The Doctor Is In

It's 2 in the morning and I can't sleep. Instead I'm giggling over a conversation I had with my dad a few hours ago. I'm also listening to my dad cough and snore and my mom talking in her sleep, all of this coming through my bedside baby monitor. Uh oh, now he's up going to the bathroom. I've got to turn down the volume. There are just some things I don't want to listen to. Back to the earlier conversation.

About 11 o'clock, Dad called me downstairs:

"Joyce, I can't sleep. I need an Ambien."

"Dad, you only have one left. You've been taking them every night for the past week. Are you sure you want to use your last one tonight?" I paused looking over at mom, snoring away, mouth wide open, cheekbones prominent.

"Sure," he replied. "I'll just get some more."

"But Dad, Dr. Jungwirth doesn't want you to take it. That's why he only prescribed 10 pills. At first he wasn't going to give you any."

"That's all right. I'll just go get them from Dr. Urge."

"Dr. Urge? You don't know a doctor Urge."

"Sure I do. He's the one who gave me my antibiotics," Dad explained. "Come with me and I'll show you tomorrow. He's down at the corner."

"Dad," I said, "that was Dr. Wilson at Urgent Care."

"I didn't go to Urgent Care. I went to Dr. Urge!" Dad now insisted.

"No Dad, Dr. Jungwirth is your doctor but he couldn't see you for the pneumonia so I took you to Urgent Care. Not the ER, Urgent Care. And Dr. Wilson prescribed the antibiotics."

Dad paused. "I want to see Dr. Urge. I know he'll give them to me."

I walked into the kitchen and got dad the last Ambien.

I know I live in an asylum. A year ago my visiting brother, John, told Mom he was the doctor when she insisted at 3AM that she needed to tell a doctor about all the terrible things going on around her. At first she called for the police. When John's imitation of a police officer didn't satisfy her she asked for the doctor.

John walked into her room and said, "Hello Olea. I'm the doctor."

"You're the doctor? What's your name?" she asked.

"Dr. Strangelove," he responded without missing a beat.

I think I'll take myself, and my ankles that sound like castanets when I walk, into the bathroom to find the Tums. And maybe the Aleve. And while I'm at it, watch an Alfred Hitchcock movie on my laptop. That sounds like a better solution than Ambien.