Ann-Marie MacDonald - Adult Onset

She lay on the slab for the X-ray. The technician asked, “Is there any possibility that you are pregnant?”

You’ve got to be kidding . But she said, politely, “No.”

She had to admit she was pleased, in the way a thirty-year-old is pleased to be carded at a bar. He entered the glassed-in nuke-booth in the corner, then re-emerged instantly. All done. There was no cashunk sound as in the olden days.

The technician, a lugubrious former East Bloc citizen — no doubt a brain surgeon barred from practising in Canada due to bureaucracy — seemed to have forgotten she was there. She felt sheepish; there was nothing wrong with her. Paging Dr. Freud!

She waited for the komrad to hand her the X-ray so she could schlep it over to the specialist’s office, but when at length he looked up, as though surprised to find her still there, he merely muttered, “Digital.”

Not only was she a hypochondriac, she was a dinosaur … No one toted around actual X-rays anymore. She nodded at his instructions on how to get to the Orthopaedic Clinic, “western wing, northeast elevators” … second star on the left, straight on till morning …

She wandered off past a supply cupboard stacked with Phisohex, past doors that afforded unlooked-for glimpses of lumpy bedspreads, trying not to breathe too deeply of hospital smells, past the nursing station where no one so much as glanced at her. What if I were a maniac, here to murder helpless patients? Past the Emergency Eyewash Station, past a laminated chart illustrating the degrees of “Hazardous Waste,” until she found the elevator. She emerged into a sky-lit nexus on the fifth floor where a plump volunteer with a name badge told her to follow the white footsteps. “White for bones!” she chirped.

She found a seat in the waiting room — it was still warm from the previous occupant and she shuddered at the vinyl exhalation as she sank into the roomy ass-print. Her eye was drawn, like a moth to a flame, by the muted television mounted in a corner of the ceiling, its “live eye” tracking traffic on the Don Valley Parkway while across the bottom of the screen, a band of news text unspooled like a postmodern novel, its content neither sequential nor linked to the words a female commentator was mouthing, which appeared as closed captions in a band across the top and which could not possibly be accurate, “… WHAT IT MEANS TO BE A HUMAN BEAN IN THIS DANE AGE …” She tore her gaze away, opened her book and read about a girl who’d been born with half a brain.

“Mrs. MacKinnon,” announced the brusque West Indian receptionist.

Mary Rose looked up— Mrs. MacKinnon’s my mother, dude! — and stood meekly.

Dr. Ostroph turned the computer screen on his desk to face Mary Rose — gone were the days of the shadowy X-ray in the light box. Just as shadowy, but on a computer screen now, was the long bone of her upper left arm in all its forensic glory. Her humerus.

He pointed with a pencil — some things don’t change — at the various, to her indiscernible, old fracture sites. “… you can see where the bone healed here, here, here and …” She noted that Dr. Ostroph was pale but had excellent bone structure. She determined to be the best patient he had seen that day, the most informed, the least needy. He had golf clubs on his tie. He talked fast, she talked faster, out-brisking the specialist, “So an injury that wouldn’t harm a normal bone causes a bone cyst bone to break,” she said, helpfully paraphrasing in case he had not understood himself.

“It’s called pathological fracture.”

“Right,” she said.

Like the frozen puddle .

“Bone cysts go undiagnosed a lot of the time because they’re asymptomatic unless there’s a fracture.”

Like the skating rink .

“Sorry, what?”

He spoke slowly — did he think she was stupid? “You don’t feel the cysts unless the bone is broken.”

Like the airplane swing .

And because she still must have been presenting with all the facial cues of a carp, he added, “It hurts. That’s your first clue.”

Like … every time it was sore .

He was saying something. She wondered if he knew who she was — perhaps his kids or his wife had her books and he’d twig to it when he got home this evening, Hey, you’ll never guess who walked into my clinic today … He stopped talking. She blinked. “I beg your pardon?”

“I said, where are you on the pain scale?”

“What’s the pain scale?”

“One to ten, one being low.”

She came clean. “At the moment I’m not on it.”

“You had pain, though, recently.”

“It comes and goes.” Like the Looney Tunes frog in top hat and tails that would sing and dance so long as no one was watching. She chuckled.

“From one to ten?”

He was getting impatient with her. What was the right answer — what was the question? “Uh, three. Eight?”

His eyebrow flickered.

“I have a high pain threshold,” she said.

“Pain is subjective.”

“Have they come back?”

“No.”

“Could they?”

“I know of no research to support that.”

“Is it, are they, is it from adhesions?” she asked. “Like old scar tissue?”

“Is what?”

“The … soreness.”

“All that would have resolved long ago.”

“Okay. So there’s nothing I should or shouldn’t be doing.”

“Don’t jump in front of an oncoming car.”

“Ha-ha.” He wasn’t annoyed with her after all. “It’s hard to know, with kids, though, if they have a broken bone, right?”

“In very young children it’s called a green-stick fracture and no, you might not know.”

He was typing something into his computer. Probably billing the government at that very moment. Was this her cue to leave?

“Especially if you weren’t aware of anything actually having happened to them, unless they cried or complained.”

He looked up. “Why wouldn’t they complain? My kid complains about everything.”

“Do I have cancer?”

He did not crack a smile. “I see no indication of that.”

“Thanks, I only ask because I’m here at the urging of my partner and my family physician, so they’ll be glad to know …”

He was already turning the screen away and she was halfway to the door when he said, “What about the pain?”

“Well obviously it’s in my head.” She smiled. She wasn’t going to let him be the one to say it.

“Well, yeah, that’s what pain is, information.”

“Absolutely.” Brain plasticity. She brandished her book. “I’ve just been reading about—”

“Messages.”

“Exactly, neurological—”

“You get an old pathway kicks up in the brain, it’s literally ‘remembered pain.’ ”

She flashed on an illustration from her childhood Treasury of Fairy Tales , of a prince hacking his way through brambles on an overgrown path beyond which could be glimpsed the castle of Sleeping Beauty. She mirrored Dr. Ostroph’s clipped tones, “So you shut down the pain pathway with what, like with what, surgery?”

“Doesn’t usually work.”

“So …?”

“Antidepressants.”

“Really?” Had she missed something?

“I can’t prescribe those.”

“No, that’s fine, I don’t want them, although that is quite fascinating—”

“Here.” He scrawled something on his prescription pad and handed it to her.

Tylenol 4s .

“Oh.”

“You want fives?”

“No, no, this’ll do, I’m sure.”

“We’re talking bone pain, right?”

“Yup, I just don’t like to take a lot of drugs, you know?”