Naked

When my body decided to get sick again, six sinus infections since last birthday, I marched into the best ENT specialist, waiting room lined with Hollywood’s finest stars begging for reasons why they couldn’t reach the octave of the day before, impatiently flipping through old magazines, interrupted by cell phones ringing in unison. I got the lead role, thanks for your inquiry, want to go to Hawaii for the weekend? Susie died. Funeral tomorrow. Allan’s away on business. This doctor sucks. I have lunch with Ellen at noon. Dad’s in the hospital. Freckles just had pups, want one? My name is called. I shuffle behind the nurse, my chart clasped to her chest like the baby she might never have had, into the shoebox size room packed with instruments I didn’t know, despite three years of nursing school. The suave, forty-something doctor, released my X-rays from their sleeve, and mounted them onto a screen. He looked up through his sleek wire frames, “You’re absolutely beautiful on the outside, but a mess on the inside.” I wondered if he was making a pass or soliciting a surgical procedure and how many times he repeated that line, loud enough for the pedestrians five floors down to hear this and the other truths about my battlefields— three C-sections, knee surgery, twice a victim of what strikes one in eight women, and reconstructed organs of sensuality with tattoos to hide their truths. Now I dodge doctors as one avoids the cones at the scene of an accident, but I can’t dodge this one. My voice is hoarse, my breathing is shot and I envy those vacuous starlets in the waiting room, listening to their chitter chatter on cell phones. I sit in the exam room before the surgeon tells me one more time, something I need to do to hang onto my life, but I’d rather be the person before the scalpel found me.