A Doctors Visit

I swing my feet back and forth, the soles of my shoes just brushing the beige linoleum that covers the floor. My mother sits next to me, her back rigidly straight and her eyes staring ahead at nothing. Usually she fidgets when we are waiting for the doctor, poking around the drawers in the examination room or doodling on her calendar, but today she is still. It took us a year to get to this point. A year of pursed lips and raised eyebrows, of suggestions that it was all a ruse to get attention or skip school. A year in which it was an accomplishment if I made it all the way through a school week. By second quarter I had missed so many days that my Algebra 2 teacher threatened to fail me, even though I had straight ‘A’s in her class.

But now the doctor was coming in, frowning at a sheet of paper he held in his hand. I knew the paper had the results of the test they had run. I had been strapped to a table and rotated up and down to see if I my heart rate would spike, or in extreme cases, lose consciousness. The test was supposed to last for an hour. I fainted after twelve minutes. The doctor sat on his stool and began explaining the name of my condition, and how very little they could do to help me. My mother’s back got straighter, but my feet stopped swinging. I dropped back against the fake plastic leather of my seat and smiled. The doctor was still talking, and my mother was taking notes at a speed to rival the most accomplished journalist, but I didn’t hear them. White noise filled my ears as I imagined everyone who had ever told me it was in my head. My mother shot me a look out of the corner of her eye. I was not paying attention and she knew it. I sat up again, and listened as the doctor explained that there was not some magic treatment for what I had. I would get worse before I would get better.

My mother was stony faced as we left the doctor’s office. I felt tendrils of anxiety begin to wrap their way around my happiness. When we got home, I lay on the couch staring at the ceiling as she began calling in prescriptions, both of us preparing in our own ways for the years to come.