The Last Time I Saw Wilson

  The last time I saw Wilson, it was last winter when I was fat. Not intervention level gastrointestinal surgery fat, but all the same, my numbers were a little higher every time I stepped on the scale in the bathroom and the pink lines on my thighs were getting longer. My mother said my cheekbones were disappearing into an “amorphous” blob; I suspect she may have looked that adjective up in the OED I have in the upstairs den. I was thinking about this while I walked the two blocks from my house to Wilson’s office, debating if I should ask him what his medical advice was on the subject. Besides “watch what you’re eating, dumbass.”

Wilson had delivered me; a bit of an accident really. My mother’s regular ob/gyn was on his day off and he was the partner on call. He had a reputation for a gruff bedside manner, but my mother was never one for being coddled anyway. She asked him once, “Why are you such a dick?” He had looked slightly over his shoulder as if to be sure no would overhear his wisdom: “Because if you do that long enough, people don’t expect you to be warm.” “Fair enough,” she said.

Twenty-one years later, this retro small town horseshit came full circle when I went to Wilson for my first pelvic exam. This last February, I trudged over to his office again for my second. I got on and off the scale. Turning to the nurse, I asked, “Do I even want to know what the number is?” She looked at me, looked down at the chart with the weight she had just recorded and said, “No.”

Ten minutes of silence later, wrapped in a paper/cloth gown and starring at the ceiling, Wilson asked me if I wanted to have him send my cells to the lab to test for any STDs.

“Well, if I didn’t have them last year, I sure as hell don’t have them this year.” “Oh,” he responded, I thought I saw his eyes cast down to the side briefly.

He reached out a hand as I started to sit up, which I took and gave a firm handshake. Looking back on it, I realize he was probably trying to help me up. But he got a handshake instead and didn’t say anything to correct me.

A friend of mine called me the other night. Her family knew Wilson too. He’d removed a tennis ball-sized cyst from her right ovary our second year of college. His ex-wife Kathy, a mid-wife, had given her the sex talk when she was six using an improvised collection of kitchen products.

“Just so you know, Nicole, Doug Wilson died yesterday.”

I’d known he was sick; a cancer of some kind, migrating from one of the lower abdominal structures to his liver. It was fast from there on to the end. But I hadn’t really thought that he was going to die. In spite of hearing my mother saying to someone on the phone early last spring, “He’s in the long-term care center in Middletown you know. He’s dying.” I was genuinely surprised.

So now I have a moderately good story about the last time I saw Wilson (who I realized then, was the first human being I’d ever touched, after he’d cut open my mother’s lower abdominal wall and pulled me out of her): when the nurse felt bad I was getting fat and he felt bad that I wasn’t getting laid.