Alfalfa

            On Friday morning I had an appointment with my doctor as a follow-up to the tests on my toenails. The nurse called a few days ago to confirm that I have a fungus and that Dr. Shechtman wanted to discuss treatment. I got to the Bloor Medical Clinic half an hour early just in case the doctor was running ahead of schedule but he wasn’t. I did some writing in my notebook about the previous day and watched some of the others in the waiting area.

A large woman was wearing a mustard coloured shirt with the message in black letters: “DREAM BIG”. She was there with her daughter who looked about seven or eight. When the woman was called for her appointment she didn’t want to leave her daughter by herself in the waiting area so she had her sit behind the reception desk where the staff could look after her. One of the women behind the counter happened to have some crayons lying around for the girl to draw with.

An elderly couple at least in their 80s were sitting across from me. When the lady was called the husband got up to come as well. They both had canes, though she walked with much more difficulty than he did. He cane was in her right hand while his cane was in his left and so together they were balanced.

A very loud and social woman was there with her teenage grandson who had a walker and seemed like he might also be developmentally challenged. She struck up a conversation with a young mother who was carrying her baby in a harness facing out and swaying, swinging and bouncing the child as she moved around the clinic. The woman told the mother that she had four generations living in her house consisting of children, grandchildren, great grandchildren and her. She got the baby to smile at her, declared “I always get a smile!” and then she seemed to lose interest in the baby except to say that the ponytail the mother had made on top of her daughter’s head reminded her of Alfalfa from Our Gang. Then she started talking about Our Gang to an elderly man a few seats away from her. She told him she was there with her grandson and then she held up her hand, palm down and rocked her hand from side to side in the gesture that suggests a situation is iffy.

Dr. Shechtman called me in and again reminded me of my options for getting rid of the fungus. There is a treatment of pills that takes three months to clear the fungus but there is also a risk of liver problems. The alternative is a paint that I’d have to use for a year, has no risk of liver problems but is much more expensive than the pills. From my blood and urine samples that I gave a couple of weeks ago Dr. Shechtman had the lab check my liver function and it's fine and so he didn't think there was much chance of the pills doing me any damage. I asked him if it would be covered by my Ontario Works drug coverage but he said it wouldn’t be. I told him that as a U of T student I also have Green Shield. He didn’t know that and said that it might be covered in that case and so might the paint. He gave me a prescription for the pills.

After leaving the clinic I ventured east along Bloor on a mission to find used copies of the other two required texts for my Romantic Literature course. The plan was to start with BMV, go to the chaotic bookstore in the building that used to be Rochedale, coast down Yonge to ABC Books, dip into Eliot’s and then to check in on She Said Boom on College on my way home. At BMV there were several copies of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and most of them seemed to be the edition described in our course syllabus. I grabbed the cheapest of them but thought I’d double-check the syllabus before buying. It's lucky that I did because the $5 copy was the first edition of the book by those particular editors and we were required to have the third edition. Fortunately there was one copy of the third edition.

I couldn’t find Thomas de Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater in the Literature section and I couldn’t think of where else it might be. I went to the cashier to ask if they have a database, but she said that because they have so many second hand books a database would be impossible to maintain. She told me that she might be able to help me though and she did. They’d put Confessions of an English Opium Eater in the Drug Culture section underneath the Occult section. There were two editions and I took the one Oxford University Press that indicated that it used the original uncut text, plus it contained other of de Quincey’s writings. I paid a little over $16 for both books together and I was done book shopping for school until next September, since I doubt if I’ll need any books for my creative writing course in January. I think last year I spent the equivalent of a working day trying to track down books while this time I was done in about half an hour.

When I got back to Parkdale I immediately went to Vina Pharmacy to hand in my prescription. I’d been worried that my insurance wouldn’t cover the medication but it did. I was surprised that they already had my Green Shield information because I’ve never had any prescriptions covered by it before. I think there might have been a time a few years ago when I gave them the info for something that it turned out they didn’t cover. In the case of the Terbinafine it turned out that Dr. Shechtman was wrong when he said that Ontario Works wouldn’t cover it. Social Services paid for about $35.00 of it while Green Shield only put up $3.50. There was a $0.40 charge left over that the drugstore waived.

I told the pharmacist that the doctor had warned me about possible liver problems but the druggist offered the view that a healthy liver would have no problem dealing with the toxins in the medication and he also didn’t think that my drinking three beers a week would be a problem while taking the pills.

They only had one box of Terbinafine in stock, which is good for one month and so they immediately ordered more, so I’ll have to come back for the nest two months supply in three weeks.

I had some strips of red pepper and apple with hummus for lunch and took a siesta.

In the late afternoon I was trying to get caught up on my journal when my neighbour Benji knocked on my door and asked me to help him set up an email. He didn’t really care about an email address but he wanted to play the radio on his phone and Google wouldn’t let him do it without an email. I tried to help him sign up for Google Chrome but he got frustrated after a while and gave up. After half an hour or so he came back and we tried again. I thought he’d come up with a gmail address but it didn’t work when I tried it. He ended up getting the radio to work because all he’d needed was Google Chrome for that. I was surprised to find out that Benjamin is actually his last name while his first name is Pooran. Maybe he just found it easier for people to call him Benji when he came to Canada in the 1970s.

I ran out of potatoes for dinner and so I steamed some frozen carrots that I’d gotten from the food bank. I didn’t put enough water in the pot though and it evaporated causing the sugar that had dripped down from the carrots to burn the bottom of the pot. It’s going to take me several scrubbings with baking soda to get all the black off the bottom.

I watched the 12^th episode of The Naked City and I’m really enjoying this series. Plus, the show are only half an hour, which works well for me during the school year when I have reading and writing to do.

In this story a young woman named Carol from the Midwest who’s only been in New York for three months has just gotten a telephone line installed. As soon as the technician leaves the phone rings, even though no one has her number and she hasn’t made any friends in the city yet. When she picks up the phone she hears a desperate woman’s voice crying, “Larry, help me!” A man says, “Maybe there aint no Larry, huh Sugarbuns?” “Stay back! Don’t you dare touch me! No! NO! AHHHH!!!” and then the line goes dead.

Carol goes to the police to tell them that she heard a woman named Marilu being murdered over the telephone but they don’t believe her (I didn’t hear the woman say her name was Marilu but I guess that part was cut). Carol decides then to take it upon herself to track down the killer. She goes to the phone company and talks to the man that had installed her phone to find out who had her number before she did and it turns out that it was a man named Larry. She gets Larry’s address but he’s a playboy who’s known lots of Marilus and he barely remembers her. Carol is lucky to leave his apartment unmolested. She talks to a newspaper reporter who runs her story and stupidly they publish her address. Carol uses the publicity to fund raise a reward for the capture of the killer. Five days later one of the policemen, Detective Halloran, though he’d dismissed her story before starts to think that maybe there might be something to it, while the older cop, Muldoon is skeptical because a body should have turned up if the woman had really been murdered. Halloran decides to do a little detective work on his own.

A man knocks on Carol’s door to tell her he wants to donate to the reward money. At first, because it’s late at night she doesn’t let him in. He understands and tells her he’ll slip his donation under the door. She’s so impressed by the $10 bill that she opens the door. He asks her on a date and so they decide to go ice-skating the next Sunday. 

Halloran finds out that a woman named Marilu Connors has been missing for five days and he finds the building where she lives. The landlady describes a boyfriend that Marilu had who wore the brown uniform of a city worker. In Marilu’s apartment the police find a claim check for some photographs and they find Johnny’s picture. His uniform shows that he works for the sanitation department and they head there to investigate.

Meanwhile Carol meets Johnny for their ice skating date. He offers to show her the place where he works and so they go there. He gives her a tour and tells her how the garbage is incinerated until there is nothing left and then he calls her “Sugarbuns”. Suddenly she realizes that she is dating the killer. She screams as he goes to grab her and faints. The cops hear Carol’s scream and stop him just before he’s about to toss her into the stream of garbage on it’s way to be burned.