EPISODE 4 - FAST-TRACK TO THE GRAVE

The woman behind the plastic partition had a face like a brick. The Spanish middle-aged woman had not laughed nor fucked in a couple of decades to say the least. She looked like every receptionist I had ever encountered at a centro de salud with a long face unfazed by the vicissitudes of life and a jaded approach to everything she did while purposefully refusing to type more than one key at a time. 

“I’d like to see my doctor today please?”

“¿Tarjeta?” I handed over my social security card and placed it in a cardboard bowl which looked strangely like an upcycled coffee cup holder. As soon as I placed it there, she took it with her bare hand. 

She typed, slowly, a key at a time, the long list of numbers on my card. She squinted. She looked from under her glasses. She looked at the card from afar and finally, she pressed enter. 

“¿Que? ¿Hoy? ¡Mi pobre niño!” 

She made oohs and ahs and grimaced at the computer screen while biting down on her lower lip. 

“¡Es que tu doctor de cabecera está de vacaciones!” She looked up at me and feigned embarrassment. I knew the move. It was a classic: there is nothing else I can do. My hands are tied. I’m sorry. Next!

“¿Es que acaban de diagnosticarme con un tumor en el cerebro, señora?” I pointed to the middle of my forehead. 

Her eyes widened like an owl. She stared at me for what felt like longer than necessary and returned to the computer. She typed a little faster this time. She bit her lower lip and scratched her head. The whole thing was cartoonish. A real Tex Avery show. And then, as if by magic, the computer started to cooperate. 

There was a doctor, claro que sí. 

They would see me right away, claro que sí. 

It had been merely a couple of hours since I had faced the neurosurgeon. I hadn’t fully grasped how bad things were but if she reacted that way, it couldn’t be good. In my experience, clerks didn’t look for solutions. ‘Computer says no.’ Yet, she was handing me a scrap of paper with a room number and telling me to hurry on up. It was unsettling how frightfully fast the doors were opening once I had mentioned my tumour. Bruno seemed to be getting me fast-tracked. 

I had barely settled on the metal bench when I heard my name called in. There was a kind faced doctor smiling at me and inviting me in. 

“So, what brings you here?” she asked. 

“I have just been diagnosed with a tumour.” She didn’t let me finish. 

“Let me, er, look at your file.” 

She read silently, without giving anything away for what felt like an eternity. Her face didn’t betray her like the woman downstairs. I hadn’t asked her for anything and yet she was handing me my baja.  

“I can’t give you any longer, I’m afraid. I’m not your assigned doctor. I’ve given you a month and then he will prolong it. Ok?” 

I was in and out of el centro de salud in about 10 minutes. My friends tell me I’m dramatic—and I am—but bureaucratic efficiency is a dead giveaway that you’re about to die.   

I wobbled outside the building and held onto a lamppost. I was supposed to walk into my appointment this morning and be told “¿Porque nos están haciendo perder nuestro tiempo, señor?”—that’s what I was supposed to be told. I was supposed to be misgendered and move on with my life. Not that it was a tumour that may be nibbling through my brain, not that they were gonna cut me open to get a peekaboo, not fast-tracked through red tape and sent home, alone, with a pat on the back. I slid down the lamppost and rested on the pavement for a bit—told you, I was dramatic. Bruno was not only fast-tracking me through the health care system, he was also a one way ticket to the grave.  

I walked home to my empty flat where there wasn’t a hug in sight or the wagging tail of a happy dog to welcome me in. As I turned the key, I felt lightheaded. I held onto the wall and breathed in. I had just discovered circular breathing where you take a long inhale, followed by a short inhale and then exhale slowly. So that was what I did. I inhaled, inhaled and exhaled. Long, short, exhale. Long, short, exhale. The tsunami I feared didn’t happen. I walked in and closed the door behind me. 

My flat was the only achievement in my life I considered as such. I had bought it nine years prior. Even in my childhood I had never stayed nine years in the same house. In the entrance, I had draped pink, velvety curtains to cover a wall and turned the entrance into some sort of secret threshold to an underground cabaret. The rest of the house was simpler but cosy and filled with various trinkets from all of the lives I had led. Home felt like home, with or without the husband and the dog. It was my refuge.   

I poured myself a cup of coffee, out of habit, and plopped my ass on the sofa. I stared into nothingness while my coffee got cold. It was the knock on the door that brought me back to reality. 

Enters Chaos, also known as Lucy.

She was out of breath, she leaned against the door and added that she came here as fast as she could. I didn’t remember having called her. One breath in and she burst into my flat and started monologuing about the many –the very many– obstacles that had been in her way. How she couldn't find her travel card because her flatmate had moved a very important bowl where she was keeping her very important things by the front door; how he had left her on read, how they were going to need to have a talk; how she therefore had to grab a city bike, how the first one had no battery and the other a broken wheel; then there was something about a cab driver honking at her and screaming behind his windshield; some dudes whistling at her; she mentioned a cat… The flurry of catastrophes to get to my place was the equivalent of having crawled the seven circles of Hell on her bare knees. I’d always admired her ability to talk about the most mundane things with such authority. She could rabbit on for hours about a Facebook Marketplace ad and how she didn’t get the thing she wanted. She was life minutiae being thrown at you with great and excited verbiage. 

And I listened. I listened the way I always did, to forget that I had problems too. One in particular right now, one that dwarfed everything that had come before. Bruno. 

When she finally sat down, she looked me dead in the eyes: “So,” she paused, “how are you?” 

I sighed. I knew she meant business. 

Bruno, meet Chaos!