It's Hammertoe time!: As corny as Kansas in autumn- part 2
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Sandra Tsing Loh takes her dad to the bunion doctor.
Wednesday is my day to drive my 89 year old DAD to our weekly OUTING-- For SOME adult children and their parents it would be QUALITY time, for others…not so much. What I MEAN is that while SOME eightysomethings might CHOOSE, for their day out, say an UPLIFTING visit to the GETTY -- my dad was excited about a trip to the BUNION doctor-- The one who sent my dad a MAILER full of colorful photographs of corns and hammertoes.
This particular outfit, the oddly NAMED foot and ankle INSTITUTE-- do feet and ANKLES have to HAVE their own institutes? You never hear about the HIP or NOSE institute-- Anyway, this particular bunion INSTITUTE was LOCATED, as so many of them ARE, in CALABASAS. I should ADMIT that Calabasas never seems quite REAL to me-- It is so eerily and quietly MODULAR, with its strips of squat mid-century OFFICE buildings, potted trees, black tinted windows you can’t see INTO-- Remember Genevieve Bujold in COMA? To me Calabasas is like that!
Anyway, knowing I have a PREJUDICE about Calabasas, I TRIED not to react negatively to the foot and ankle INSTITUTE. After all, the office looked like any OTHER medical office--the little sliding window with typing, businesslike lady, the clipboards of health insurance forms, the pastel COUCHES, the selection of respectable MAGAZINES. But I ASK you: Wouldn’t YOU like to see a few DIPLOMAS on the doctor’s walls? Doesn’t have to be HARVARD, just SOME diploma. The fortysomething doctor who SAW us, in scrubs, was very enthusiastic. But he would GIVE no patient REFERRALS, and he DID have a tattoo. The BUNION surgery would be forty-eight-hundred dollars per foot, one foot at a time, cash on the barrel.
I drove home semi-creeped out. (Genevieve Bujold! Genevieve Bujold!) But my DAD has called me every day since, three times a day. My dad loved the hammertoe FLIER-- He literally MISSES his flier, and wants me to RETURN it -- He really liked the doctor -- if he even WAS a doctor and not a veterinarian. He enjoyed the doctor’s can-do spirit--"We can start with the left one on Tuesday!" And he was cheered by the doctor’s relative youth. "All MY doctors are so old and have given up," he says.
So my dad wants to know -- when will we SCHEDULE his bunion SURGERY? I say never, but in a sense that doctor was a miracle worker. One free diagnosis and my DAD is full of energy again, and a sense of mission, as he hobbles eagerly to his mailbox, looking for the next hammertoe flier.
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