Equine Pregnancy and a Visit to a Clinic

I wrote the following as an email to my pal Cindy in Los Angeles who has been kept in the loop with my participation in the world of government assistance and you haven't, whoever you are. It's an always-interesting, enlightening world and I truly appreciate every good thing I've gotten from it, especially since the City of Oakland deemed me indigent and made me a member of the West Oakland Health Clinic which is where I went one day for an appointment with one of the doctors who will be named Dr. Doctor.

The appointment was for a prescription for a medication I will call Prettypills and I was going to have it filled at the clinic pharmacy. I was also going to ask Dr. Doctor if I could be prescribed an estrogen cream that wasn't Premarin.

I arrived at the clinic at 9:55 for my 10 AM appointment. There was only one woman ahead of me in the check-in line. At the check-in window a woman was giving what sounded like her entire medical history to the check-in person. At 10:15 I was still waiting but I knew not to get ruffled because there was plenty more waiting to come. I remembered what the receptionist told me last time I was there and had had an astonishing wait, which was, "People don't think we workin' but if we movin', we workin'." The staff doesn't get stressed out about anything & when I'm at the clinic, I try to be like them.

By 10:25 I was registered and on my way to the next line to hand in my medical file and clinic card. While I was in that line I counted 48 people waiting to be seen by one of the clinic's two doctors who handle gen med. There may be more than those two but I've only seen two people in that department who looked like doctors (stethoscope, u know) and one of them is Dr. Doctor.

In line with me and so many, many others was a white guy with a Band Aid on his face. He was standing next to a black guy who was holding the seat of a bicycle and the pole thingy that's attached to it. The white guy complimented the b. guy on his cleverness, said he'd seen people remove all sorts of things from their bikes in order for them to not be stolen, but had never seen the seat removed. The black guy muttered, "Fuckers will steal everything they can," and didn't engage in further conversation with the w. guy. If this exchange had taken place between a white and a black woman, they would have immediately become forever-friends and exchanged life stories and then forgotten each other when one of them was the first to reach the window where you hand in your medical file and card.

To be continued............