life and puppies

A billion years ago, my mom told me that it was perfectly acceptable to decline to be weighed at the doctor’s office. Years later, Doc Heather confirmed the accuracy of my mom’s report. Despite these wise women’s words, I never used my voice to ask not to be put on the scale. The most I had ever braved on this front was saying meekly to the nurse, “I don’t want to look.” Often, this was met with mucho respect. The nurse would go out of her way to shield me from the computer screen or whatever other papers would show the numbers. Other times, not so much. Today, though, I was staring down the barrel of a doc appointment to look at some itchy splotches on my right calf that have been there for months that, according to the interwebs, could either be (a) eczema or (b) cancer. What’s more is that said appointment was going to directly follow a lunch I was required to attend to listen to the Administration defend its budget proposal. Add to that that I’m swamped at work and feeling like there’s not enough time to do anything well in any arena, and I was just not feeling the scale. Plus, I have a regular physical in June so what in the world is the point of adding insult to injury? I remembered my mom and Heather’s advice, and told myself, “Today is the day. Today is the day I say, ‘Uh, can we skip that wretched machine that discounts all of my positive attributes and shows me an ugly number that will make me feel bad forever? Please!’ Yes, today is the day.” So, I steeled myself. I drove to the appointment, parked, checked in, got kicked off of the self-check-in kiosk because I admitted I’d traveled outside of the country in the past 21 days, was gently told I broke the kiosk, was asked about Ebola and corpses, used the restroom, sat down in the waiting room, stood up when a nice woman asked if I were ‘Kate’ and told me that the nurse had called my name, and then nearly lost all of my resolve when I relaized that the nurse assigned to my appointment was male. Why would this matter? I’m not so sure, except I think I worried that maybe by asking not to be weighed I’d be fulfilling some sort of stereotypical ‘women can’t handle the truth’ nonsense. In any event, it didn’t take long before I snapped back to reality and my courage returned. The nurse made his polite introduction and said, “And then if you’ll just come this way and we can get your weight.” He swerved to the right, ever-so-slightly. I said, quickly, “Actually, can we not do that?” He swerved back into his lane and took a left, saying, “Sure. No problem.” And that was that. And this is 40.