Are you okay? People ask other people a lot. I file that question in the folder labeled INTRUSIVE. Plus, it’s an impossible question to answer. It implies there’s a scale of happiness, normalcy, wealth or virtually anything measurable. Now things like body temperature, blood pressure, pulse. Those are measurable and the question applies.
Am I okay? Well I’m running a fever and sweating plus my heart’s racing but that could be because you just asked me that question.
Now that I’m on Medicare, my appointments constitute a decent amount of my social life. The waiting room is like a party of people sharing stuff about medications, what works and what doesn’t. And the people at the front desk must be the most tolerant people on earth. Just scheduling a follow up with some of these wiz kids can easily take fifteen minutes.
No I can’t do Tuesdays. Pilates, ya know. Oh no nothing before noon. In a month? I can’t go that long. Does he do evenings?
Hey lady, step to the side, figure your life out and let us get on with ours.
Now when my mother was alive, she tended to be a hypochondriac. Well not tended, she absolutely was one. Virtually everything was wrong with her and everything (even a rash) caused her “such terrible pain.” If I had a buck for every time she said that. Damn. Now driving these painful conditions was a love affair with opioids. One of her caretakers called me one day to discuss this romance.
She’s in the top 1% of the entire State of Connecticut in opioid usage.
Is she in first place?
Well, not yet.
I wanted to tell her she popped pills like Sweet Tarts my entire childhood. When she was older and came to visit, she’d spend much of the day laying out her pills, counting them, then staring at the clock for the magical hour she could pop ’em. She was long past a bed in the Betty Ford Clinic, so they kept loading the pills onto a conveyor belt. It gave the nurses some resting time once she passed out. She had them doing her hair every morning as she couldn’t lift her arms. They outfitted her – no not the creme blouse the tan one, and we’ve had this discussion before. They’d do her makeup, prop her up in her recliner just in time for her twelve o’clock round of pills and then she’d be down for the count until dinner time … but she looked great!
She wasn’t aware I got an itemized bill of her extra expenses, like sixty bucks for a mani-pedi every Friday. I periodically had to remind her she was in an assisted living apartment, not Kensington Palace. Asking her if she was okay was a loaded proposition and so was she. I stopped asking on our Monday night calls.
Thank god for therapists and the art of pivoting. I’m quite good at it.
So before you ask someone if they’re okay, here’s a few tips. First, take note of their posture. Posture tells a lot. Are they slurring their words? Are they Wobbly? Wincing? Then take the pivot. Even better, do an
about-face / noun ə-ˈbau̇t-ˈfās