Visiting the Healer: Inoculations

It was a preemptive strike, I decided.  A couple of Mondays ago, we prepared ourselves for the deadliest combat to come out of any country, communist or capitalist, developed or undeveloped: germ warfare.  We struck at--or were instructed how to strike at--blood-borne, food-borne, and water-borne illness. 

Let the first world paranoia begin.

We had been instructed to go to this special "travel clinic" by our kids' pediatricians.  "We don't keep all these specialty inoculations on hand," they told us.  Okay then.  This is serious. Specialists. 

It turns out there are two travel clinics--competitors (when businesses compete for your business, the price goes down; this is the truism I'm counting on.  Of course, whose to say they won't compete in painting the most horrific pathogenic vista that they can?  Do I really want to shop around for this sort of thing?)  However, at one of the two we can get the whole family in to one appointment, 8:30 Monday morning--and we're advised to take it because this doctor's usually full-up weeks in advance.  Okay then. 

We leave for our appointment--may wonders never cease--a fraction early.  We've decided to pick up breakfast as an enticement for this trip, leaving in the background of the early morning fog the reality that there may well be shots as part of this otherwise family excursion for which they get to miss school, another carrot. 

Carrot-shmarrot, we bypass the hometown coffee shop for McDonald's drive through, where my kids order the works.  (Note to self: I can no longer get by on the cheap with my family at McDonald's.)  On top of this, the window-worker (what kind of place is this?) tells us to pull ahead to wait for some fresh hashbrowns.  So we do.

Hashbrowns.  Those golden brown oil lollipops.  Those crunchy on the outside, starchy on the inside human salt licks.  How long could it take to fry one of these pre-gridded beauties up? 

It could be long.  It could eat up my precious fraction.  Only when my wife searches out our order and finds out they'd forgotten about us--how could they, I felt such a connection with that window-worker?--can we get back on the road, now not just a fraction but whole numbers late.  We open the bags to find we still don't have hashbrowns. 

Thirty minutes later, we find our spot in the parking lot outside the magically named "Medical Building Two" 11 minutes late for our appointment, wrecking horribly our 6-minute late average.  What would they do to us for this crime?  Send us and our virgin immune systems to face the hordes of tropical viruses unprotected? 

"You're not late, the doctor's not even here yet," the receptionist tells us.  "You can't be late if the doctor's not even here."  I wonder if she's trying to assuage my guilt or simply complaining about this doctor's habits.  Both possibilities are enough to make me question this whole charade. 

However, in little time we're ushered to an exam room:  two chairs, a twirly chair at a plastic desk built into the wall with a computer, an exam table, a window high up in one corner that lets in no light.  It's not white-sterile and asylumesque; it's mauve-sterile and suburbanesque. 

A team of nurses descends on us, taking pulses and temps and blood pressures.  Three for the price of one?  Doubtful.  I'm paying for three nurses to see my children at once.  In five minutes, they flutter away. 

All it takes for the doctor to show up is taking the boys to the bathroom.  I take them; she shows up; my wife looks annoyed. 

We start reviewing the immunizations records, which are faithfully up to date.  Except we never got the second Hep A shot for my daughter.  Except I seemed to have never gotten any shots ever.  But that reflects bad on my parents, not me, and this is what this trip is about:  are we good parents or not? 

As we get past the outer rings of protocol, diseases with powerful names arch across the room, cloud the air above us, make the already tight confinement of the exam room feel even closer:  hepatitis, malaria, typhoid, Japanese encephalitis, tetanus, tuberculosis.  These names are ancient, Latinate (maybe), undefeatable.  "Doctor, can't you do something?" I want to yell. I feel like the narrator of Don Delillo's White Noise, who finds that death has entered his body in just such an exam room in just such a shiny building.  

With three healthy children sparking throughout the room--examining stolen rhino horns in National Geographic, lounging in tween lethargy on the papered exam table, headlocking big brother--it's enough to make one question the sanity of even going to this deadly place, where even one sip of the wrong type of water could mean a protracted dance with death. 

After questions and instructions and warnings--no tap water, no uncooked seafood, no uncooked anything; emergency diarrhea pills for all; an emergency strategy if any of us get bit by a stray dog--I need something to cut through it all.  "Excuse me.  Can I ask you something?  Do you go back to..."  I'm trying to proceed with caution, and I manage it without saying, "You're not from here are you?" but it's still some leading question like, "When you go back to India"--the "home" country I had managed to apprehend--"don't you indulge the food culture?  Are you really this careful about all you eat?" 

I'm look for--I'm not sure what I'm looking for. I'm looking for subtext, for an aside that says, "Between you and me this is all White Noise paranoia.  If you come back here and you haven't eaten some street vendor food, and you haven't eaten something right off the tree that someone hands to you without washing it, and you haven't eaten something in someone's house that you don't know how it's been cooked--then I'm going to tell you you wasted your trip..." 

Nope.  I've watched too much Anthony Bourdain.  What I get is pretty much party line.  "When I go, I make sure what I eat is fully cooked..."

Turns out, too, that I'm the only one to get a shot, a Hep A and B combo pop, and I play it up for the children.  "Tell me, tell me when it's going in," I say, turning away in angst as she is already done.  I'm such a clown, such a good father; yes I am.  I've taken them out of school--for nothing but just in case.

The rest is prescriptions for pills.  Although there's been mention of some different pills that cost more or less, there is no tally of the cost of all this on paper and therefore there's certainly not any real numbers floating around my head.  It's all just necessary; it's all just part of being a good parent, first-world style.

And as we exit "Medical Building Two" and enter our Toyota Sienna, I have another feeling prevalent in White Noise, the feeling of being well-insured.  I'd been to see the healer, and she, with her incantations and ceremonial instruction, had done what she could for my whole family.

On the way home, my wife's sister calls:  she's been to see the doctor in town and gotten all she needed.  That doctor is exactly a one-minute drive from my house.

"Should we stop and get our hashbrowns?"  I ask my wife.