This is a story about how amazing I am. This is a story about how tolerant Jen can be when it comes to my desire to exploit her personal pain for my personal gain. This is a story about carrying a semitransparent bag of vomit across a busy parking lot. Like the title says, this is a story about love.
One thing I've learned over the course of my time as a woman who forms romantic attachments to other women is, people in same-sex relationships can get away with things that people in opposite-sex relationships can't. Like believably impersonating your partner to get drugs.
I can't tell you how many times I've pretended to be Jen and filled the prescription for her migraine medication. On some truly unfortunate nights when Jen wakes up feeling like William Howard Taft is sitting on her head (scary, because he's dead; painful, because he's fat) and we realize that, stupidly, we've forgotten to fill her prescription at the non-24-hour pharmacy 3 blocks from our house, I jump in the Grand Am and crank the radio, thankful that no company wants to waste money on advertising at 4:00 in the morning and drive 20 minutes to the closest pharmacy that can help us out. The poor, disheveled pharmacist who's been relegated (for what crime, I don't know) to working the overnight shift doesn't need to know who I really am. "Wow, your headache must be pretty bad if you've had to drive out at this hour."
"Yeah, hopefully this will help," I say while trying to smile my appreciation for his concern. It's harder than you might think to smile in a way that appropriately conveys a pain that you've never experienced. I'm not Meryl Streep.
I can't tell you how many times I've pretended to be Jen and filled the prescription for her migraine medication. On some truly unfortunate nights when Jen wakes up feeling like William Howard Taft is sitting on her head (scary, because he's dead; painful, because he's fat) and we realize that, stupidly, we've forgotten to fill her prescription at the non-24-hour pharmacy 3 blocks from our house, I jump in the Grand Am and crank the radio, thankful that no company wants to waste money on advertising at 4:00 in the morning and drive 20 minutes to the closest pharmacy that can help us out. The poor, disheveled pharmacist who's been relegated (for what crime, I don't know) to working the overnight shift doesn't need to know who I really am. "Wow, your headache must be pretty bad if you've had to drive out at this hour."
"Yeah, hopefully this will help," I say while trying to smile my appreciation for his concern. It's harder than you might think to smile in a way that appropriately conveys a pain that you've never experienced. I'm not Meryl Streep.
I'm Carrie, and I've never had anything worse than a sinus headache, but as soon the pharmacy opened this morning, I called and asked whether or not there were any refills left on the prescription for my migraine medication.
"Name?"
"Jennifer ____."
"Date of birth?"
"xx-xx-19xx."
"Nope, looks like you don't have any refills." Fuck.
Today it wouldn't have mattered if she'd said there was a refill left. The headache was too far gone for the pills to do any good. The only solution at this point was to head to urgent care where some unfortunate doctor who didn't have the good sense or the skill to go into plastic surgery where the real money is made is, therefore, now stuck diagnosing 5-year-olds with strep throat 8 hours a week to supplement his/her general practitioner salary in order to pay off the $200,000 in student loan debt that he/she incurred in med school when he/she still dreamed of having some never-before-discovered disease named after him/her. (Don't worry, I can't make any sense of that last sentence either.) The point is, the doctors who work at urgent care clinics are sad, and Jen needed one of them to give her an injection of the high test stuff if she wanted to get rid of her headache. The only question at this point was do we go now when Jen's only had the headache for 3 hours, or do we wait a couple days (yes, these migraines can last for days) so that the dead-on-the-inside physician won't think that Jen is a drug seeker? Since Jen had already run to the bathroom to throw up on 3 different occasions, and I had dreams of salvaging our weekend I made an executive decision. These drugs she had to get for herself. "Get dressed. We're going."
The last time we made this trip, 3 months ago, we learned the hard way that discarded fast-food bags that you might find in a pinch in the backseat of your car are not water proof, especially if that water is being projected at 62 feet per second. before we left this time, Jen grabbed a couple plastic grocery bags that we normally hang onto for when we scoop that cats' litter box. As she grabbed the bags, we looked at each other the way two people in love do when they're sharing an inside joke that doesn't even need to be spoken to be understood. In this instance, the joke was, let's don't throw up all over the floor mats again. Hilarious.
The worst time to drive to an urgent care north of The Ohio State University's campus when you're coming from south of The Ohio State University's campus is 1 hour before kickoff of a home game. We had to take a less than direct route. Lots of turns. Lots of jostling. Lots of me thinking, she's gonna throw up. She's gonna throw up. Don't take that corner too fast, Carrie. She's gonna throw up.
We were so close. If I had been driving an all terrain vehicle, a tank or one of those four-wheelers that I see daddies proudly driving their 3-year-olds around on when we're driving along back roads, we'd have made it. Since I was in a Grand Am, though, I couldn't just drive over the median and down the grassy hill that stood between us and the miracle cure. Instead, I had to stop at a red light and patiently wait to turn onto the street in front of the urgent care. "I'm so sorry," Jen cried as she pulled the plastic grocery bag up to her face.
"That's okay, baby," I replied, though I doubt she heard me.
They should really put trash cans outside big office buildings. They should especially do this if within the office building is some sort of clinic where people who are too sick to wait for their regular doctor's office hours to be treated for ailments or injuries more severe than a cold and less severe than a bullet to the hip. What I'm saying is, I bet Jen isn't the first person to show up outside this building with a bag of vomit.
She got out of the car and looked around. "I don't know what to do with this," she admitted as she limply moved the bag forward in case I wasn't sure which, "this" she was referring to. We walked around to the side of the building. Nothing. Jen just stopped, not sure how to proceed. It was at this moment that I did the thing that makes me amazing. I stepped up to her, and I grabbed the bag.
Resolute and determined, I marched the length of a football field through the parking lot that the urgent care shares with a very busy grocery store. Fittingly, the bag that Jen had grabbed before we left the house had been one from this chain. What I had in my hand was not only a semitransparent bag of vomit, but also a sign of customer loyalty. Thank you for your plentiful selection of cheeses and your conveniently located trash cans, Giant Chain Grocery Store.
By the time I got back to the urgent care building, Jen was checked in and seated in the waiting room. Now, if the worst time to drive to an urgent care north of The Ohio State University's campus is 1 hour before kickoff of a home game, then the best time to arrive at an urgent care north of the The Ohio State University's campus is 30 minutes before kickoff. Since the rest of the city was either at the game or in the Giant Chain Grocery Store across the parking lot picking up last minute game day necessities, Jen was the only person in the waiting room. As far as I could tell, we were the only people in the office other than the staff. Within half an hour Jen had been injected with an anti-pain/anti-nausea cocktail that could have made us a lot of money on the black market. We headed home with most of a weekend yet to look forward to.
One of the more immature, yet understandable reasons that some young people give for not wanting to have children is that the thought of cleaning up piss, poop, and puke multiple times daily for 3 or 4 or 8 or however many years it takes to potty train kids is repulsive. Knowing parents always say the same thing, "It's different if it's your child." I don't know from experience, but I imagine that's true. Or maybe it truly is really fucking disgusting, but you do it anyway, because a) you love the kid, and b) you don't have a choice. In any event, I hate to be the one to break this news, but whether you have kids or not, someday you're going to end up responsible for the cleanup and disposal of someone else's piss, poop, and puke, and, if you're lucky, someone else, someone who you're lucky enough to be loved by, will be responsible for the cleanup and disposal of yours.
Stuff happens. We get drunk. We get sick. We get old. We get paralyzed from the waist down. Whatever it is, it ain't pretty. I just hope when the time comes, you have someone as amazing as me there to carry your semitransparent bag of vomit wherever it needs to go, and that, if that person asks permission, you're as amazing as Jen for letting them tell the story.
The last time we made this trip, 3 months ago, we learned the hard way that discarded fast-food bags that you might find in a pinch in the backseat of your car are not water proof, especially if that water is being projected at 62 feet per second. before we left this time, Jen grabbed a couple plastic grocery bags that we normally hang onto for when we scoop that cats' litter box. As she grabbed the bags, we looked at each other the way two people in love do when they're sharing an inside joke that doesn't even need to be spoken to be understood. In this instance, the joke was, let's don't throw up all over the floor mats again. Hilarious.
The worst time to drive to an urgent care north of The Ohio State University's campus when you're coming from south of The Ohio State University's campus is 1 hour before kickoff of a home game. We had to take a less than direct route. Lots of turns. Lots of jostling. Lots of me thinking, she's gonna throw up. She's gonna throw up. Don't take that corner too fast, Carrie. She's gonna throw up.
We were so close. If I had been driving an all terrain vehicle, a tank or one of those four-wheelers that I see daddies proudly driving their 3-year-olds around on when we're driving along back roads, we'd have made it. Since I was in a Grand Am, though, I couldn't just drive over the median and down the grassy hill that stood between us and the miracle cure. Instead, I had to stop at a red light and patiently wait to turn onto the street in front of the urgent care. "I'm so sorry," Jen cried as she pulled the plastic grocery bag up to her face.
"That's okay, baby," I replied, though I doubt she heard me.
They should really put trash cans outside big office buildings. They should especially do this if within the office building is some sort of clinic where people who are too sick to wait for their regular doctor's office hours to be treated for ailments or injuries more severe than a cold and less severe than a bullet to the hip. What I'm saying is, I bet Jen isn't the first person to show up outside this building with a bag of vomit.
She got out of the car and looked around. "I don't know what to do with this," she admitted as she limply moved the bag forward in case I wasn't sure which, "this" she was referring to. We walked around to the side of the building. Nothing. Jen just stopped, not sure how to proceed. It was at this moment that I did the thing that makes me amazing. I stepped up to her, and I grabbed the bag.
Resolute and determined, I marched the length of a football field through the parking lot that the urgent care shares with a very busy grocery store. Fittingly, the bag that Jen had grabbed before we left the house had been one from this chain. What I had in my hand was not only a semitransparent bag of vomit, but also a sign of customer loyalty. Thank you for your plentiful selection of cheeses and your conveniently located trash cans, Giant Chain Grocery Store.
By the time I got back to the urgent care building, Jen was checked in and seated in the waiting room. Now, if the worst time to drive to an urgent care north of The Ohio State University's campus is 1 hour before kickoff of a home game, then the best time to arrive at an urgent care north of the The Ohio State University's campus is 30 minutes before kickoff. Since the rest of the city was either at the game or in the Giant Chain Grocery Store across the parking lot picking up last minute game day necessities, Jen was the only person in the waiting room. As far as I could tell, we were the only people in the office other than the staff. Within half an hour Jen had been injected with an anti-pain/anti-nausea cocktail that could have made us a lot of money on the black market. We headed home with most of a weekend yet to look forward to.
A few days ago I asked Jen, "If something happened, and I was paralyzed, would you take care of me?"
"Of course."
"I mean, like if I couldn't even go to the bathroom myself?"
"Of course."
"Really?"
"Well I wouldn't be happy about it, but..." The truth is, I wouldn't even go to the bathroom in the middle of the woods if I could somehow be guaranteed that there was no other human or woodland creature within 100 miles of me, so if I ever found myself in the position where I needed help going to the bathroom, I'd have no other choice than to will myself to die, but that wasn't the point of our conversation, and I didn't want to hurt Jen's feelings by seeming ungrateful. One of the more immature, yet understandable reasons that some young people give for not wanting to have children is that the thought of cleaning up piss, poop, and puke multiple times daily for 3 or 4 or 8 or however many years it takes to potty train kids is repulsive. Knowing parents always say the same thing, "It's different if it's your child." I don't know from experience, but I imagine that's true. Or maybe it truly is really fucking disgusting, but you do it anyway, because a) you love the kid, and b) you don't have a choice. In any event, I hate to be the one to break this news, but whether you have kids or not, someday you're going to end up responsible for the cleanup and disposal of someone else's piss, poop, and puke, and, if you're lucky, someone else, someone who you're lucky enough to be loved by, will be responsible for the cleanup and disposal of yours.
Stuff happens. We get drunk. We get sick. We get old. We get paralyzed from the waist down. Whatever it is, it ain't pretty. I just hope when the time comes, you have someone as amazing as me there to carry your semitransparent bag of vomit wherever it needs to go, and that, if that person asks permission, you're as amazing as Jen for letting them tell the story.
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