Signs in the Ceiling Tiles

Are there hidden messages at the doctor's office?

Today I share a piece which was featured as part of a series on

Blue Planet Stories

. There I was interview by the generous and adventurous couple

Egor Korneev

and

Alexandra Essenburg

. They were on their boat at the time somewhere in the Atlantic. It was a lovely conversation and Alex recorded this story as a podcast which you can enjoy here.

Oil pens, India Ink, water, pen, accident

This is not an optional ultrasound.

A zing, numb tingling whirs through my whole body. I don’t want to be here, but I have to be here.

I once read that panic can make you feel numb.

This is what adults do, isn’t it? Follow up when the doctor says, There is asymmetry seen in the left breast. Make another appointment when the portal alerts you, Dense breast composition may be obscuring small masses.

Pay the money when your doctor advises, This is not an optional ultrasound.

Most days I still feel like I’m figuring it all out. Like how Ariel stumbles around on the sand once she gets legs, or how Frankenstein’s monster spends the first twenty minutes of the play trying to inhabit his body upright.

I want to return to the sea, singing with my sisters and hoarding treasure in a cave.

And I just paid $1200 to feel like this! My brain can’t help but do the calculations: two months of preschool, a mortgage payment, several months of groceries, ten massages. Practically, a massage a month. Could you imagine?

I’ve only been here a handful of times but I already hate this office. It’s designed to be welcoming to fool us all into a sense of complacency — clean lines, bright walls, open layout, — but sterile, like all waiting rooms. It’s the kind of place where cleaning products assault your nose hairs. Waxed green and white tiled floors and watercolor flowers adorn the walls to cover the despair. Look, there are magazines! And here’s a children’s play table!

I feel like I am walking into an enormous wolf’s mouth to grab a shiny penny inside. But I’m going on a dare, the shiny penny is a trick of the light, and the wolf is perpetually hungry. I want to turn on my heels, run screaming in the opposite direction, but something has taken over my navigation, like in a dream. I am being piloted from elsewhere. Maybe we’ve transcended the age of autonomy and I have been connected via bluetooth and someone more capable, more calm and more resilient than I am is steering the ship via a smartphone somewhere in Silicon Valley.

I am too young for this, aren’t I? It’s like when you scream at the TV that the killer is actually in the house. Turn around, you idiot! But I’m both the person screaming and the person walking into the house. It’s hard to be at civil war with yourself, I remember from a song lyric, you lose even when you win.

Everyone seems much older here under the fluorescent lights, much more middle-aged than me. I thought we all had more time. The name “Betty” is called. I mean, that right there. Do you know any “Bettys” under sixty? Then there’s a “Cathy.” I feel like the names and their corresponding birthdates are approaching mine. If they call a Madison or Chloe, they’ve probably gone too far, but if there’s a Jennifer in the house, I’m probably next.

A younger woman in cut-offs lumbers out the door, trailing her mother. So apparently not everyone is older here. She must be in her teens. The set of her shoulders, her slouching forward-folding posture. The two are waves cradling each other, carbon copies thirty years apart. Is she accompanying her mother, I wonder, or is she the patient?

They call my name and my body reacts on instinct. I feel like I am piloting a cumbersome robot. I am the little creature inside manipulating the controls, the limbs, the torso, the expression. My face is now entirely numb. How am I walking? Is this how walking works? I am an alien learning how to inhabit skin; I’m in a stop motion video that I am creating second by painstaking second while rearranging my innards in the moments between shots.

The tech has a shorn head covered by a patterned handkerchief. I speculate about her health as she spirits me away to the first scans. Everything feels like a sign. If she is okay, I’ll be okay. If she is not, — I’m making deals with someone; everything is an if/then scenario. The tech is professional and positive, patient and direct. She actually warns me before she asks me to hold my breath for the scans. She laughs at my jokes. I know she is someone I can trust because laughter is my barometer.

Maybe the short hair is a fashion statement; maybe it’s none of my business. Maybe it feels like our collective health should be everyone’s business. It must be someone’s business because they wouldn’t even see me until I shelled out a grand.

We’ve jump cut. Somehow I am back in Dressing Booth B. The first set of scans are done. I’m not sure how I got here. It’s like they pulled out the tape and cut the film and pasted two sections together like they used to do to edit movies. I was there and now I am here. The wait between appointments begins.

I cannot believe that people endure this every day: the anxiety, the sterility, the stress. I find it hard to breathe. The only way I can harness the experience is to write it down in my mind; Maybe then I can write the ending. My thoughts type themselves on a mental typewriter. I push the bar back to start a new line.

Another tech picks me up and leads me to the next scan. She misses her ex. I don’t really miss him, she says, I miss his kids. You gotta have fun, you know? She is well into her fifties, but dresses far younger. For my last birthday, she tells me, I made my girlfriends dress up like the 80s and we went to the roller skating rink.

We talk about how kids don’t know how to skate anymore. I imagine this woman, approaching sixty, with teased hair and sparkles, 80s neons and layered fishnets down her arms, rollerskating around under a laser light show while Heart blares.

She skates out of the room to consult with the doctor.

I lie alone on my back for what feels like an eternity. The ceiling is a grid of plasterboard drop ceiling tiles, the kind that crumble above office-workers and collect mold at old universities. The single panel above the bed has been replaced with a beach scene — reds and blues and yellows, waves cutting a shape against the setting sun. It’s not technically the best painting, but at this moment, it is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. It stands out against the gray of the tiles. It’s the only color for miles in this sea of sterility.

The image feels transgressive and thoughtful, like someone is sending me a message across space and time. It’s as if a secret coalition of women banded together and said, How can we improve this miserable experience? And then concluded they needed to replace single drop-ceiling panels with art. I imagine them, painting countless beach scenes in a warehouse, breaking into the hospital at night, crawling through the vents, pushing out the asbestos-laced tiles. Popping in beach scenes, and nature, forests and mountains, then slipping out under the cover of darkness.

The next day, none of the hospital staff notices the change; the only people who could possibly notice would have to be flat on their backs — flat on their backs, and desperately looking up.

The ’80s tech who misses her ex’s kids scuttles back into the room. I can’t look at her. I am at the beach. Maybe I can stay here forever, suspended at 9:13AM on a Tuesday morning, not knowing anything more than I know now.

Her voice warms the room. I rarely get to give good news, she says, but today is a good day.

I have been looking at the beach for ten minutes, but it feels like I am seeing it for the first time.

And suddenly, I can breathe. The numbness begins to recede, like the waves above my head. I want to thank the secret society that installed the painting above me. I want to save every woman who comes after me, who bears the loneliness of this space — the space between the future we envision and the one we are given.

At the very least, when they lie here, numb and terrified, holding onto breath and hope, seeing signs in the ceiling tiles — I hope they know we were looking up at the same sky.

Created in Canva

This piece was originally published in The Narrative Arc.

If you are seeking calm and connection.