I'm in a medical clinic, in an exam room, waiting for a doctor. I am not sick, but I am a subject in a survey waiting for a brief exam.
There is a mixed green salad on a thin metal soap dish that protrudes from the blue wall. (The walls appear in color and pattern like a paper hospital gown.) I am eating the salad with my right hand. It is dry, with iceberg lettuce, carrots chopped in matchstick shapes, onion, radish slices and perhaps diced red pepper, so it takes me a while to chew and swallow each bit. I am painfully aware that eating the salad in this manner (using my unwashed hands and taking it from a fixture that's been exposed to all sorts of hospital germs) is very unsanitary, but I do it anyway.
Since the door is open I can tell how far along the doctor is on his rounds. As he enters the nearest neighboring exam room, I know that I will be next. I want to finish the salad before he arrives, so I shove the last handful into my mouth. While I'm chewing that, I go into the adjacent bathroom to gather all my belongings so I can leave right after the exam. I grab that nearly unused bar of vegan lavender soap and put it in my bag, glad that I spotted it.
I open the door to go back into the exam room, but it hits an obstacle. There is another doctor in the room bent over and attending to something. She has long thick dark brown hair and is wearing a frumpy white lab coat. She's unaware of me, and I wait quietly and patiently for her to finish what she's doing.
Saturday, December 29, 2012
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