so far the game plan for september seems to be this: read one novel per day, stop going to therapy, look up, look up.
look up, no really, the sky is frighteningly gorgeous today.
today it fell to me to tell a patient who was returning for her regularly-scheduled contraceptive injection that she had become pregnant sometime between the last injection & now. she stood shaking in the middle of the linoleumed room & i wanted to steer her to a bed to sit down but i was afraid she might explode in my hands.
she asked me to do an ultrasound & she lay on the table shaking & i could see barely, inside her retroverted uterus, the fetus fluttering its fingers.
i didn't say anything about the fluttering, of course.
but it's been sitting/fluttering in my heart all afternoon, since. i am glad the sky is so absolutely on. i am glad that today's novel was the sisterhood of the traveling pants because mildly witty teen-girl lit is about all i could handle in that kind of aftermath.
i make a living talking to pregnant women who don't want to be pregnant. but of course they know they are, before they walk into my workspace. & i haven't been seeing them & joking with them every twelve weeks.
she is a waitress, she always pays for her office visits in crumpled ones & fives.
when i left work, i told j-ann, "when i leave this building, none of this will be my problem anymore. on saturday it can all be my problem again." when i said "none of this" i made a sweeping gesture with my right hand. level to my hip.
also i decided to stop going to therapy, while sitting with bare feet in my therapist's newly-redecorated office, actually spending money to talk about certain display innovations at IKEA pittsburgh. i felt like i was in infinite jest. even people who have only started infinite jest may know the scene to which i specifically allude, because it's within the first hundred pages.
also it is september, i do things like get my hair cut & have a doctor's appointment & watch my friends get married to each other. i find new novels to read. i think about robots.
here is something i said today. this is how i actually talk, when left to my own devices: "you make it sound like i have bradycardia as like a. thing. i don't. it's tachycardia."
