I can still learn

It isn't always about you. That is, it isn't always about me. Sometimes I think it is, or I behave as though that's what I think.

Last Friday's dr appointment was all about me, and I didn't want to go, didn't need to go, had been to the cardiac dr on Wednesday. So I called and said, "I want to know what this appointment is about."

"The nurse says this is a follow up to your heart attack."

"But I have just been to the cardiac clinic. Just today."

"I will have the nurse call you."

No call. Next day I call again with the same questions.

"I'll check with the nurse." I'm on hold. Kind of impatiently on hold. You know.

"The nurse says you need to come."

I could have said, "Tough, I'm not coming." But I didn't. Friday morning I went. I was right, though. I didn't need to be there, but since they said I needed to come--you know, like they made me come--I decided to tell the truth about something that has irked me there. So I told the dr I have a problem with drs who come in, hand extended (the glad hand approach, I call it), to show the patient, me, they really care. "I figure it's something they're told to do. But I only like handshakes that are genuine." He said it wasn't that way with him. No one told him to do it (I didn't believe it. Dr Burr, Dr Funke, PA Carmichael--they all do it, like somebody told them to.) Then he said, "And it is genuine."

"Hmph," I thought. And I was sure I didn't need to be there.

Then the dr asked me if I'd been writing much lately.

"I have."

"What have you been writing?" he asked.

"Well, I have written four poems in the last several months. All pretty much the same theme. Death." So then we talked about death. I told him a few lines from the latest poem. The conversation was all about me, really, because I know so much about the subject, you know.

Then I asked him if he had experienced the death of anyone close or anyone in his family.

"My father died three weeks ago," he said. And suddenly, it wasn't about me.

I gasped, couldn't help it, and said with heartfelt sympathy that I was sorry. I asked why he had died--"aneurism in his abdomen; it burst, and you don't live through that."

I asked his dad's age. "Sixty-one." I gasped again, couldn't help it. "Oh, I am so sorry." I said it again. "Then you're just a kid," I said. "You're not 40, are you."

"I just turned 40," he said. And he was starting to cry, doing his best not to, but his eyes welled with tears. I asked if he cries every day. "Not any more," he said.

He told me he knows all the technical stuff about aneurisms and about people dying. "But it isn't the same when it's your dad. Those things don't help."

I said again I was sorry and hoped he would always shake my hand, which he did before he left the room.

That was why I needed to go, so he could talk about his dad, cry a little bit. It wasn't really about me at all.

There's more, but I have to write it tomorrow or another time. It's about his nurse, whose only son was killed in June.