When I was 13, in that liminal space between childhood and adulthood, my mum took me to the doctor. I’d been feeling off for a week or so, faint and lightheaded, suffering from near-constant headaches, and having trouble concentrating in school, something that was out of the ordinary for me.
I’m not sure what my mum thought was going on, but I can tell you that I was not brought to the doctor very often, and certainly not willy-nilly, for no good reason, at the drop of a hat, as I bring myself to the doctor now that I’m an adult.
No: whatever was going on with me must have been apparent even to my mum, who still thinks 7Up, Milk of Magnesia, or a spoonful of baking soda in warm water, will cure (almost) everything.
Anyway, it turns out that I had low blood pressure which, according to the American Heart Association, can be caused by a variety of factors: pregnancy, depression, Parkinson’s, decreased blood volume. I’m not quite sure why I had it; I haven’t suffered from it since.
In any case, my doctor told me to drink more water, and wrote me a prescription, which my Googling suggests must have been for some antibiotic or other.
I remember him sitting across from me – I was sitting upright on the examination table with my ankles crossed, while he sat in a rotating desk chair – in the little surgery he had in the back of his home.
We’d park in the driveway, then walk down the gravelled path to the side of his semi-detached house and into a little prefab, into a waiting area where the radio was always on too loud, I imagined to drown out the potentially embarrassing conversations going on in the examination room next door.
He sat there, and he wrote my prescription down, in confident chicken-scratch, on his little pad, and as he peeled the page off and handed it to my mum, he tucked his pen into the pocket of his shirt.
Then – and I remember this as if it happened in slow motion – he reached that same hand back out towards me as if to shake my hand, but instead he grabbed on to the roll of fat below my belly button and, without looking me in the eyes, said, “And, you know, you should try to get rid of that.”
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Anchor Baby to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.