immodesty

I am at the hospital for a vascular test. The hallway between two exam rooms is only as wide as a parking space, and two patients in stretchers have just been delivered, blocking me in. I'm parked in a chair in a 6' x 6' square of waiting room. I am next to the air conditioning unit, and my nose is runny, so I move to another of the four seats and find myself face to foot with a patient. The rest of him is in the exam room, the curtain of which has caught on one of his feet and lifted the sheet covering it. I am so close that I sit sideways.

The young female technician talks to him behind the curtain, and he answers in an old man's voice, which is perfectly appropriate, because he has an old man's foot. It is not like a lady's foot or a child's foot or even my husband's foot. It is a blue-ish pad of flesh with gnarly toes. Despite my dislike of feet, especially ones that look like this, with unkempt toenails hard as elephant tusks, I wonder about him. Where are the children or wife to rub those scaly feet, to clip those nails to keep them from scratching him in the night?

Occasionally the foot moves a little, and whether it's coyly or shyly or just to reposition, I can't tell. I'm betting he has other things on his mind than his exposure. I remember some sicknesses, the total absence of modesty. Because you don't care what's poking out of a curtain or even the back of your robe when you're puking from the pain. This is what some people think is a loss of dignity.

Certainly, people think, it's undignified to be in pain. Better to be full of sedatives and parked quietly by the wall, like the other patients here, trach tube covered with an oxygen mask, bag of vitamin-B-colored urine dangling by the side of the stretcher.

But that's undignified. What's undignified is that two orderlies clunk the left stretcher twice, and no one says excuse me, even reflexively. What's undignified is the young woman talking on her cellphone as she enters the elevator trailing an old, hunched over, moaning woman from her arm and doesn't stop talking for a moment, even as she drags the moaning woman from the elevator at the third floor.

I never see who belongs to this foot. I only know that I see it and I feel guilty for having walked in here myself, in these 12-year-old Steve Madden Olives, brown with a neat stitched flower. They are falling apart. But I am not. I am hale and hearty.

I didn't even park in the garage. I walked a quarter mile around the hospital. I trimmed my toenails last night before a bath. I got in the tub myself, without a metal bar.

I take my shirt off so the technician can look under my arms for an anomaly, which she doesn't find. I put my arms in different positions and lose my pulse. When I am finished, the foot and the man attached are gone. But I have not forgotten him.

He might have been immodest. He was not undignified.