Fire in the Hole

I'm killing time until Nicole comes in on the Fung Wah bus. Don't worry, my easily-offended audience, we're going out for malted dairy beverages, then watching Chitty Chitty Bang Bang before slumbering in separate twin beds. For now, let me tell you a story.

This morning I brought the goiter catscans to Dr. Rho (the EarNoseThroater) so he could interpret them with his special decoder ring. Dr. Rho was in a touchy-feely mood today, which was a bit odd. His demeanor is typically cold and antiseptic and he only seems to smile when I am wrong. That's why all the arm grabs and shoulder pats were so disconcerting. He was kind of treating me like a very sick child who is too young to know how serious his ailment is.

So Rho hooks up my scans to the special viewing machine and makes a bunch of hmmmms and ahhhhs. Then he comes to the sixth and final scan and, I kid you not, he says, "Okay, here's the money one."

After a quick analysis, he decides my goiter (I don't know what else to call it) has nothing to do with lymph nodes. It's a pesky little mass on my salivary gland, making a big to-do over nothing. Shut up, little dude.

To figure out whether the mass is cancerous, Doc Rho said he had to do a biopsy, aka jabbing a huge needle in my jaw and taking a sample. I told him to do it right away so I wouldn't have any time to think about how awful it could be.

Right before the doctor does the procedure, a piercing air-raid sound starts emanating from the hallway. Dr. Rho says absentmindedly, "Oh must be the fire alarm" and continues to prep me, tucking a napkin in my collar, dabbing alcohol on my jaw. I'm a little nervous about the wailing siren but hey, doctor knows best.

A receptionist then sticks her head in the door and says, "There's a fire alarm going off, doctor, everyone has to clear the building!" I can hear a bunch of rushing panicky people in the hallway. After she leaves, he continues to prep for the procedure. At this point I'm really starting to freak out. Not only is a huge-ass needle about to be rammed into my jawbone, but we're going to do it in the middle of a blazing inferno! What is this, 'Nam?

But what could I do? If Doc Hawkeye works best under potentially life-threatening pressure, I didn't feel like I had room to question his unorthodox methods. "I get results, Hirsch!"

So he did the very uncomfortable procedure, showed me the weird little yellow glob he extracted into a jar, then walked out of the building while dabbing at my bleeding jaw with gauze. Then we stood around in the rain, feeling awkward because it was hard to tell if the appointment was over yet. He asked about my family.

The fire alarm was a false alarm, as it always is. Unless there's a fire. Afterwards, I did go back inside, but not because me and Dr. Rho had any further business. I just had to poop.