The waiting room of the county health clinic always smelled like old linoleum and bleach, a combination that has turned my stomach since I was a boy sitting on those same orange plastic chairs waiting for a tetanus shot. I sat there with my palms pressed flat against my knees, watching the clock above the reception desk tick over from 10:41 to 10:42 with a heavy, mechanical clunk. My throat felt like it was lined with coarse sandpaper, and every time I swallowed, a sharp little ache reminded me why my wife Martha had finally forced me out the door that morning.
I am fifty-two years old, and I have not seen a doctor in seven years, mostly because I believe that if you leave your body alone, it usually knows how to fix itself. But Martha took one look at my pale face over breakfast and said she was driving me herself if I didn’t grab my coat.
Dr. Vance came through the swing door holding a thick manila folder that looked entirely too heavy for the two minutes he had spent looking at my chart in the back. He didn’t smile, which is usually a bad sign when a man in a white coat enters a small room with gray walls. He sat down on the rolling stool, let out a slow breath through his nose, and tapped the corner of the folder against his knee twice. I kept waiting for him to talk about antibiotics or a simple bottle of cough syrup, but instead he just stared at me over the frames of his glasses like he was trying to figure out how to explain a car wreck to a child.
The air in that room got thin real fast, and I could hear the faint hum of the vending machine out in the hallway through the thin drywall.
“Doctor, give it to me straight. What’s wrong with me?” I asked, my voice sounding rougher than I meant it to.
He leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees, and lowered his voice. “I’m afraid you have a highly contagious, extremely dangerous virus. We’re putting you in strict isolation.”
My chest tightened right up, and I felt that cold, heavy drop in my stomach that usually comes right before you realize you forgot to check the oil in the tractor before heading out into the back forty. I am not a man who panics easily, but the word isolation sounds an awful lot like being locked away from everything you know with no way out. The thought of Martha sitting out in the Ford station wagon waiting for me made my throat ache even worse than the bug itself did.
I gripped the edge of the examination table until my knuckles turned white, trying to process the sudden shift from a simple morning checkup to a full-blown medical emergency.
“Oh my god. What happens now?” I asked, my voice cracking just a bit on the last word.
“You’ll be locked in a sealed room and placed on a strict diet of pancakes and personal pan pizzas,” Dr. Vance said, entirely deadpan, without so much as a twitch at the corner of his mouth.
I just stared at him, my brain skipping beats like an old engine with a fouled spark plug. I waited for him to crack a smile, to tell me he was pulling my leg or testing my reflexes, but his face stayed as flat and gray as the linoleum floor beneath my boots. The silence stretched out for three long seconds, thick and utterly baffling, while I tried to reconcile the idea of a lethal quarantine with a breakfast food typically reserved for Sunday mornings at the diner.
It made no sense, and yet he looked at me like a man who had memorized a rulebook he didn’t write.
“Wait, will all those carbs help cure my virus?” I asked, shaking my head to clear the fog.
“No, but it’s the only food flat enough to slide under the door,” he replied, standing up and tapping his folder shut.
That was the exact moment the bottom dropped out of the whole performance. I stood up so fast the metal stool tipped backward and hit the floor with a loud clatter that brought the nurse running in through the door. Dr. Vance finally broke, letting out a low, rumbling laugh that shook his shoulders as he reached into his pocket and pulled out a small, foil-wrapped square of butter. He tossed it onto the examination table right beside my hat like he was dealing cards at a kitchen table poker game. It turned out Martha had called him from the parking lot five minutes before my name was called, asking him to play a trick on me because I had spent the last three weeks complaining about how men my age never get taken seriously by doctors.
I stood there in the quiet room, looking at the butter and then at the doctor who was still grinning like he had just won the county fair blue ribbon. I was mad enough to chew nails, but underneath the anger, I could feel the tension leaving my shoulders in one long, slow sigh. My throat still hurt, and I still had to go home and tell Martha she was entirely too pleased with herself, but the quarantine was a ghost. Dr. Vance patted my shoulder on his way out the door and told me to drink some water and go home to my wife. The clinic waiting room smelled just as bad when I walked back through it, but the sun coming through the front window felt a little warmer than it had ten minutes ago.
