A Side Effect
Every once in a while I make the mistake of reading the long list of side effects that parade alongside a particular prescription. Certain death is always on the list. Whether it is vaginal cream or a statin. Side effects? My right side is always the one. Sensitive to leaning right while stretching into a second position plie. Every once in a while a tug, a moment of pain. Then it is gone. I found out that my right foot is bigger than the left. Only a bit. Measured on a metal foot detector the last time an overzealous shoe salesman at REI suggested we check. He was right. I got the bigger pair to accommodate.
Recently Dr. M. suggested a tiny lift inside my right shoe. To even things out. To minimize the side effect on the right. She was recommended to me a few years back. When my right side was acting up after a set of large, open, sweeping movements coalesced into a point of pain.
She is probably close to 80, Jewish, from Belgium. She and her husband, who is also a doctor, have an office in the same building where Nico’s first pediatrician practiced. Every once in a while I have discovered a doctor who feels like a benevolent parent. I want to curl up and never leave.
Dr. Luz let Nico crawl on the floor of his office. Down the hall, Nico would find himself in the supply room. Nothing harmful that he could reach. I think there were bottles of formula. I picked this doctor because he was older and balding like my father. He was kind and gentle, but definitive. He reassured me, single and working so hard to be perfect. When the breast milk stopped flowing he told me to add a bottle. “Don’t listen to anyone else. Not to the La Leche league.” I had been admonished by the zealots of the breast-feeding world to stay in bed all day with my newborn. To let him nurse at will. But Dr. Luz cheerfully suggested alternating a bit of soy formula with the breast. It worked. I wasn’t refused and my son thrived.
Dr. M. came years later. After the side effects of mothering. When the fatigue and the feat turned into pride and joy. Like the band. Remembering the music of the time before nursing a baby. Now that my son is grown and launched, I find myself going to the third floor of the same office building to see Dr. M. in a softly lit examining room. The furniture is simple, a bit dated and comfortable. A poster on the wall depicts the human from a crawl to a stoop. Admonishing perhaps that we maintain good posture. She enters the room with a warm smile. Appearing always both elegant and comfortable. With a slight accent. “I love your skirt,” I said yesterday. “It is from Molly B,” she smiled. We both know the store. It is our custom to chat about clothes and jewelry for a moment. To admire each other. Once I saw her at a clothing outlet in my neighborhood. She was with her daughter and looking for the same pattern I had worn into her office for a previous visit.
“I love your mother,” I said after being introduced. “Everyone does,” said her daughter. I remembered shopping trips with my mother, and the brown wool coat I still wear that we chose together at Saks Fifth Avenue over 50 years ago. Only altered once, it holds me still. One time Dr. M. introduced me to her husband. He works magic on his patients as well. She wanted me to encourage him to see a film I had recommended, but one he was reluctant to see. That came before meeting her daughter on Valencia Street. I have never met her son. But I feel enveloped in their family.
Dr. Luz was our father. Mine and Nico’s. For those years. Dr. M. is now like my mother. But without the complicated pieces of blood and genealogy. A side effect of getting older is wanting not to be alone as the aging continues. I have my family and friends, but there is something about this intimacy that soothes in a different way. She gave me some tools to level out my right side. To equate it with the left. To feel equal and as good as. I brought her tulips the other day. I have never brought flowers to a doctor. Lester Luz died sometime after retiring, and we moved on to another pediatrician, a kind man but not my father. Perhaps I didn’t want my doctor to die before I had said thank you. A side effect of attachment is loss.