The Student Health Center was an unattractive one-story brick building that stood on university property south of Rex Hall. It was a confused little building that jutted out in all the wrong places, often in badly constructed angles, and sat in the middle of a sea of cracked and disheveled asphalt. One got the impression that the original intention was not to have a building this small take up a plot of land that large but perhaps something went awry in the construction phase.
I was supposed to walk to the health center once a week for allergy shots. It was a fairly quick and painless walk – the street that dead-ended outside between Bowman Hall and the Communication Building was Seventh Avenue; I walked down the hill two blocks to the intersection with Riverside Drive and then crossed the street to the health center. Five minutes tops.
But it didn’t take long for me to think twice about being a pedestrian around traffic along Riverside Drive. Yeah, I may have been too nervous to cross the street when cars were nearby. I had seen a few students chased out of the zebra crossing by cars that could not wait (driven by other students, no less). These pedestrians managed to get out of the way as quickly as possible, sometimes to the other side of the street but many times back to where they started. Therefore I remember hanging around the corner some mornings “causally waiting” for the cars to go by. It wasn’t always busy, yet I managed to always be on the scene when a garbage truck of delivery van was visiting the area.
Of course, once I crossed the street I still had a good walk in front of me through the seldom-used parking lot. Health center staff filled up about a fifth of the spaces and since the entire lot was designated for use only by faculty and staff that meant students couldn’t park there unless they wanted a ticket. So who parked there aside from the occasional campus service vehicles or University Police Department squad cars? Nobody. But then why UPD never noticed the cars running students off the road I’ll never know.
I quickly learned that the interior of the building was as devoid of common sense as its exterior insinuated. Windows stared out in most every direction (including up, as I discovered in the back of the building) and in some areas at each other (one pane of glass in the waiting room looked into one of the examination rooms, and vice versa). The waiting room was as painful as the clichés would have you think, complete with old magazines, complimentary literature on drug products, and some sort of music from an overhead speaker.
Just as cliché were the people that worked in the health center. Possibly atypical for the polite vibe that the university promoted, the woman behind the desk did little to welcome you and smiled only when she handled money. I never saw the doctor assigned to this outpost but there was a laundry list of rumors about him: that he had been reprimanded by the local hospital and worked with students as his punishment; that he was pushing 90 years of age and knew little of modern medicine; and that he prescribed aspirin to everyone for everything (a long-standing joke I heard both my freshman and senior year was that the doctor gave a kid aspirin for a compound fracture).
Huey, Dewy, and Louie were the nicknames of the three nurses I encountered and who were the only medical staff I ever saw. Each week it would be one of the three who would call me into the bowels of the building to shoot me up with serum. Then I clamored my way back to the front to sit and wait. Because there were three different people there were three totally different bedside manners to deal with.
One – the tall, Native American looking nurse – said I had to wait fifteen minutes after I got the shots but would usually let me go after maybe five or ten minutes if my arms looked okay. The downside was that she always talked to you for ten minutes or so before actually giving you the shot. Another woman – a short woman with her gray hair in a bun – went through some sort of ritual before administrating the shot (wiping down the needle, my arm, and God knows what else with alcohol pads). The major obstacle in dealing with her was that she insisted on at least fifteen minutes of waiting time after the shot. You could easily be there an hour after sitting in the waiting room and the post-shot follow-up. The third woman was certainly more pleasant but a bit younger than the rest. I tend to think she was new on staff, fresh from medical school or an internship somewhere, because she was sure to let you know how important allergy shots were and why I should also come in for flu shots and understand what happens when.... (Wow, looking back, the nursing staff might have doubled as the cast in a university production of One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest.)
But midway through the fall semester I started putting off my weekly walk to the health center for a myriad of reasons. Part of it was crossing Riverside Drive and dealing with the traffic. I also used the rain as my excuse. Part of it was defiance. I was at college and was going to do what I wanted to do. Assuredly, another reason was I didn’t like dealing with the various personalities within the health center. It was frustrating wanting to make a quick visit only to linger half an hour in the waiting room and then have to deal with one or more of the nursing staff with their dissimilar views on procedures.
In the long run, the only noticeable thing about not getting shots was that I didn’t seem to have any allergy problems. Heading into winter and throughout the spring semester, my weekly visits became every other week, and the nursing staff told me that I could never build up a resistance to allergens if I didn’t get the shots on a regularly scheduled basis. But nuts to them and nuts to the only thing the three of them seemed to agree about. I had received shots for about a decade up to that point and after missing a few weeks I realized I wasn’t suffering from bouts of ragweed, pigweed, pisporum weed, or all those other grasses. Why spend money to buy a serum that wasn’t really doing anything for me, anyway?
Waiting to get my shots was discouraging, yes, but so was waiting to cross Riverside Drive. If there were cars passing through the intersection when I approached, I usually turned the corner and walked alongside Rex Hall and began pacing back and forth as if I were waiting for someone. And it was here I noticed a strange segment of sidewalk. Decades ago when the cement was laid, a group of people must have walked this very path before the cement had fully hardened. Ghostly shoe prints were still visible and one could literally walk in the footsteps of former students. I was sure the shoe prints were created by students because another segment of the cement was signed by people named Jim, Terri, Sharon, and others with dates as far back as the 1960s.
I suppose there were so tired, so tired of waiting, too.
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To Our Health
(Jan Hedin/Magnus Karlsson)
Happydeadmen
From the album After the Siesta
1998
