OOOOOOMMMMMANNNN

OK OK
No, wait.
How to do this justice?
OK OK

I go to the Oriental Medicine clinic, but not the one I usually go to. This one's smaller. Same folks run it, just smaller, fewer people in the waiting room. Two when I arrive. Now me. Lots of chairs to choose from but I like to sit with my back to the wall and face the window. Vet thing or guy thing, who can remember? but there's a high school let out somewhere nearby and it's a warm day, so there's that. I skip a chair from one woman and face another.

The woman next to me is a bit younger than me, but I can't say by how much. Maybe ten years. The one I'm facing is talking. She has taken off her gym shoes and is in her stocking feet. Maybe she thinks it's a cool or proper thing to do, like in an ashram or something. She's my age, maybe older, younger, but not by much. Shortish gray/white hair, mid-life in a lot of ways. She has the attention of the woman to my left and the very young receptionist and is talking about her upcoming colonoscopy. 

No sooner than I sit down, the talker asks the woman and me, "Have either one of you ever had a colonoscopy?" What the fuck? I ignore her question and the woman next to me begins to say something but the talker doesn't wait for an answer and continues on with a rundown on all she has to give up and do in preparation for the scope. No herbs for ten days, no grains or nuts or seeds. (By the sound of it these are all she lives on, on her way to Nirvana or some shit, I'm sure.) Then the "Holly" GoLytley and her neighbor has offered to take her for the exam but he's a forty-nine year old man who shouldn't have to sit there and wait for four hours until she's done. And here's where I pick up my first solid clue.

Never mind the guy shares my first name. She immediately shifts gears to the birth of her daughter and the incomplete epidural and rubs her abdomen in the place where she could still feel the labor still and just as quick back to the scope and the sedation and

"I'd really like to know a man's perspective on the whole thing... what it's like for them to have the procedure... but then guts are guts... but then there's pregnancy...

Thankfully my intern showed up just then. Unfortunately they put the woman in the room next to mine and the walls are thin.

I get stuck with a dozen needles and go to my happy place.