An experimental essay about anxiety & doctors’ offices. It begins:

“1. Waiting Room
 
             Muzak earworms a song so deep into your subconscious that for weeks afterwards: hum, hum, hum. And it’s Juice Newton. It’s Steely Dan. The Girl from Freaking Ipanema. The golf magazines, the parenting advice and this-is-your-future gunmetal hair, pages moist and crumpled like leftovers from someone else’s bathroom. Saltwater tanks flash exotic plumage—a mirror of the unnamed diseases I fear I have. Plants barely hanging on, leaves shriveled brown at the edges, stalks dry as chalk at the bases. But worst is me. In a doctor’s office, I am hypervigilant, tuned into the pulsing, ticking micro, and I get, well, nervous.
             Now when I write nervous what I mean is six-alarm panicked. Accelerated heart rate, darting eyes, sweaty everything—clammy knees, sticky ankles—dizziness, a snowball of mania. From the minute I’m parked in the waiting room, I plan, I plot, working out the logistics of just how long I have to keep it together for before I can make a break for the exit…”

To read the complete piece, click here.