I wrote this five years ago (to the day) for a creative non-fiction writing class. Funny to stumble onto it now ...All I wanted to do was turn off the light.
There were no windows in Examination Room 2, but I was sure with the door open we would have enough light in the small enclosure to get by. As it was, the fluorescent rays showering down on us were almost blindingly white, too honest and revealing. I saw every wrinkle in his brow; I saw the complete lack of creases about his lips. There was no smile. This man never smiled. But the light I so desperately wanted to shut off made it all too obvious that today’s fixed expression was more stern than usual.
More than I needed reprieve from the brightness, I needed the light fixture to be quiet. Its humming, incessant burbling – it was deafening. “Have you no respect for the living?” I wanted to scream. “Have you no sense? This moment – I’ve waited for this moment for five months. Can’t I at least have my silence during this moment?”
The light remained on, and I remained disgusted with its brilliance and precision. I felt cheated of my concentration, robbed of the opportunity to hear the news and feel its full impact all at once. Deprived of the chance to die and resurrect and die again as Dr. Garland delivered first the diagnosis, then his cheery hypothesis, and finally the gloomy prognosis. I had MS. My immune system, for no reason whatsoever, had decided to make an enemy of the myelin in my brain and spinal cord. Dr. Garland began explaining in greater detail what the debilitating disease is and how, after five months, he was finally able to determine the culprit. But I couldn’t hear him. The humming from above was too loud.
The humming changed to a buzz, and from a buzz to a chant. The natives were getting closer. They were surrounding me, coming from every direction. Chanting, chanting. I couldn’t understand their words, but they were menacing, threatening. Snarling.
I coughed. Then I looked around. It was as though the chanting of the light told me to. Look, look, it said. Look at what I’m showing you.
I looked, and I was more aware than I had been. Not sad. Not scared. Not angry or confused. Just distracted by the humming. Just aware.
Aware. Aware of my chair. Never had a piece of furniture been built with such little regard to comfort. The brown, scratchy back was too straight; it refused to give even a millimeter for the sake of relaxed posture. And the bottom, though thickly padded and supposedly softened by years of exposure to patients just like me, felt as though it had been constructed of rock slabs. I wanted to sink, sink, sink and fall into oblivion, but the rock slabs forced me to remain erect, as though a false god or shrine to the virtue of dignity. “See this woman oppressed, yet look how she carries herself. She holds her head high.” I meant to show no strength. I felt no strength. I just felt the chair pushing, crushing my tailbone and wondered how I had sat in this abomination of a chair for so long without realizing its cruelness.
Aware. Aware of the whiteness of the four walls surrounding me. Again, if I could just turn off the light, that damned light. The walls were smooth, with no wallpaper, no border, no hint at an artistic brush stroke from its impeccable painter. Just meticulous and white, methodically made so and methodically maintained. It exuded sterility, perhaps meant to give comfort to individuals entering into the enclosure looking for cleanliness to correct their imperfections and impairments. I received no comfort from the surrounding walls. They were flawless but also loveless, they were uncaring and uncompassionate, unmoved by the news that my body was not, as they were, in perfect order.
Aware. Aware of my mother, sitting beside me in her set of rock slabs. She, too, was sitting erect, though her posture was that of high-alert, not discomfort. As I was studying the room about me, she was studying me, watching for signs of emotion, for cracks and holes in my facade of composure. She was searching for my reaction so she could formulate her own. I looked at the light switch, no more longingly but now desperately, pleading with God Above to somehow cut its source since I, myself, couldn’t rise from my rock slabs and flick the single switch.
But the light continued to rain down, exposing the sterile, stoic room. The perfectly lined cotton swabs in the clear, glass cylinder on the countertop, the three pamphlets on migraine prevention evenly spaced beside it, the sink without a water spot as though hard water never danced in its shiny silver exterior. All of it seemed so wrong, so out of place.
Wrong because it wasn’t spinning. Shouldn’t it be spinning? The entire planet was on its incredible trek around the sun, spinning and whirling on its own axis as it hurtled in its elliptical orbit. How could the world be making such a journey without impacting a single item in this sterile, stoic room? This unyielding, uncaring, unmoved room. The world would spin and spin, but nothing ever deviated in this room.
Dr. Garland continued his counsels. What to do. What not to do. What to think. What not to think. My ears accepted them all, and somewhere in my brain it was registered, catalogued and stored. I was nodding, asking questions. I was responding. But my words were drowned out by the humming. My brave front was exposed by the harsh lights.
The appointment ended. Another was scheduled for the following week. Decisions would have to be made, a course established and followed. But for today, we were finished. Other appointments would be on other days in other rooms. That moment was my last in Examination Room 2. I stood, grateful to peel away from the rock slab. Normally satisfied to follow others out of a room, I led the way. He opened the door and I escaped, leaving the light on and its honesty behind.
