This Is A True Story

At some point between re-typing old articles for the website and coming across items while cleaning up that room, I remembered the first paragraph of a commentary about health care and how I had explained it fully in a Fiction Writing class. Now that the site's done, I re-typed this as well for posterity's sake (and I'll be smart enough to save it to disk this time):

February 28, 2005

“Little White Button”
Over the course of the past week or so, I’ve been experiencing a throbbing pain at the back of my heel. Actually, that seems to be overstating it. An ache perhaps?

Here’s the thing: I’ve been through this before. A small item that feels physically afflictive at first, only to evaporate with the passing of time; toothaches, sore muscles, mysterious scratches.

This heel thing—actually, it’s more like my Achilles tendon—if I roll back and forth on the ball of my foot, I can hear it, I can feel it, stretching and retracting like a rubber band being pulled at both ends. At first, the most basic activities hurt: walking, taking the stairs, the rolling-on-the-ball thing.

And now?

I can’t stop doing it.

I suppose most normal people, upon finding that a part of their body is acting somewhat strangely, might immediately consider consulting a doctor. It’s really no different than, say, “hearing a strange sound” in your car one day on the road and fearing a visit to the mechanic.

Just as I would ignore the possibility of rushing to the shop, I’m equally as stubborn about going to the hospital.

I know a lot of people would argue against this notion, but I’m fairly certain that I’m better off continuing my belief of just how little benefit is to be found in regularly seeing a doctor—if at all.

I know, I know—

“But Derek! They go to these big, fancy schools for so many years to study so many different areas of medicinal testing and have to go through so many tests of their capabilities to meet these high standards that—”

*SIGH*

Listen.

I can remember the exact day—no, two days—well, a series of years really. It includes no less than two visits to the doctor’s office that fully support my assertion that, basically, your health is just as much of a mystery to the guy asking you to cough as it is to yourself.

***

It was the first grade. It was also my first year of school where you didn’t go home at noon. Not surprisingly, I was bored at one o’clock or so when my reading group gathered at our round table. I can’t recal what stuttering, drooling classmate of mine was stumbling their way through the Clifford book or whatever, but I do remember that moment of fascination I had.

Inside this silver coffee can that contained extra pens, pencils and erasers, right there at the very bottom of it, sat a small white button.

Where did this come from?

Did somebody lose this?

Why is it in here, of all places?

I did what, I can only assume, any child my age would have done, and began seeing just how far I could get the button into my ear.

To my surprise, it went in—in its entirety—quite easily.

To my dismay, its removal was a far more daunting task.

My teacher shot me a look of horror and tapped the open text before me with her ruler.

“Derek! Get that pencil out of your ear! Do you want to be deaf for the rest of your life?”

If it had not been her posing the question, then perhaps the answer would have been No.

I set the pencil beside the open book and began reading aloud, as instructed. Blinking back tears, I wondered if I had now transformed myself into Helen Keller.

***

“Is everything OK?”

My mother posed the question as she slid my grilled cheese before me. I remember the meal well, for I had assumed it would be my last. I would never confess this to her, nor to anybody. This was my secret shame and if this sole, stupid act of curiosity—and all the life-threatening consequences that came along with it—if that was what killed me, well, so be it.

“I said ‘Is everything OK?’”

I bit into my dinner and nodded. At least I could still hear her, right?

I didn’t say a word that night. I guess it wasn’t like me. But I was turning too many things over in my mind now. Perhaps I was on to something.

***

Like I said, I don’t believe in doctors. But seeing as this was the first grade, the regular visit was a decision I had no say in. Much like church, I was dragged against my will, regardless of what I believed.

It had been months since the little white button found its new residence in my left ear. There were no pains, no bleeding and, despite the threats of a crippling ailment from my teacher, no apparent loss of hearing.

I couldn’t tell you if there was a shot involved, or if it was just one of those stops where he bangs your kneecaps with that miniature rubber hammer. The only thing I remember was him grabbing that instrument with the light on it.

“Let’s have a look in here,” my doctor said.

With that, he inserted the cold metal object into my right ear. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him peering into the little peephole of his contraption.

I became overwhelmed with panic. In mere moments he would walk around to the other side of the table, repeat the motion he had just made, and then suddenly drop dead of shock.

Just like that.

All of it, my fault.

If only I had said something.

“Looks good,” he said, setting the device back on the counter and checking boxes off the sheet on his clipboard.

For a moment, I believed that the tool he used might have been broken. Maybe the lighting was bad. Who knows? Perhaps the button was just too far in there now.

But instead I came to the grand realization of what an illusion this whole procedure was. Over the years, I’d be seated in the same office, going through the same motions, always getting the same results.

Eventually, I just forgot about it.

***

Admittedly, there were times when I felt the button on accident, but I never gave those occasions too much thought. I had grown to assume that as I grew older it would just fall out, as easily as a leaf from a tree come autumn.

The summer that I spent at my only apartment to ever include a swimming pool brought the button back into my life—from wherever the hell it was that it had disappeared to, most likely the very back of my mind.

After grade school cam middle school, and then high school, which led to community college, followed by university and then there was dropping out (or, “taking time off,” as it was popularly referred to).

Somewhere in that time span, I lost touch with the doctor’s office.

Despite severe sunburns or the nasty gash I suffered after stepping on a sharp rock at the bottom of the pool, it was a relatively carefree summer in was otherwise a definitely carefree life.

Everything will sort itself out.

Right now? All I wanted was nothing more than days filled with swimming and sitting in the sun with my girlfriend, and hopefully finding time for sex before my roommate returned from work.

Toward the end of the summer, on a trip to help my sweetheart find an apartment at college, I began to feel a sharp, stinging pain in my ear——the left ear.

“Is everything OK?”

It felt like it’d been so long since I’d heard anybody ask that.

She asked this while I clutched the side of my skull in the passenger seat, writhing in agony. Years and years of silence, and now I’d be forced to come clean.

We gave my suffering a couple minutes. Then we gave it a couple more. When I eventually grew tired of feeling my masculinity wilt before her eyes, we found ourselves visiting a hospital.

It had been quite some time since I had last been in this setting, and I immediately feared the line of questioning I’d get when this doctor—one I’d never met before—made this discovery that had been more than a decade in the making.

This was it. By now, you’d figure I would have come up with an explanation.

It was quick, the way she came in and went straight to the instrument. The doctor was an older woman, chirpy voice and pleasant tone. She peered into the ear in question and I bit down on my lip.

“Yep,” she said, turning off the light on the device and stepping over to the sink. “Been in the pool a lot this summer?”

I didn’t quite see what this had to do with anything, but I admitted that, Yes, I had.

“That explains it.”

She went on to explain that I had contracted something called “otitis externa,” more commonly known as “swimmer’s ear.” The way this doctor painted the picture of what was occurring inside my ear canal sounded horrifying ... nauseating ... and, completely incorrect.

“You’re going to need some eardrops and cotton balls,” she explained, scratching out a prescription.

I felt cheated. This would not cure me. This didn’t solve anything. The pain, most certainly, would not subside.

On the way to the pharmacy, I finally broke down and confessed: the button, the ear, all the time that had passed.

My girlfriend shifted the car into park, placed a hand on my knee and looked me in the eyes with a bit of visible skepticism before saying anything after I finished.

“Sweetie, you have swimmer’s ear,” she said matter-of-factly. “Now lets just go inside, get you your medicine, give it a shot—and then we gotta’ hurry up ‘cause I told the landlord we’d be there by two, OK?”

Miraculously, the eardrops worked. But the doubts she expressed about the validity of my button saga, or maybe the lack of sympathy in expressing those doubts, hurt me more than the earache from earlier that afternoon.

Frustration overcame me slowly, and that’s when the attitude suddenly became more one of Fuck the doctors, I’ll perform this surgery myself.

***

It was months later—in my new residence that did not have a swimming pool—that my girlfriend returned from school for a weekend. By this time, I was toying with the button constantly. I purposely let the nail on my index finger grow to dangerous length, such that it would make it easier—and more fun—to poke at the plastic object inside my head.

After an entire weekend of “I’ve almost got it,” I imagine she could take no more. But as it turned out, my estimation of the progress made was correct.

“You are not sticking tweezers in your ear!” she shouted.

But it was too late.

She stood in the bathroom door, continuing to berate me as I felt and heard the tweezers’ tips repeatedly scrape within a hair of that firm grasp on the button I sought.

“I’m not driving you to the hospital if you end up—“

And that’s when it happened; faster than any damn visit to the doctor. After I felt a solid hold, I pulled the tweezers from my canal: a brown, waxy button in their possession. She had to cover her mouth following the initial scream, but I’m fairly confident that she had nothing to say.

I placed the button in a baggie and began showing it to everybody. I’d explain the object’s legend which, in turn, led to my long-winded theory on the falsity of modern medicine.

My listeners were skeptical at best.

“And you say it was white when you put it in there?”

Dismiss the tale if you’d like. I should mention that I’ve also surgically removed an ingrown toenail and popped a dislocated shoulder back into place. Maybe I broke some bones. Maybe I didn’t. I guess I’ll never know, which is a pain. Or maybe it’s an ache. Whatever it is, it’s only temporary, and I’ll go on just fine without it.