Would you take your grandmother-in-law to her foot doctor appointment in order to be allowed to borrow her car?
I would.
Well, actually, I did.
Rex and I are visiting family in Kalamazoo, but we have no car. I had fun lunch/coffee dates lined up with some of my girlfriends, but I found myself in the unfortunate position of being without any sort of transportation to get to those meetings. When we took Rex's grandma out to lunch, she suggested the proposition. I could borrow her car as long as I'd drive her around to the places she needed to go. Awesome!
I didn't doubt my decision at all until I found myself sitting in the foot doctor's office at 9 AM the next morning staring at a sign that said "GOT FUNGUS?" There was a slew of informational pamphlets under the sign I could pick up to read about various foot problems. The waiting room was boring, but I decided that it wasn't quite boring enough to read informational pamphlets about foot fungus. Grandma assured me that she "wouldn't be long," so I decided to do some people watching.
Most of the people in the waiting room were quite unremarkable, which made for boring people watching. The average age of the people in there was probably hovering around 90. It was as if time had stopped...no one was moving. Every once in a while I checked around to make sure everyone in the room was still breathing. The occasional ring of the telephone behind the check-in desk reminded me that time was progressing and I would be free soon. I thought about reading a magazine, but have you ever looked at the magazines in a doctor's office waiting room? Where do they order these subscriptions? I don't remember the titles, but they're all weird. Things like Clarinetists Weekly, Turtle Lovers, and Quilting Quarterly (although that one would probably be quite popular among the crippled geriatrics). I decided that I would pass on the magazines.
Suddenly a perfect vision of foot-doctory glided out of the examination rooms and into the waiting room. When I say "glided," I don't mean that metaphorically. I mean that this chick literally glided out on a custom made scooter that had a special stand for her injured knee to rest on. Her hot pink cast was the kind of cast I dreamed about having when I was in first grade and everyone cool had some sort of broken bone. I was always too cautious, and it was never my turn to have the cast. Dang. Anyway, this girl was a teenager, and you could tell that she felt super cool gliding along in her custom-made scooter. No fair - she gets to scooter around in school, in stores, even in church! I wanted to stop her in order to ask how she got that injury so that I could try to get a similar one, but that seemed a little too weird. I later asked Rex was her injury was, but he didn't have enough information to tell me. I'm never going to get that scooter.
Finally Grandma was finished with her appointment. Apparently all the doctor did was cut her toenails. She went to a foot doctor to have her toenails cut?! I could have taken her to the mall to have those nice Vietnamese people do it for $5.99! Oh well. As we were leaving she said, "I really should have been a foot doctor. All they have to do all day is sit around and cut toenails!" I smiled and nodded...but she was serious. She really thinks that all they do is cut toenails. No surgery, no therapy, no other foot-related medical issues? I guess not. She made another appointment to have her toenails cut again in September. I'm not taking her to that appointment. I hope to never go to a foot doctor ever again (unless of course I am going to pick up my super cool scooter to compliment my pink leg cast).
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