Urgent Care

Feeling miserable? Can't wait for the long 4th of July weekend or a break from the five-car pile-up of recent celebrity deaths?

Don't worry, Dr. Tom is here, writing you a prescription for 500mg of... The Little Details.

• In the interests of explaining my lack of blogging, I want to inform you that I will only be publishing entries whenever the landlord has maintenance come to the building and turn the water off.
• So, roughly - three times a week.
• I finished my days working background on that movie. It was a lot of long hours. I got to watch them roll a car and other cool stuff.
• I'll blog about all the cool stuff later, what's important now is the special parting gift I got on the last day of the shoot.
• It turns out that when you have 250 extras, all licking their chops over the same spread of food on the craft services table, you get something very special. You get: the flu.
• To be fair, it just starts as a runny nose.
• It's just a runny nose, it's no big deal. It could be allergies!
• I've never had allergies in my life.
• You get the idea that maybe it's not just a runny nose about the time you're driving home and your head starts to feel like a worn tetherball filled with mucus.
• This metaphor would be worrisome if it was that icky, green, foreign-invaders-are-attacking-my-immune-system kind of mucus, but it's not. It's just the clear, runny stuff you get when you have allergies. I'm sure you can sleep it off. No worries!
• It's when the chills and the sweats and the muscle aches all kick in that you start to worry.
• It could just be allergies! I've never had them so I don't know. Maybe this is what allergies are like!
• I've never had walking pneumonia though, either. Or rickets. Or leprosy.
• I'm no expert, but I don't think leprosy gives you a runny nose.
• Whatever it is (best guess is either shingles or the Black Death) it is definitely TIME TO TAKE ACTION.
• TAKING ACTION: YOUR THREE-STEP GUIDE TO BETTER HEALTH
  1. Take 1000mg of acetaminophen.
  2. Lay on the couch.
  3. Tune television to any channel not broadcasting a Michael Jackson retrospective.
• Out of all those items, you may find #3 to be the most difficult.
• If you're feeling miserable and sweaty and feverish, it may not be the best decision to tune the TV to the History Channel's Life After People. As you wend between waking moments and illness-tainted dreams, your subconscious mind will slowly absorb the notion that it may only be a matter of weeks before the coyotes and indigenous gila monsters crawl in through the window and eat you.
• On the other hand, it does remind you to feed the dogs.
• "Feeding the dogs" is not a euphemism. I was housesitting last week.
• Besides, that would be a horrible euphemism. You people are sick!
• I can think of some much better euphemisms, like...
  1. "Taking 1000mg of acetaminophen."
  2. "Laying on the couch."
  3. "Tuning the television to any channel not broadcasting a Michael Jackson retrospective."
• Sunday morning, you wake up, check in with WebMD.com and decide to go to Urgent Care. You know, in case you're actually sick and not just suffering from a really horrible euphemism.
• You slowly get dressed, find your insurance card, and drive down to Urgent Care only to find that... they aren't open on Sundays.
• "Urgent Care" it seems, is neither.
• You go back to your cramped little 1-bedroom apartment, take another 1000mg of acetaminophen, and lay on the couch. Sans TV. No one needs that promo for Ice Road Truckers haunting their fevered dreams.
• Monday morning, you wake up and feel slightly better. But you always feel slightly better first thing in the morning. You think about calling your mother the nurse, but you know what she would say. "Couldn't hurt to get it checked out." You get dressed and head out the door.
• The assistant at the ironically-named Urgent Care raises an impatient eyebrow as you approach. "Can I help you?" she says as if she has no idea why you are there.
• I debate telling her about the leprosy and the Black Death, but just mumble "Yeah, I have the flu." instead.
• She grunts and shoves some paperwork at me. If leprosy was an attitude, she'd be her own island colony in the Pacific.
• There is nothing lonelier than sitting in Urgent Care by yourself. Some guy is there, with his wife. Some old woman is there, with her husband. Some girl is there, with her boyfriend. I'm there with my iPhone.
• No offense, Steve Jobs, but you just can't download an app that'll hold your hand and tell you it will be alright.
• As it turns out, the wait is brief. The nurses' aide ushers me into the tiny holding cell with the papered Barca-lounger. She then asks me a bunch of questions I've already answered on the forms they gave. "The doctor will be right in," she says.
• I assume this is a lie.
• Last time I was here, I saw Dr. Ronica. She was very nice. Straightforward, attentive.
• The door pops open, it's not Dr. Ronica. It's Dr. Paul.
• "So you've got a cold, huh?" hiccoughs Dr. Paul. He's in an exceedingly chipper mood for 9am on a Monday morning.
• I specifically explain that I do not have a cold, I have flu-like symptoms: sweating, aches, mild congestion.
• Dr. Paul asks what I do for a living, I tell him I'm an actor and that I probably got sick on the set of a movie. He proceeds to explain that Peter O'Toole once shot a movie at the hospital where he attended med school. Mariel Hemingway played his assistant. Peter O'Toole's character was trying to resurrect his wife from the dead. According to Dr. Paul, the movie never came out.
• In four minutes I have learned more about Peter O'Toole than Dr. Paul has learned about my symptoms.
• That, however, does not prevent him from enthusiastically prescribing me a five-day treatment of antibiotics. "Z-pac! It's so simple! Two pills the first day, and then one pill the next four days. Easy!"
• Five minutes later I'm standing in front of the pharmacy window with a prescription in my hand and a confused look on my face.
• My suspicions sprout further tendrils of unease when the older woman comes into the waiting room behind me and says to her husband "He's going to give me Z-pac, it's that five day treatment."
• Still, the guy at the pharmacy is exceedingly friendly and plays the accordion, just like my dad. And the prescription is only $20. Still...
• You trudge out to the car, the little white packet dangling in your hand. The whole thing seems as half-baked as some movie where Peter O'Toole gets Mariel Hemingway to help reincarnate his dead wife.
• And that's when you call your mother the nurse, and talk it over, and decide that the best thing you can do is go home, take some Tylenol, lay on the couch, and sleep it off.
• But first, you have to blog about it.