Squirrelly

Yesterday was quite the day for exercise. Kelly the First (who is not the same Kelly as the fabulous workout partner Kelly, but who it turns out is actually also a fabulous workout partner) and I did about five miles of walking in the morning, then we went to the gym in the afternoon and did another forty-five minutes or so of boredom-busting cardio (which means that we got on just about every cardio machine: elliptical trainers, stationary bicycles, stairsteppers, and the rowing machines). Later that afternoon, I returned to the gym with my niece for another half hour of cardio and a light lifting workout (which wasn’t that light because I’m trying to start getting a bit tougher on myself).

And what was my reward for all that exercise? A trip to the darkest depths of retail hell: Walmart. I have to tell you that I despise despise despise Walmart and the only reason I was there was because my older brother suggested it as the place to go to buy a gift for E.L. Kiddo’s upcoming second birthday. We spent about ninety minutes in Walmart, including a full thirty-minute wait in line to check out. (I can’t write about it because I can’t relive it and remain sane.) But we did, luckily, find a great bunch of giftage in the children’s toy department. And I’ll tell you, I seriously would have loved to have had me and Dave and my brother as gift-givers when I was a child, because E.L. Kiddo is getting a major birthday haul: two big tractors, five little tractors, a big bag of candy, an enormous bag of MegaBloks and a handful of books, including some Spanish-English books (his Nana wants him to be bilingual) and a copy of Everyone Poops Taro Gomi’s seminal poopy tome.

True Patients

That was yesterday. Today? Today was a strange day. Today Kelly the First and I went off to be fake patients (faktients?) for first year med students. The exercise was ostensibly to allow them to interact with people-slash-potential patients, but it turned out to be so much more. Here’s the set up:

The faktients (about nine of us) assembled in a room and then were dispersed to groups of four med students who were being handled by a real pro (of the two groups I spoke with, there was a doctor handling one and an RN handling the other).

The first group was pretty sad. I walked in and was introduced (“This is Tokyo Rosa.”) and they in turn introduced themselves.

Then it was as though none of them ha d ever interacted with another human being before ever. Let loose by their handler with instructions to ask questions, they immediately began to act like reticent toddlers. Urged on, the first student began with something like, “Can you tell me about yourself?” I gave them my name again (Tokyo Rosa), age (37), and general background (born and raised here, graduated from this university). When I finished, they sort of looked around at each other. There was a follow up question about something, I forget what. Maybe preventative medicine?

The second student was urged to ask a question. The question she came up with was something like, “Can you tell me about yourself?” Fail. I dutifully repeated the information I had just given. (Tokyo Rosa. 37. Born and raised here. Graduated from this university.) She asked a follow up question about my family history. There was some discussion about open- and closed-ended questions, examples of both were given. Then the third student was up.

The third student, who I’ll just admit I didn’t like (yawning, examining his cuticles while his fellow students were talking, drinking from his Nalgene bottle, looking at the clock over his head, later asking if we were going to get to take a break, but front and center like an eager little weasle when it was time to answer questions from the handler), had now heard my name at least four times, and he got it wrong (“It’s Singapore Rosa, right?”) which made me completely detach from him and put forth some fake me into play. It made me also want to make fun of him and so I did by comparing this group to groups of nervous non-native English speakers that I used to teach in Japan who couldn’t think of a single question to ask or anything to say. (Their excuse was an unfamiliarity with foreigners and a critically limited vocabulary. I don’t know what excuses these students have.) Third student didn’t even seem to notice that I thought he was a complete ass and that he had lost me. No, he wanted to play a game. He wanted to play some game by which I imagined driving in the desert and coming upon a cube. Did I want to play? Could I describe the cube, it’s color and size? I hope I kept the smirk off my face, because if I had cooled my heels waiting in an examination room in a paper gown for a real doctor to come only to have some clown walk in and start with ridiculous questions about imaginary deserts and cubes, I’d be pretty goddamned pissed off. But it was his time, right? And he’s not a real doctor (though he introduced himself to me as a quote student doctor unquote), so whatever. So I answered him (silver cube the size of a two story house--oh, and it’s nighttime in the desert) and my personality was duly analyzed (silver is a feminine color unlike gold which is masculine--I know, what?--and the cube is my ego so the opaque metal means I’m hard to get to know and the size of the cube is relative to the size of my ego). On the basis of his getting my name wrong and then trying to play some little game? Fail.

Student number four didn’t get so far as to ask me to tell her about myself. I really only remember one thing she said and that thing was that ideally she would take the tack of trying to be the patient’s buddy. I looked at her crossed legs and crossed arms and at her notebook held defensively in front of her chest and thought, that’s not the body language of someone who wants to be my buddy. Oh, and some eighty-year-old woman who’s coming to you for breast cancer treatments? She doesn’t need a buddy, she needs a doctor. So, my little buddy? Fail.

Ah. I felt really old and cynical when I left that room.

I went and sat again in the patient’s waiting room and chatted with an eighty-year-old artist who was a cancer survivor. She told me that she makes Ukrainian eggs, decorated with traditional red fertility designs and she’s given seven away that have resulted in seven babies being born to couples who were strugging with fertility issues. She told me that she used to sell real estate. She suffers from dry eyes. She has three kids who can’t believe that she just up and moved from Florida nearly fifteen years ago after coming out here to visit a sick friend for a few weeks. We talked about how the quality of light was so different here and how it seemed to enchant artists in particular. Oh, yes, she said, and the weather is so wonderful here. Not like in Florida where she had been evacuated four times one year. Earlier, she had shown me her purse (“That’s Florentine leather.”) that she got at a yard sale for ten dollars from a woman who had been a Home Shopping Network junkie. She had bought three purses, ten dollars each, and each one was more beautiful than the last. She loved purses.

This is how you have a conversation, right?

Then I was called into a room with a second group of students. Right off the bat, I could see that they were friendlier, more gregarious and open. They all stood to shake my hand and their handler didn’t have to prompt them to talk (in fact she didn’t say anything), they just talked. In the course of our hour, they asked about my travels and about my hobbies and about what I had studied and about my views of culture and medicine and what kind of illnesses I had had and whether I practiced preventative medicine. They asked about my immediate family, my brothers, and whether I had children. They asked about my parents and their health concerns. They asked about what languages I had studied and what other jobs I had held. They talked about their own experiences abroad and the jobs they had held. They took notes while I talked, which was fine with me. The handler didn’t say a single word until the end when she talked about her own experience dealing with people from other cultures (with whom she had to employ translators) and how it was important to listen to patients when they were expressing cultural-related information. She talked about her own travels abroad and then the hour--a quick one--was up.

On the way home, Kelly the First and I talked about our variant experiences. The students she had talked to hadn’t even asked her age and were reluctant to talk about her health. We talked about about how conversing with people is a skill that we forget we’ve both built up over years and years of interacting with people. I told her about the student who irked me and she said he’d probably be slapped down by his handler.