I Could Dance To This Beat

Hello, dear friends.

First and foremost, as Rebecca alluded in our last post: We’ve switched platforms. I’ve re-subscribed everyone here and as a reader, the transition should be seamless, but shoot me a note if it’s not. A few quick FAQs for anyone wondering:

• Why did we leave Substack?

  • The platform has a history of uplifting the voices of “conservatives” and alt-right idiots. It’s always been a thing, but recently they’ve decided to stand behind a notable Nazi voice and while we don’t make any money from this newsletter, we didn’t want one single thing we do to contribute to their “both-sides-ism”.

• Why did you choose the platform you’re on now?

  • Quite frankly, I choose beehiiv because I know the founder and I feel that I can trust they are decent people. This also matters to me because I know I can reach out directly to them if there are any issues. Also, it’s easy and we can keep this newsletter free to run. (Rebecca is busy running a sandwich shop and can yell at me later if she doesn’t like the interface.)

• What about how easy it was for me to read all my Substack emails in one place?

  • Did anyone actually go to the Substack site to read stuff? I didn’t. If you did and I made the experience harder for you, I apologize, but I also don’t care given the above.

• What if I had a paid subscription?

  • First of all, thank you, we love you weirdos so much. I have been trying to pause everyone’s subscriptions but Substack has charmingly decided to give me an error message each time. I am going to keep at it, but to be safe, please cancel your subscription! In the meantime, Rebecca and I will be donating the proceeds to BTFA Collective.

Anyway, onward.

This incredibly strange thing happened last week wherein on another of the Bad Places on the Internet, a straight cisgender woman started getting attacked by TERFs because she mentioned she had a transvaginal ultrasound and they decided that meant an ultrasound on a trans body. (I assume you guys know it…does not mean that.) It was a prescient conversation for two reasons: One, because Online is about to get so much worse leading up to the 2024 election than we can ever anticipate even knowing what we know now, and two, because I happened to have gotten a transvaginal ultrasound myself just that morning.

Ordinarily, I would be the first person to say this is simply too much information to share with y’all, but since the personal is never not political, it’s haunted me a little bit as I’ve started going through the process of clearing out the enchanted forest of my insides. It’s made me think a lot about how we use women’s bodies as a weapon on a grand scale, and personally, it’s reminded me about the private language between an ill person and a doctor in a way that I have been lucky enough not to have to engage in in some time but am now fully, deeply, re-entrenched in.

There’s a book called Intoxicated By My Illness by Anatole Broyard, written in the months leading up to his death, in which Broyard dictates the idea that a person with an illness is an artist of a certain kind. He writes: “Just as a novelist turns his anxiety into a story in order to be able to control it to a degree, so a sick person can make a story, a narrative out of his illness as a way of trying to detoxify it.”

He also writes about the ways in which a patient needs to be a poet communicating with the doctor as audience; the dance between the two becomes an art form. This morning, I was reminded of the comparison in the waiting room of a radiology department somewhere on the Upper West Side.

“Dr _____?” the receptionist said. “Are you just really early? I don’t think he comes in until noon.”

“My appointment is at 9,” I told her. She shrugged noncommittally at me in return and gestured for me to sit down as though daring me to see if the dude would show up at all.

There’s a lot of work that someone’s face can do in winning another person over, and it’s very hard to do that work when you’re masked. I thought about this as I waited to see if my name was ever called, and by the time I got to the doctor’s assistant, I had turned on my full charm.

See, for me, I’m less of a poet. Instead, the dance between doctor and patient feels a lot more like flirting: If I’m the correct amount of charming, the correct amount of engaged, the correct amount of understanding, then the doctor will crack a joke, smile through explanations, decide that I’m an easy but informed patient. Once you’re easy, then the doctor is rooting for you while they treat you. Once you’re easy, then you can be difficult when you need to be.

The doctor’s assistant, Alex, is a witty, detailed women in a white lab coat and scrubs. She is kind but descriptive. She was there to lay the groundwork for the procedure that I’m receiving a consult on and to do the work of preparing me so that by the time the doctor repeated everything she told me, I could actually think of questions I needed to ask.

While waiting for the doctor after Alex left, I zoned out completely in the way that one can if you’ve been doing the doctor dance for a very long time. How I react in these rooms has changed greatly: As a kid in these rooms with my mom as the patient, my dad and I used to go through all the doctors’ drawers to see what was in them. We were bold and unafraid and also got caught several times trying to play with the instruments. In my 20s, I brought a book so they’d know I needed to be taken seriously as an adult. (The “adult” things we do in our 20’s always seem ridiculous later.) In my 30s, I checked my phone obsessively.

Now, the only time in my life I’m in a meditative state is waiting in these rooms. I’m recharging, you see, for the moment I need to be charming again. It turns out, though, that today I couldn’t be charming because I spent the next fifteen minutes trying desperately not to laugh at the fact that my doctor is Just Some Guy.

Dr. Some Guy, you see, is a scruffy dude. He looks like an aging Ed Sheeran (or, as my friend Chad pointed out, “Sammy Hagar”), which would be fine except he was also not wearing doctor clothes. This man walked into the office like he just finished mowing the lawn wearing jeans and an orange polo shirt and he shook my hand like I’m his buddy’s girlfriend at the backyard barbeque.

Dr. Some Guy is the man who’s going to perform this procedure next month. Dr. Some Guy is the man who spent several minutes asking me extremely detailed questions about my lady parts and my bleeding, and Dr. Some Guy does not need to be charmed because it turns out…he’s really just some guy.

Some people would be scared by this, but I’m thrilled. Through the series of doctor’s appointments that only beget more doctor’s appointments like rabbits fucking in the springtime, Dr. Some Guy is a light in the darkness. If I’m a poet, he’s not my audience, he’s my muse. If he fixes my insides like he says he can, I will dedicate my first novel to him.

I won’t include a recipe for you guys today, but I will tell you I’ve been eating grilled cheese sandwiches made on the grill all week, and I can’t recommend it more. Grilled sourdough bread, melted cheese, and heirloom tomatoes at the height of their glory can never be wrong. I’ve been cutting them into triangles and dipping them into mustard, and I’ve never been happier. It’s deeply basic, but it’s delicious, and I bet Dr. Some Guy would approve.