Philadelphia Weekly

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I was sitting in the crowded, noisy emergency room at Graduate Hospital watching Hollywood Squares. I was supposed to be writing a column about my dad for Father's Day, which was going to be a big writerly challenge because, as Tim Whitaker always says, I can't write about my father without "getting schmaltzy." Thus I had avoided the column until the last minute--having no idea that the last minute would be spent here, in the ER.

When I arrived, all bent sideways from the pain, the admissions guy asked what was wrong. "Ovarian pain," I said. To a man, that must sound like, "Ever since that math test, my pituitary has been really sore ... " But a woman knows.

As I waited, I saw my pain manifested in two strange images. In one, I was in a 1950s health class gazing at one of those pull-down sex education maps of the female reproductive organs. I watched the teacher's wooden pointer land on the pale pink ovals marked "ovaries." And when I felt the contraction and the sharp pain, I saw the pointer tap-tap-tap again and again.

A more plebeian imagining had my ovary as a birthday balloon held by a teeny, tiny magician (Matty "I'm in the Human Body" the Magnificent) who kept inserting a long straight pin into the balloon without quite popping it. Puncture the surface of the balloon (applause!), push the pin through slowly (cheers!) and pull the pin out (gasps!) as the balloon remains painfully, miserably intact.

While I waited in the emergency room's antechamber, obviously too whacked out from pain to recognize a good analogy if it smacked me in the face, I realized there was a party going on. When I got there, I noticed there were an unusually large number of people, but I thought they were all, like me, waiting to have organs attended to. As it turned out, they all knew each other and were joyously celebrating someone's health. The longer I waited, the more of them appeared, bringing big smiles and hugs and laughter and jokes.

While in my heart I was glad their loved one was going to be okay, which I heard repeated 17 times, in my other heart, I desperately wanted to scream, "Stop the rejoicing! Enough jubilation! Can't you see someone's in pain here? Take it outside already!"

Alternately, I had a perverse desire to dress up like a doctor and rush in saying, "I'm so sorry--we lost him. We did everything we could. At least you have each other, all 18 of you."

�

I was a little cranky. So sue me. When I finally got triaged, the nurse noticed my info had been written down incorrectly. It didn't say "ovarian" pain, apparently, but "Lutherian." No wonder I was taken last. Spiritual crises don't compare to broken bones. As I sat in the paper-like gown for two hours, I heard the doctor talking to a fully clothed, young and pretty patient. I noticed her lip gloss, which made her lips look full and alluring. (Personally, I can't wear lip gloss because I invariably wipe it on my sleeve. You just know this woman had been wearing it for two weeks now without a hitch.) The doctor sat right across from her. A young guy with funky glasses--his signal to the world that beneath the white coat, still waters ran hip--the doctor was clearly beguiled.

As she explained her situation in a voice suited to smooth jazz radio, he hmm'd with great interest. Every time she giggled, which was with every noun, he giggled back. When he asked if she was sexually active, she demurred (she was all about demurring). "I would tell you if I was," she purred. "But I swear to you I'm not."

I thought he was going to jump her right there and change all that kittenish chastity. Worst of all was hearing her reason for coming to the ER--which, in the interest of anonymity, I will not disclose. But that girl was purrfectly healthy.

By the time Dr. Rico Suave got to me, my mother had also arrived and we were deep in a conversation about shelving options in my new apartment. I didn't even know what the hell was wrong with me anymore. "Spleen, maybe?" I said. "Yeah, my spleen hurts."

He asked my mother to leave the room so he could ask me, in the tiniest whisper he could manage, if I was "sexually active."

"Oh yes," I boomed, just to counteract Ms. Virgin Whore out there. "All day every day."

But I did end up liking him, if only because when he did the pelvic exam he said, "Okay, if there's anything I'm doing you don't like, you just say 'chill,' and I'll chill."

"I like your lingo," I told him. After all, the man did have his hand inside what he'd later refer to as my "tailpipe."

In the end, it turns out I have an ovarian cyst. I need some more tests. I also need, apparently, not to write a great swooning tribute to my father. But I do want to say this: Without my dad, none of this could have happened. So here's to you, Dad, and your vas deferens.