Sorry To Keep You Waiting

“Sorry to keep you waiting, Sir. It’s really not like us at all.”

“Well a fat lot of good that does me,” said the man. The pain of the fish hook attaching his thumb to his cheek had mostly gone away. But the strain in his arm from being in a perpetual picking his nose position for four hours now wasn’t much fun.

“Please,” said the nurse, “You have to let me explain. Dr. Stakely’s a veteran you know. He served his country well back in Vietnam. Anyway, since Dr. Stakely’s a veteran, you can only expect him to have a certain loyalty for other veterans, right? So, when Mr. Tanner from Priestly called him, of course he’d drop everything and be ready to help.

He felt the ache again in his bicep. Or was it his tricep? He let the arm drop slightly only to be reminded how easily his cheek could be ripped from his face.

And on went Nurse Susan, or so her nametag said. “Now can you picture Dr. Stakely getting that call from Mr. Tanner? Mr. Tanner, all in a panic, begins to tell him about his sister Pernella who just moments ago had slipped on a wet floor and pounded her head against that butcher block counter he’d installed last spring. Pernella had a bump the size of Sam Stine’s prize tomatoes growing on the side of her head is what Mr. Tanner said.”

“And that’s not even the worst of it,” continued Nurse Susan. “It turns out that the whole reason Pernella had that bump on her head was that her best friend Tawney’d been calling for her at the top of her lungs. Seems she’d been running up the road now for nearly a mile screaming all the way. Well Pernella heard all that commotion from her best friend since second grade and made a bee line to the door. She forgot that Spaz had knocked over a glass of lemonade while chasing a fly. Spaz’s her cat, you know. When she hit that lemonade, there was nothing stopping her except for the butcher block counter and her head.”

“When Tawney finally made it to the house she was stunned to see her dear friend Pernella laying on the floor with her hand on her head and Mr. Tanner bending over her. The shock of it all caused Tawney to completely forget what she had just done the marathon run up the hill for in the first place. It came back in a rush though, and she cried out that Billie, the light of her life, at least since June, was stuck in his car. It seems he couldn’t get out because it was upside down and he wasn’t too happy because his hand had somehow gotten stuck between the window shield and the steering wheel.”

“So,” continued Nurse Susan in a flurry. “You see, the nearest ambulance is all the way to Randy County which you know is nearly thirty miles from here. We used to have an ambulance. Still do actually, but the driver got laid off just two weeks ago because we couldn’t afford him any more. And, Mr. Tanner has never quite figured out how to drive that old Chevrolet they have with that prosthetic right leg he has. I think I mentioned he was a veteran.”

“Dr. Stakely doesn’t officially make house calls anymore; no one does, you know. But he really had no choice except to drop everything and head on out to the Tanner place to see what he could do to help. On top of having a heart of gold, he always thinks of everything. There he was flying out the door with his medical bag slung over a shoulder, a long screw driver in one hand, and a big red chainsaw in the other. Lord knows where he had a chain saw stashed away. And do you know what he said to me as he was leaving?”

“He said,” she answered before the man could respond, ‘Nurse Susan, please make sure to put my peanut butter sandwich back in the fridge for me.’ Never misses a thing, that one.”

“So Dr. Stakely made his way out to the Tanner place figuring he ought to tend to Pernella’s tomatoe-sized head bump first since she was the sister of a fellow vet and since a head injury is usually more serious than a hand injury even if the one with the hand injury is stuck in an upside down car. It turns out Mr. Tanner was exaggerating a little bit and that bump was only the size of one of those grape tomatoes. A cold ice pack and a couple of aspirin had it fixed up in no time.”

“Billy’s problem was a little trickier for sure. Luckily, in addition to his many medical talents, Dr. Stakely is pretty handy with the chain saw. In just a matter of minutes he had the passenger side door off and used that screw driver to pry Billy’s hand right out. A few stitches but no broken bones, he thinks.”

“So,” said Nurse Susan, her face a little flush, “Dr. Stakely hopes you’ll forgive him. He just called and he’s right around the corner.

The man looked at her curiously. He couldn’t tell why he cared, but he felt strangely compelled to clear one thing up, even though his arm now felt like he would forever be signaling a left turn. “Why did Billy wreck the car?” He asked.

Nurse Susan looked abashed as if she couldn’t believe she’d missed such an important part of her story. “When he got distracted he ran off the edge of the old bridge down at Lake Troutwater,” she said. “He turned the car right over when those wheels left the road.”

“What distracted him?” He asked, a little too impatiently.

“Some idiot got a fish hook stuck in his cheek.” She said and turned around.

“The doctor will see you now.”