Suzanne Kleine ’11
Features Editor 

People are crazy at the doctor’s office. I recently spent a few hours there after school, just getting my birthday check up, and things got pretty weird.

While waiting for the doctor or nurse to show up, I amused myself with old Highlights magazines, a ripped “Good Housekeeping” magazine, and looked at some pamphlets. The magazines advertised a few things about computers that parents could teach kids, like the top five useful tech tips of 2009.

Please. Kids in the United States are born with an iPod in one hand, and a computer mouse in the other. Even at a few years old, they could probably teach their parents something.

Oh, and good news: I don’t have herpes.

Once I got sick of learning how to potty-train infants, I looked around the room for toys. I tried to help my little brother open a Barney toy, and it took us a good ten minutes to figure out how the toy opened. Yep. A 16-year-old took that long to open a toy meant for a two-year-old.

Turns out that wasn’t interesting either. I forgot that I hated Barney as a kid. So I just hung out on that little bed-bench thing and kicked my feet around.

I heard screams coming from a few doors away.

A few little kids started crying, and I could just imagine the doctors trying to jab at the insides of their arms.

It’s hilarious. You can hear the whole conversation. The doctor starts off in a very soothing voice, telling the parent, and then the kid what is going to happen. But then the needle comes out, and the kid’s voice gets high pitched. And then the screaming begins.

This was not new, but my ears perked up when I heard a girl my age screaming. She was yelling things that were probably not appropriate for little kids to hear, especially because the f-bomb punctuated every other word. The threats were pretty interesting, too. The girl got creative after a while, cursing first the doctor, then her own mother (who I could tell was humiliated), and then the entire doctor’s office.

It’s like a soap opera in there, I swear. Like a much more violent and not nearly entertaining Scrubs.

But a doctor’s office can be a pretty fun place once someone is actually tending to you. I got weighed and measured, and it turns out that the nurse can’t add a foot onto your height, even if you ask nicely, use the magic word, and promise not to tell the doctor. I tried.

Once the nurse leaves, though, you’ve got an hour or so until the doctor walks in. The upside is that I learned how to discipline young girls, and which methods are most effective. The bad news is that I have no children, I’m not planning to have children, and that I have a little brother, not a little sister. That, and the fact that I don’t baby-sit anymore because I quit on a mom and she blacklisted me.

That’s just my theory though. It’s most likely all in my head.

So in that hour, I watched my brother’s entire art show. I watched him wrap the blood pressure thing around his forehead, and pretend it was a turban. We spoke about his past girlfriends, his hopes and dreams, and if he wanted children (he is nine). My mother paced around angrily, commenting that she was just going to get up and leave if the doctor showed up (she never left). 

Finally, though, the doctor came in. She smiled around at us very nicely, and forgot two important tests. So we had to wait a little while until she remembered that she forgot my vitals.

I got two shots, by the way, and I was very brave.