DIAGNOSIS: COOTIES

I was a good girl and went to my doctor today. As I’ve mentioned before, I really do like this doctor. He is all of 3 minutes by car from my house and he has always taken his time with me which is probably the number one thing I look for when searching for a doctor. I don’t mind waiting in your lobby if I know you are running late because you take your time with each patient and aren’t trying to process us all in less than 5 minutes. He also treats me like a human being. He discusses my weight, because he’d be a crappy doctor if he didn’t, but I never feel judged and he isn’t inclined to treat EVERYTHING as if it’s a direct result of how much I weigh:

“Well Mrs. V, you probably wouldn’t have that sore throat if you just lowered your fat intake to 20g per day.”

I won’t go into detail about my visit with him because it was pretty standard. He ultimately diagnosed me with a sinus infection and asked me to come back for a stress test for the other symptoms I mentioned I had last week. The past few days I was doing better, so maybe my body is just trying to figure out what the heck I’m doing with all the healthy food and extra activity. I kind of have this whole crazy scenario in my head where the higher ups in the management of my body are sounding alarms and barking orders trying to deal with the chaos my new diet and exercise regime must have caused:

“She’s trying to use WHAT muscles??? She hasn’t used those in over a year!” “And whats with the reduced calorie intake? What is she trying to do to us?? We can’t support this body on that kind of intake! Where are the French fries and Cheeseburgers?!? Can someone please text the fat cells and tell them we are going to have to downsize?

Somewhere in the region of my butt, the sorry little fat cells are melting, two or three have banned together with violins playing their last little concerto while the Titanic that was my ass goes down. I have a rather overactive imagination, I know. I didn’t share this little theory with my doctor just in case you were wondering, I think I might have come out with a whole other kind of diagnosis if I had.

Ok, well enough of that. Essentially, he gave me some antibiotics and asked me to come back for an echo cardiogram and a stress test. I’ll be scheduling that in the next few weeks. The interesting part of the visit happened when I walked into his waiting room.

This particular doctor is from some Middle Eastern country and most of his patients are of Middle Eastern descent. I won’t lie to you, I am pretty ignorant when it comes to middle eastern culture so maybe part of what I experienced can be chalked up to cultural differences and not just outright rudeness. If any of you can clarify, I’d love to hear your opinions, but I’m inclined to think it was just rudeness. Just to set the scene, I was the only non-middle eastern patient in the office today.

So I walk into the waiting room and find it’s very crowded. Every seat is taken, but two of the seats have tiny little 3 year old butts in each of them. The seats in the doctor’s office could easily sit three 3 year old butts comfortably in one chair, so I’m thinking that by the time I sign in, maybe the mom will have asked her two children to sit together so that the nice fat lady has a place to sit. NOT HAPPENING. I turn around and this family just stares at me, I turn to the receptionist and ask if there is somewhere else I can sit (secretly hoping that they might overhear me and make room for me). The receptionist says they only have what is available in the waiting room and that she’ll try to get me in a room as quickly as possible. In the meantime, I know that I have a good two minutes on my feet before my body begins to protest so it’s slightly “panic time” in my head.

Luckily, one of the hyperactive three year olds decides he’d much rather be running laps around the waiting room so I swoop in and ask the mother if its ok for me to sit in his now vacant seat. She gives me this “look” and looks at her husband who is filling out the paperwork as if to make sure its OK with him and then turns to me and says something I can’t understand. Her body language seems to say its ok with her, but apparently they were NOT ok with it.

I sit down and the children immediately start wailing in some other language and the mother gets up and trades seats with them; I’m assuming so they don’t have to sit next to the fat lady? I try not to take it personally, children will be children after all and maybe I’m the first really fat person they’ve ever seen in their lives. Maybe they thought it was catching or maybe they just thought I was gross? I don’t know. What I will tell you is that when a woman came out from the back office, everybody in that damn office started playing musical chairs to make room for HER to sit down. The father filling out the paperwork actually GOT UP OUT OF HIS CHAIR and stood so that this other woman could sit down. Another woman came in (of obvious Middle Eastern descent) and again with the musical chairs making room for her. At this point, I wanted a magazine, but I was seriously worried that if I got out of my chair, one of these men who were now standing, would swoop in and claim my vacant seat.

My conclusion? Unbeknownst to me, there must have been some cootie detection alarm that went off when I walked through the door. I didn’t hear it, but it was obvious everybody else did. I mean, I took a shower, used my bath and body works scrub, and put on deodorant (which honestly a couple of other somebodys in that office hadn’t bothered to use that morning). Heck, I even used a few sprays of my Gautier perfume so I was pretty darn sure that any cooties that might have survived the shower were smelling really good. So what was the problem? Was this a “fat thing” or a “cultural thing” or just a plain “we are a rude bunch of people thing?” I refuse to believe that I have cooties!!!

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