Story & Characters © Belic 2002

EKG Experience

Having your heart tested for problems is like listening to a bad joke. You have an awful feeling about how it is going to end but you have to sit there and smile anyway.

My visit to the doctor's office started like it usually does, with a 15-hour wait in the lobby sitting next to a screaming child with chicken-pox. Next, I was guided into a small examination room and asked to lie down on a table covered with a sheet of cheap toilet paper (the feeling on my back ranked right up there with burlap turtle-neck sweaters on the "Comfort Scale"). About an hour after I had finished counting all of the dots on the ceiling tiles--24,677 for the curious--the nurse wheeled in the EKG machine and started to set it up. First, she plugged it in. A good start, I thought. Then she turned it "on" . . . theoretically. Nothing happened. She checked the plug again--evidently to make sure she had indeed inserted it into the outlet and hadn’t just taped it to the wall to give the illusion it was plugged in--and hit the switch. Again, nothing. Nada. Surprise, surprise. Then she tried another plug. Ooooooh Hoooooo! It works! BUT, the machine is out of paper. So now she yanks the cover off and starts pulling and pushing paper in and out of various slots and rollers like she’s weaving an EKG basket. But that still doesn’t fix it. As I’ve always said, weaving is never the answer.

Meanwhile, while all this is going on, I'm slowly losing my mind. I'd like to know if I have a heart problem before the Second Coming or the Patriots win a Superbowl. Actually, I think they’ll probably happen the same day.

Back to the action! My white clad angel of mercy STILL can't get the machine working! So she leaves the room and returns with another nurse. Oooooooh good. Now we have TWO people in here who don't know what the hell they're doing! Three if you count me! I think to myself, These nurses must have gone to school for many a year to get certified. They must have had to learn everything there is to know about nursing and how the body works. How to pop out a spleen with a crescent wrench. EVERYTHING! Hours of endless study, tests, and lectures. Why, oh God, WHY couldn't they have learned how to put paper in an EKG machine?'

Then one of them says, "I think that's got it." But by the way the paper is NOT coming out of the machine, I know we're as far away from 'got it' as we can get.

"This can't be a good sign," I growl aloud.

Speaking of signs, who is the genius who put up those "entertaining" little posters in the examination rooms? Like I really want to look at the "15 stages of ear infection". It's either that or a cartoon of "Bubbles the kidney stone" that even a two year old wouldn't think was cute. No middle-ground whatsoever.

Needless to say, they FINALLY get the machine working, but, the fun has only begun. The nurse then starts to put things that look like little puffy stickers all over my furry body.

I smile and say, "Hey, this isn't too bad." But then it occurs to me that these things are going to have to come off eventually, and I bet when they do they're going to take my chest fur hostage! But I'll cross that painful bridge when I come to it.

Now the nurse starts stringing wires EVERYWHERE, like she’s running conduit! I look, and feel, like a big fat ursine marionette.

"Here we go," she says in a sickeningly cheerful tone as the machine whirls to life.

WE aren't going anywhere, I say to myself. I’M a fire hazard and YOU’RE the poster-child for giddiness.

And like all carnival rides, it's over half an hour after you scream "Stop the ride NOW! I'm going to be sick!" Speaking of screaming, that's pretty much the only word that does justice to the removal of the puffy stickers.

A few minutes later the doctor comes in with the results. "It looks good," he tells me.

"It looks like the seismograph readings from the 1904 earthquake that leveled San Francisco," I say. A lame attempt at comedy, I know, but my sense of humor has gone the way of the chest fur. The doctor chuckles and walks out the door. Which, if you think about it, isn't a bad way to leave a room. I steal a few tongue depressors for my trouble (which I plan to use to make a raft. But that's another story.) and then I'm on my merry little way.

Sometimes a joke isn’t as bad as we think it’s going be. This wasn’t one of those times.