I can’t believe I’m going to share this story, but one trait I’ve had most of my life is allowing my life to be an open book. I’ve never felt the need for a therapist to solve my problems, because if I’m worried about something my wife and closest friends will soon know about it — because I’ll tell them.
I’m good at keeping secrets about others, but have never been good at keeping secrets about my own life. I can attribute those tendencies to being more like my Mom than like my Dad, but even Mom didn’t feel the need for everyone to “know about her business.”
There’s nothing juicy about this story because it took place when I was 3 years old, closer to 3 than 4. It’s a story of pain, unbearable pain, that no 3-year old should ever have to experience. It took place in Kansas City, Missouri, in a doctor’s office. I don’t know if he was a pediatrician or a family doctor that also treated children. All I know is that he was the same doctor that Mom and Dad took Pam and I to, the same one that stitched my sister’s palette back up after I shot her in the mount with an arrow (yes, you heard that right).
As noted in the story of me shooting Pam, the doctor had a very long waiting room. It was extremely narrow. with large wooden chairs on both walls. The width of the room was wide enough to grant about 4 feet of walking space between the chairs, from the front door of the doctor’s office to his treatment rooms in the back.
To the best of my memory, the doctor’s office was on the second floor of a large building, up a very long flight of stairs. As soon as you got to the top of the stairs you took and immediate u-turn to the right to reach the doctor’s office door about 7 or 8 feet away from the upper end of the stairs.
I really don’t know if the doctor never had a lot of visitors, or if he just saw Pam and I in case of emergencies, but just like the time that we took Pam to get her palette stitched up, there was no one in the waiting room on this particular day. It appeared the doctor and nurse were waiting for us, because as soon as we entered the front door of the waiting room, he pulled back a curtain that covered the doorway of one of the two treatment rooms and motioned for us to come on back to the room.
I had no clue what we were going for, but looking back I had an uneasy feeling about it. I knew that my pee-pee had been hurting, and that whatever Mom had been putting on it wasn’t working. But she never told me that was why we were going to see the doctor. When I questioned Mom about it she just make it sound like it was just a normal checkup.
Looking back on the moment, that walk down the long narrow waiting room was more like “dead man walking,” than it was a stroll down memory lane. Because Mom was taking me to get circumcised, at the ripe old age of 3!!! Yes, you heard me right, and for you men reading this story, I won’t to point out that this “Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run” used no painkiller.
It was cruel and unbearable punishment. When I was a young boy I would tell my Mom I would never forget what the horrible doctor did to me in Kansas City and ask why it had to be done when I was older, and not when I was a baby. She always had some lame excuse about how she and Dad debated the merits of it when I was born and opted not to do it because I was just a little baby and it would be too painful for “them” to have to endure.
Well let me tell you, that argument never went down good with me. What about the pain I had to endure, I will ask her. She would always giggle until she shake like a bowl full of jelly. I used to refer to it as her “sick giggle, a nervous uncontrollable giggle and laugh that always came at the wrong times. The way I looked at it they opted for me to wait and endure the pain when I was old enough to see, hear, feel and understand what true unbearable pain was really like, rather when I was a little lump of coal that had an eggplant for a brain and wouldn’t have a clue what was happening. I would tell her, “To make matters worst, not only did you put the surgery off until I was 3, you sat there and watched me mutilated by a man with a scalpel who gave me nothing for the pain.” Hell, he didn’t even give me a stick to bite down on.
I can still feel the sharp burning pain and the shrill yelling from the top of lungs, with the doctor saying after the dirty deed was over, “Now see there, that didn’t hurt that much, now did it?” I was yelling, wailing, crying louder than I’ve ever cried in my life, while this moron wiped me with what looked like a white cloth diaper, all the while muttering, “Yeah, that didn’t hurt.” The experience forced so much adrenaline into my little body that I practically collapsed into the car and slept all the way home. When we got home, Mom put me to bed and I slept for the remainder of the day and throughout the night.
My Dad, who had a very low threshold of pain, couldn’t stand seeing the sight of human blood or anyone getting cut, was a big fat chicken and used the excuse of “I had to go to work on that day,” instead of being there to hold my hand.
The whole ordeal was a horrible experience, that no child should ever have to go through without a fifth of whiskey and a liter of morpheme. On that day I became a man in more ways than one. In fact, I realized I was more of a man than my Dad, who chickened out on going to see his little man go under the knife. From that day forward I never went to the doctor without knowing in advance why I had to go.
Still can’t believe I shared that story. 🙂