This week I went to the doctor.
"Not breaking news, Tabatha," I hear you say, "no need to put this in the newspaper."
Well, let me tell you, you could have knocked my doctor over with a feather when I walked in there, having called and asked for an appointment, no less. This is man-bites-dog-while-landing-on-the-moon-type news, dear readers.
"This is so not me," I said sulkily to my doctor.
"I know!" she said, almost excitedly.
I just don't go to the doctor, unbidden. And I was bidden to go to my family doctor not five months ago and actually got around to going there about a month ago for my annual checkup.
That checkup is an event I sometimes push to biannual, but that I feel would benefit from being held in more of a World Cup manner: I'd like to see my physical held every four years with an inappropriate amount of merchandising (pap-smear glow sticks, perhaps), bets taken on my cholesterol level – wherein I'd have to pound back slabs of bacon to fix the fight – and my doctor being more open to taking bribes.
I'd like medical marijuana; I've been asking her for years, and she laughs at me.
"Why would I do that?" she says.
"Umm, I don't know, to help me cope with the anxiety of you laughing at me?" I've offered. No dice. The number of doctor's man hours that will be freed up once full legalization of marijuana has been accomplished and people stop having this conversation with their doctors cannot be calculated.
I have a friend who reports that what he will miss once no one needs a doctor's note to buy weed any more is seeing all his relatives lobby his wife for a prescription at family gatherings. It's particularly entertaining to watch, he says, as his wife is a pediatrician.
We're in the final year of those days: This week Health Minister Jane Philpott announced that the government will introduce legislation next spring to begin the process of regulating and legalizing marijuana. Some people complain that it has not been done quickly enough, but it is one hell of a product rollout. There's lots to be considered, and I'm okay with this being done slowly; indeed, on stoner time.
In the meantime, there are some issues that need to be addressed. You young people need to visit your grandparents more. In the past when I have written about medical marijuana, I've received a fair amount of e-mail from older Canadians who had either never smoked weed before or who had not smoked it since the 1960s, and who are being prescribed it now.
The seniors writing to me seemed to really appreciate their medical marijuana, but many reported being completely thrown by the new technology. They're confused by the vaporizers; it's like they were being asked to smoke with their TV remotes and need some assistance.
Go and make the light flash on their VCRs again, if you get my meaning, dutiful offspring. I can't be helping anyone on that score. Right now I, a woman who, once upon a time, passed a little hash in "the pit" and could be relied upon to make dazzling smoke rings – I was goddamn Guelph Gandalf, I tell you – can't even think about smoking anything. I'm struggling with the basics; I can hardly breathe.
Therefore I can't talk. I make weird squeaking sounds, like some sort of large, unmelodic flightless bird, or possibly a seal.
I tried to speak authoritatively at breakfast earlier this week and my younger child looked at my older child and said, "What is she on about?"
"I'm not sure," said older child. "Try throwing her a fish and see if she quiets down," and so, finally, after 10 squeaking days, I went to the doctor, like a child called to the principal's office.
To give you some idea of my feelings about going to the doctor, when I was pregnant with my first child, I was so determined not to be one of those women who showed up at the hospital and got sent home because they weren't actually in labour yet ("Oh, the shame!" I'd think, as all the other pregnant women told these stories, laughing) that my baby's head crowned as I walked into the delivery room. I still had my boots on.
I kicked those puppies off and I had that baby, but I wasn't a wuss about it. Just an idiot. The important thing was I was not sent home.
Also, I took no drugs.There was basically no time, anyway; but also that's just not how my family does things – taking specific drugs for particular ailments from a selected medical professional. Drugs come from my parent's medicine cabinet, almost exclusively, and there's no point in saying, "Thanks, Daddy, but I'm pretty sure that different antibiotics are used to treat different kinds of infection. Also, these expired in 1992," or "I'll bet those were cheap in Jaipur, Mum, and, my, what a lovely colour, but shouldn't you go and … talk to someone who once had a similar headache and bought pills from a guy in Ukraine for it or something?"
I'm not really in a position to lecture on this matter. I had my second child at home, and when the midwives made me fill out a form that asked if there were any "spiritual or religious reasons" for my decision, I wrote, "Why pay for parking?" and I meant it.
But this week I caved. I went to the doctor.
I shuffled feverishly into that doctor's office like a big, pale, wheezing emu and now I have these drugs, drugs that were actually prescribed to me, drugs that say "Tabatha Southey" on the label, typed, like I'm some sort of pharmaceutical princess too good to take pills from a cracked-lidded bottle with a faded label handwritten in a foreign language, or use an inhaler the size and colour of the Easy-Bake Oven I once owned (although I loved that oven).
I'm told I should use these fancy-shcmancy drugs until I'm better, or, smart-ass doctor said, I must go back in in four days and they'll X-ray my lungs. Which I think I can do at home. I'm going to Google it as soon as I catch my breath.