The Visit to the Doctor

Two weeks ago Sarah got sick and I needed to take her to see the pediatrician. We got an appointment at the office closest to us. This was not the office that I usually take Sarah to because her favorite doctor generally worked out of an office further away. It was the office where I most often took Emma, though. She has switched to a female doctor when she entered puberty and her new doctor worked out of the office closest to our home.

I took the appointment in the closer office because Sarah was sick to her stomach and I didn’t want her to have to be in the car long. I probably should have realized that going to the office that I usually went to with Emma would be very hard.

It started right when I checked in and the receptionist said she needed to update some information on Emma’s record. She missed the note on the screen and so I was forced to say the words I still haven’t gotten used to, the words I don’t think I’ll ever get used to.

The nurse who called us in from the waiting room was Emma’s favorite nurse, of course. She is a sweet young woman who knew just how to help Emma through getting the shots that she so dreaded. Emma and I had always worked through that together. I would hold both her hands and have her look me in the eyes while I talked to her to distract her from what was going on. However, this nurse taught us a new trick that we added to our routine. She told Emma to cough just as she was about to prick her. This additional trick proved to be very effective, although I still always held her hands.

The last reminder of Emma appeared when we walked into the exam room. Posted on the door of one the cabinets in the room was a portrait done by a very young patient. It could have been one of Emma’s early portraits – a big circle that served as both head and body, big round eyes, a big semi-circle smile, and straight lines that jutted out of the big circle from all angles and in too great a number to be accurate representations of arms and legs. Emma got an easel for Christmas when she was 2 ½ and she was constantly at that easel drawing pictures of herself, her family and everyone she knew. In fact, on at least one occasion she drew a portrait of a visiting repairman and presented it to him to take home. Her self-portraits lined our basement walls for years and are now carefully preserved in the attic.

Seeing that round googly-eyed picture in the exam room brought me right back to those days and it made me smile. Better yet, it made her real for me again for a few minutes. There she was, looking back at me from the picture on the cabinet door.