Special

Even if I were to describe her to you, you wouldn’t be able to pick her out in a crowd. As far as physical description goes, the kindest thing to say would be that she was ordinary, and several less kind things could probably in all honesty be said. She was Irish, or at least, of Irish descent, information readily available from her name, Anne Maloney. Her hair was thick, dark and curly, cut just below her shoulder with bangs that flopped almost into her round, dark eyes. Her face was also round, besides being abnormally flat. Of course, although I’m sure I have the general appearance, the particulars may be slightly wrong, the hard edges smoothed down by long separation. Any other discrepancies can by explained away by the fact that I loved her, and love, although not blind, is certainly a little like looking through a distorted lens. I would probably have loved her no matter what she looked like. To me, she was always beautiful, in a remote sort of way.

Now, by this time you are probably wondering who exactly the crazed writer at the keyboard is. To save you the possible trouble of skimming my profile, I’m female and, so far as one can reasonably ascertain, straight. The mystery of how I managed to fall in love with someone not only also female, but with whom I crossed paths maybe five times in my entire life, the last being over two years ago, is as confusing to me as it may be to you. It may not even seem real, when looked at objectively, but I am anything but objective.

Allow me to add one more question to your list, one more witness against my sanity. She wasn’t a classmate. Not a peer, a friend. Not even an acquaintance of my parents’, as I’m told sometimes happens to people my age. No, she was my doctor. To be precise, she was a pediatric nurse practitioner and, by the third time I found myself in her august presence, I was completely captured by whatever you want to call the emotion that has claimed a good portion of my life for the past three years.

Maybe a clarification would be helpful here. I never loved her in the whole boy-meets-girl fashion. As I think I mentioned, I’m straight. I don’t know how I managed to do this to myself, and I can’t describe the way I loved her or was fixated on her or whatever. All I know is that it was, on some level, real.

Maybe if I start from the beginning, this’ll make more sense. I’m a trypanophobe. For those of us without a dictionary in our pockets, or maybe even those with, since my spell checker is currently telling me my phobia doesn’t exist, I have a fear of needles. The pointy, medical kind. Not to mention doctor’s offices, doctors and all associated personnel. It’s a clinically recognized condition, believe it or not. For as long as I can remember I have dreaded doctors in much the same way a perfectionist dreads a 55 on a math test.

When I want to a public middle school with, don’t ask me how, a built in “health clinic” or some such nonsense, complete with every possible health professional and guaranteed to send someone like me completely off her rocker, my mother just couldn’t wait to ship me off for my yearly physical. I, on the other hand, was somewhat less than enthusiastic. Still, the appointment was made, the date of my doom inscribed on the calendar.

By the time I trudged miserably down the stairs on that unsympathetically bright May morning, I had made up my mind to hate her, as I have hated each and every doctor that I have met.

By the time I had sullenly sat down in the waiting room of the medical offices, she was as much of a non-entity to me as I felt I was to her.

I didn’t have long to wait; in almost no time at all she was walking out of her office. She was taller than me, or so it seemed, with the perfect straight-backed posture and stride normally seen only in dancers or actors. She beckoned imperiously down the hallway, the epitome of calm confidence. I followed numbly, face pale and flushed, stomach churning with dread. My doom was sealed. My mother, who had come along for the ride, followed far too cheerily behind me.

After what seemed like an eternity to my poor nerves, we entered a room that screamed its identity with a violent fury. Everything was white, and there was no disguising the odor of latex and bleach. If I hadn’t been semi-somnolent with terror, I would have done the sensible thing and run for it then and there. Instead, I sat down quietly, waiting for her to talk enthusiastically to my mother, treating me only as a living doll to push around and do mysterious and painful things to, like a particularly sadistic child playing house with a favored Barbie doll.

Instead, she sat down in a computer chair opposite the hard plastic one I had opted for and introduced herself. After flicking briefly through a folder that I can only guess was my medical record, she looked me straight in the eye and said bluntly, in a completely level and studiedly soothing voice, “I believe that people on the whole deserve to know what’s coming their way. I’ll give you the bad news first. You need a TB test and a tetanus shot.”

As it turned out, that was the only news she had time to deliver, because I promptly burst into hysterical tears. I can only imagine that she was slightly shocked, having had no previous experience of my proclivities, but I have to give her credit: you couldn’t have told that from her unchanging expression. She barely moved.

Based on those signs and prior experience, I waited for her to turn away, ignore me the way every other doctor seems to, as soon as the tears start to fall. Worse than that is the look of utter contempt they bestow before they turn cold. You freak, you idiot, you moron, it seems to scream, growing louder with each year that passes before it finally fades into the cold, stony silence I know so well. You are beneath me. I ignore you.

When she stayed, didn’t turn away, I think it was then I knew that she would be someone special.

Holding my eyes with her own, she began to speak softly. Commonplaces, but directed at me. Even before life got complicated, I always loved her voice. I would have listened to it for hours and been fairly content. Unfortunately, she had other ideas.

By the time she asked me to get up on the examining table, I was babbling incoherently with terror. I have no recollection whatsoever of what I said, but it was probably some sort of inane drivel induced by the adrenaline rush brought on by pure terror. To again give acknowledgment where due, you wouldn’t have known that I wasn’t presenting a carefully thought out speech on a revolutionary new theorem.

By the time she got around to approaching me with a needle, I was on the verge of fainting. Everything seemed to spin and grow hazy, my limbs felt both tingly and numb at the same time and I literally could not stop sobbing. Time seemed to ebb and flow in tides, a minute first taking a half second, then an entire hour. I wasn’t even sure if I was conscious, everything felt dreamlike and strange.

I don’t remember what she said to me, only that her voice provided a pleasant counterpoint to the buzzing in my ears. She held my wrist loosely, almost gently, and I didn’t try to pull it back. If I were that melodramatic, I would say it was one of those “Resistance is Futile” moments.

When they insist that it doesn’t hurt, they lie, that’s all I know, all I’ve ever known. When they then add insult to injury by attempting to convince you that the second pointy object they plan to stick into you will hurt less, well that just isn’t true either. The only thing to be said for it is that the pain, sharp as it is, lasts just long enough for despair to fight betrayal to a standstill. Part of me wails in betrayed confusion that it wasn’t supposed to hurt. They promised, absolutely promised that this time it wouldn’t. The angst filled teenage part replies bleakly that they lied. Again. It reproaches the tiny part that believes them each time, wants desperately to trust. You fool. They lied to you again and you let it happen. The overachieving part screeches that we have failed. It is us that is wrong, not them. They didn’t lie, we are the lie. We do it to ourselves. Our fault. Our fault.

She learned from her mistakes, I’ll say that for her. After that first disaster and my angry refusal to answer her “Now that wasn’t so bad, was it?” with the answer she wanted, obstinately insisting that it was, in fact, very bad, she never again tried to convince me that she wouldn’t hurt me.

After that, all I can remember is fleeing as quickly as possible, her blessedly non-judgmental farewell ringing in my ears.

After recovering, i.e. consuming large doses of junk food and reading sci-fi novels, I began to rethink my fatalistic apathy. After twelve years of allowing myself to cry it out, since nobody cared anyway, here was someone who did, if in a completely impersonal manner.

The not-so-old adage that Google is your friend was never proven so true to me as it was in the months that followed. I must have researched for hours. I had honestly thought that my symptoms were unique in the universe, but they weren’t. What I was had a name, it existed, and although Microsoft Word may refuse to admit it, my feelings were perfectly valid and still are to this day. The problem is getting the medical profession to understand that just a prick is a great deal more than a prick to a lot of us poor suckers.

I wrote reams of illegible journal entries, leaving a paper trail of what can only be called, in a slightly clichéd manner, a voyage of discovery. I must have read thousands of websites, skimmed thousands of chatboards. I went down a lot of blind alleys, learned a lot of useless junk. Did you know, for example, that there is an entire group of people with a deathly fear of cotton swabs, who have fainted on top of doctors everywhere not because of the needle, but because of what was rubbed on their arm before the needle got anywhere near them? I rest my case. I learned to recognize early signs of an anxiety attack and I learned to fight them. I learned terms like vasovagal syncope. Most of all, I learned to be confident in what I am. Something that had been my deepest darkest secret for twelve years has become an identity I can claim. Everything I have done, to this day, I have done for her, in her memory, as though she cared.

A year had passed pretty fast with so much work to do and before I knew it my mother, ever eager, had called and made the next appointment. Of all the small mercies to be grateful for, I had convinced her not to tag along.

I’d love to say that everything suddenly changed that day, that the two of us formed some sort of lasting bond of mutual trust and that I lived happily and unphobically ever after. Unfortunately it was not to be. I trudged down the stairs with less hatred but more nerves to meet my still-anticipated doom.

The aforementioned doom took the form of an identical scenario to the one that had played out exactly a year before except that instead of bursting into hysterical tears, I remembered my studies and settled for nearly passing out at her feet. Since I was being quiet enough to hear, she offered helpful comments periodically. At least, I think they were supposed to be helpful. “Take deep breaths now, don’t stop breathing on me” is one I remember distinctly because of the complete incongruity. Seems like a no-brainer, but, well, you try it some day. It isn’t half as easy as it sounds. I remember distinctly the way she stood about two inches from me, holding her hands out to show that they were empty, a purportedly universal gesture that is effective even on the half-crazed. She then proceeded to lecture me on something I don’t remember, possibly the nature of the veins in arms in general and mine in particular, and once again clasping my icy damp hands in her own. Despite the terror of the moment, I have a crystal clear and mostly tactile memory of the feeling of her cool dry fingers on my hand. As clichéd as it may seem, her hands were always cool and dry, so far as I can recall. Some odd adaptation prevalent in those of the medical profession, I suspect.

I almost forgot to be terrified in that one moment. Despite my caution in looking at the floor, I had accidentally made eye contact and I found I could not look away. For some reason, although I was scared stiff, I felt obscurely safe. Well, as safe as one can possibly feel in the clutches of her worst nightmare, anyway.

My memories of that day are fuzzy. I have a feeling that I was acting more than slightly drunk, but she never said a word. It was almost like a dream, except that while everything on the outside was running at the speed of dripping treacle, my mind was racing like a motorcycle on an empty road. I can’t quite capture the obscure moment of triumph somewhere in there when I realized that I wasn’t going to break down and cry like a baby as I’d done so often before. I’d like to think that she understood a little of what I felt. Did she? Who knows.

I left that day with a neon Band-Aid, a sense of personal vindication and something disturbingly close to a crush on the one person I could not under any circumstances afford to become fixated on.

At first it was only replaying the whole appointment in my mind to determine how well my alternative schemes of information and desensitization had worked. The point of a field test, after all, is to improve the original procedure. It was innocent and objective. Well, at the beginning.

Then I began to dwell on her, obsessively writing down every word I could recall, trying frantically to remember her face. Thinking about how very kind she was to someone who didn’t deserve it. Thinking that she seemed to know everything and remembering the infinite patience with which she answered every panicked “What are you doing?” that slipped unintentionally from my mouth at odd and slightly unfortunate intervals.

The fact that she answered as fully and completely as if she were talking to an equal, not a silly child, was yet another point of distinction. It may seem rather absurd to explain the mechanics of a nervous reaction and the exact procedure involved in taking a blood sample to a slightly hysterical, well, entirely hysterical teenager, as she did, but somehow it was the right thing to do. She seemed to have a sense for that sort of thing.

Still, it wasn’t until almost a full year later that I wondered exactly what it was about her. I have never been precisely normal, but what I thought I felt was beyond what I was willing to accept without a serious discussion with myself about the implications of such a one sided emotional tie. Of course, since any thought of her inevitably degenerated into minute dissection of her every phrase and picking through my memory for every detail of her appearance, I was soon thwarted. For the time being, at least.

That year, when my mother told me that she’d made my annual appointment to get a physical, I was unmistakably divided. Between terror and anticipation, of all things. Underneath lay the old fear, but there was part of me that was rejoicing.

I’ll see her again. It will be the last time, but I will have this once, if nothing else.

This time, when she walked out that door and down that short hallway, I simply watched her. It was her, really her. She was so much more than I remembered, somehow filling the room. I caught my breath, which was shallow to begin with, and couldn’t look anywhere else. And she smiled at me. It was then that I knew for sure I was screwed, because in spite of the turmoil in my gut and the terror screaming and trying to claw its way out of its cage, I smiled back, almost instinctively. For this, no matter how it went, would be the last, the very last, our final scene together in the play of my life, although she would continue on in absentia for longer than I could have guessed then.

Every detail seemed insanely sharp that day. I can’t quite remember her face without looking at the image on the back of the flyer I filched on my way out, but I can picture exactly the shoes she wore, the rings on her fingers, the way her hair flopped into her eyes and the manner in which her hands gestured as she spoke.

I had only one thought, to try to capture something, ignore the dizziness and anticipation of pain long enough to hold something real.

Knowing that I would never see her again so it didn’t matter what I did, I confessed everything. Well, almost everything.

She knew, of course, that I didn’t like needles. She would have had to be a blockhead to miss that, but I told her what not even my closest friends knew the full extent of. The nightmares, the near-panic attacks, the dizzy spells and the true phobia that coils around my bones in a parody of affection, inseparable from my identity.

Most people would have written it off, told me not to worry, I’d grow out of it. Even after two years, I honestly expected little more from her. All I wanted, really, was to be able to say that I had tried. For this was the end of what never really was, and any risk was acceptable.

She actually seemed genuinely interested. I suppose they learn to seem that way, no matter what should come flying out of some errant patient’s mouth in a fit of panic-induced loquacity.

She managed to say all the right things, ask all the right questions. When we had talked, she stood up and informed me that she needed two “very small vials of blood”. I remember that she felt the need to emphasize the size with her fingers. If I had been alone, I would have smacked my head in frustration. If I were a different type of person, I would have just smacked her. Direct as ever, she was apparently planning to steam roller right over what she had listened so attentively to only moments before. I didn’t expect her to let me emerge unscathed, but there are ways and ways. Then, having caused my blood pressure to shoot up and my heart to nearly explode, she calmly informed me that we’d do that later, and that I wasn’t to worry. It was a start, I suppose.

She proceeded to complete the physical poking and prodding that is generally the norm, with me flinching and carrying on every time she came near me. Apart from the odd look she gave me upon noticing my skyrocketing pulse, she was still composed and calm as ever.

The words she finally said, interrupting her own comforting monologue as she finished whatever arcane thing she was doing at that point and moved over to the place I knew was where she kept the notorious sharps, were nothing special really. A perfectly routine query, on the outside, but it gave me a glimmer of hope that, for once, I wouldn’t have to suffer silently, alone.

“So, are you nervous?”

I don’t think I’ve been spoken to that gently since I was three. From anyone else at any other time, it would have been unbearable condescension, but from her it was infinitely soothing.

I blinked, tried to smile. “Yeah.”

“About what? Just the needle part?”

Every emotion amplified, I could have hugged her for not making me say that hateful n word. I swear, it never fails to send a shudder racing down my spine. I’m known among my friends for my endlessly creative euphemisms when forced to refer to…ahem…that. I simply nodded.

“Do you feel ok?”

Still mute, I shook my head. “Dizzy,” I managed to force out. “Really dizzy. And my stomach feels awful.”

“That’s fine,” she told me. Fine? I would have shrieked at anyone else at any other time, but she was special and I knew she didn’t mean it that way. It was the end of our journey and as such, all was forgiven.

“Why don’t you sit against the wall? I promise, I’m not going to do anything yet, we’ll do this together,” she assured me.

If I had been ready to hug her before, by this point I was ready to nominate her for sainthood, if agnostics have such a thing. She had been listening to me. She knew. Knew and didn’t scorn. The simple word “together” was suddenly the most beautiful thing the English language had ever spawned. I wouldn’t have to face my nightmares alone. The dreams of being strapped onto examining tables, growled at, sneered at, ignored, sedated, knocked out. You name it and I’ve probably had nightmares about it at some point. Those dreams would never be. None of the thousand horror stories that are the inescapable byproduct of Internet research and my own imagination would materialize. Not this year.

Noticing none of my infinite relief, she was already turned away, busying herself with assorted pointy objects on the other side of the room. From the time she turned around to the time I left, I think she never stopped talking, which may have been the one thing that helped more than anything else.

I was shaking uncontrollably, a fact she charitably ignored as she informed me that she still wasn’t doing anything, she was only going to touch my arm, put something cold and numbing on it. Numbing sounded good. I tried to stay still and blinked, hoping to focus the scene. She then picked up a rubber glove and tied it, thumb to pinky, around my arm. I giggled to myself slightly hysterically at the oddness of having a glove knotted around my arm as a tourniquet. It seemed funny at the time. Then she picked up the pointy object of the moment and the laughter died on my lips.

I couldn’t look anywhere but that sharp metal tip. I swear to this day that it had an evil glint to it. She didn’t insult me by telling me to shut my eyes, so I simply stared at it, coming closer and closer at the approximate rate of a snail crossing the street, or so it seemed. I had time for one final incoherent thought burst to the effect of “Oh god, this is going to hurt like hell” before that bright, unwavering voice told me to take a deep breath and the might of a long held fear hit like a tidal wave along with the pain I expected.

It took me a few moments to realize that something was wrong; I was justifiably slow on the uptake at the time. Although her voice never let up, it switched from discussion of what she was currently doing to wondering why she couldn’t get any blood. She proceeded to try again with a new needle and a new part of my arm. When that didn’t work, she tried my wrist, commenting confusedly that she had never had this problem before.

By the time she got through the third blood draw site, I couldn’t even manage to respond to her queries of “Are you doing ok? How much pain are you in?” Dimly, I thought that that was a rather stupid question to ask someone who was admittedly needle phobic and rather obviously in shock, but I couldn’t quite summon the presence of mind to reply.

She had the sense to call a halt when she couldn’t get any answers out of me except for bewildered mumbling as I blinked confusedly up at her and even her gentlest, most reassuring tone failed to rouse me from the stupor I had fallen into trying not to have a total meltdown.

She told me to come back after lunch, when the pediatrician, who’s assorted virtues were then extolled, would be in and could have a look at my veins. They had apparently done something odd in the mistaken impression that they were being attacked by something. That was the way she phrased it, anyway. Gee, I wonder how they could have thought that? Heck, I thought that. Of course, that explanation was favorable to the one she offered first, which was that I was somehow telling them to hide from her. Even she couldn’t resist turning to the inane sometimes. I didn’t mind. Things that would have given me the urge to ram a fist down any other speaker’s throat were acceptable from her.

Surprisingly, she had the foresight to ask me if I would be able to eat, would be ok between now and the time I had to come back. I nodded, shook my head when she repeated the question somewhat dubiously, then nodded again the next time she asked, having absolutely no idea of what was going on except that it wasn’t over yet and that I was terrified. She sighed and gave up, wrote me a pass and said something else soothing from her seemingly inexhaustible store. I stumbled out the door, tried to choke down some food, counting the minutes until I had to return. I stared with mournful fascination at the rapidly purpling bruise on my wrist and tried not to fall over or have a fit of total nervous disintegration.

I made it back to her office bang on time, where I promptly flopped into a chair, put my head down on my book bag and tried to hum a lullaby to myself. I couldn’t bring myself to look up when she emerged from her lair looking for me and consequently I saw nothing but her square-toed shoes and the hem of her white lab coat. Of all the irrelevant things to note, she was wearing black pants.

I hadn’t geared myself up to hate the pediatrician she had told me to expect and introduced as “Faye, my other pair of eyes”, but I disliked the woman on sight anyway. She had a condescending smile, and her overly mannerly “I don’t believe we’ve met” followed by immediate and aggressive handshaking did little to endear her to me. At the best of times my phobia has made me sensitive to people touching my arms and hands, among other odd things, and this was nowhere near the best of times.

I wanted That Anne Lady with a physical pang, because I knew her and trusted her to some degree and I was afraid. She was there, but she was on the other end of the room, practically miles, and this Faye woman was virtually sitting on top of me. When she told me to sit up on the examining table, I was almost glad to comply, just to get away from her. The relief didn’t last long, though.

Faye instantly and brusquely swabbed my arm with more cold stuff, ignoring my flinching, and tied yet another rubber glove around my arm. I was too frightened to laugh this time. I barely even registered what was happening. She picked up yet another needle, crowded me between her and the table and grasped at my arm. Anne moved from her perch by the window and stepped in sync with her to stand on my other side, adding to the impression of suffocation but making me feel immensely relieved. She didn’t speak, as I desperately wanted her to, knowing that a few words from her would make it semi-ok again. Instead, Faye filled the silence with gratingly cheerful questions about how I planned to spend my summer, questions I could barely interpret, let alone summon the presence of mind to answer. If she’d bothered to find out from either of the people who knew what my exact problem was, maybe she would have been more careful. I’m perfectly willing to credit her with all the deftness and skill Anne did, and I doubt she meant to be malicious, but simple distraction doesn’t work when the patient can’t even process the question. More to the point, it doesn’t work on the needle phobic. I’m in a position to know. Luckily Anne saved the day yet again, interjecting some bit of information I had presumably blurted some time earlier.

With no warning whatsoever, her iron grip on my arm tightened still more and she stuck me as though it was a perfectly natural extension of whatever she had been babbling about the joys of foreign travel. I tensed in shock and froze, having had only the split second forewarning given by the sudden movement of her arm.

“You’re feeling bad again, aren’t you?” Anne asked gently, speaking for almost the first time. Once again, I tried to force myself to focus and the scene resolved itself. I nodded cautiously, trying to look up and see her face as well as gauge how the blood draw was going. It was going, that was about all I could tell from the awful angle my neck had frozen at. As I tried to move, however, Faye planted her hand on my head and forcibly shoved my head back down so that my hair hung in front of my face. “Don’t look now, honey, we’re doing fine,” she announced with the syrupy sweetness that I have always despised, interrupting her own chirpy speech about my supposed summer plans.

My breath caught in my throat. ‘I…can’t…breathe…’ I slowly forced the thought to the front of my mind as I forced myself to gasp for air. I couldn’t see anything except ripples of fogginess and tipping floor, couldn’t hear anything except roaring in my ears. I don’t think I’ve ever been as close to completely blacking out as I was in that moment. The pressure of her hand on my head and the feeling of the needle in my arm, which was quite noticeable as soon as I lost my fragile hold on calm, her promises of painlessness to the contrary, rendered me completely insensible until she finally pulled the thing out and slapped a bandage on my already much abused arm.

Distraught and wanting only to end the scene, I began to leave, gathering my possessions from where I had left them by the door. As if trying to soften the blows I’m almost sure she didn’t feel, Anne remarked, “Thanks for coming back.” I smiled and tried to laugh a little, for her. “Better than math class,” I replied, although it wasn’t.

“Well, if you want, you can stay here instead,” Anne jokingly suggested. I turned, both to get a final farewell glimpse and to snort eloquently, thereby regaining some dignity.

As I turned, however, Faye laughed raucously and said to Anne, “She believed you!” Still laughing, she turned to me and said, “She was only joking, silly, get back to class,” in a tone of utmost contempt and condescension.

Anne made no attempt to refute the implication, only smiling slightly. A hundred witty retorts that would haunt me for months died unspoken and I took small comfort in the fact that Anne didn’t laugh. A catastrophic farewell for a catastrophic relationship. I gave up the quest for some lingering poise and fled for my life for the last time.

She was never a friend, barely an acquaintance; I’m smart enough to admit that. Neither am I trying to say that she was perfect. She could be cold, callous, brusque, at her worst she made me wonder what I was thinking. She never let me off the hook without sticking something sharp into me. There were times when I mumbled in my silly way that I was terrified, on the verge of passing out, confused, anything, and she just wouldn’t be listening. She’d be somewhere else entirely, in fact. I don’t think she had any specific sympathy for me, ever. She may not have been perfect, yet she was the closest I’ve ever come.

To cut a long story short, I graduated, went on to high school and left the “Anne lady” behind, in physical form, at least.

Sometimes I write her letters, not to send, as if I could find some magic to get them to her, but simply to say things that could never be confessed, except to her. Like I said, she was special.

I do my best not to belittle the more “normal” love other people feel by suggesting that what I had was love everlasting. I’m nothing but a teenager, as confused about love as about everything else. All I know is that there was something and that it was real, if one sided. None of the rules I ever knew applied to her. She was special, and she will be special to me for the rest of my life, I imagine. That is the only excuse I can offer.