Adventures in Mexico

My experience with Mexican doctors never fails to be interesting. In the last two installments, I have come across some upstanding members of the medical community: the excruciatingly honest dentist, the detailed eye man who made it so that my blind eyes can now see 20-20 with just a few uncomfortable moments of Clockwork Orange-style surgery.  However, my luck wasn't so good with Smoky the Bear, my ear nose and throat doctor, in Spanish, otorrinolaringolo. 

I arrived to my appointment after suffering months of the catarrh (see entry of about one year ago). The building looked like it should have been destroyed in the great quake of '85, covered in black soot, bombed out looking, very 1970s, very much an insult to buildings worldwide. I entered the office which looked like a cast off piece of scenery from the Dick van Dyke show, wood paneling, dark, sprayed popcorn ceiling, terribly ventilated. A couple who looked like they had walked out of Juan Rulfo's haunting novel Pedro Paramo (about a guy who goes to find his father in a typical Mexican pueblo only to discover that the place is haunted by somnabulating ghosts) morbidly hugged chest x-rays, a man with cauliflower ears snored loudly in his chair and a Rita Moreno looking secretary buzzed around as if this was as normal a place to work as your neighborhood Starbucks.

I was ushered into an office which again had all the fixings for a late 1960s sitcom. I sat next to an ashtray overflowing with cigarettes and the smell of tar and smoke filled the air (yes, this is an ear nose and throat doctor). After falling asleep from the weight of my catarrh, the heaviness of the surviving too many weeks of congestion in one of the most polluted cities in the world, the doctor entered. As is normal, we made the small talk. "Where are you from?" "Utah." "You are Mormon?" "No." "How is that possible?"

Usually at this point, I politely explain some of the lesser known facts of Utah population demographics (i.e. not everyone has 6-10 wives, wears pioneer clothing and worships whatever they imagine that Mormons worship), but this day I had no patience.

The doctor then abruptly states, "How did your nose get so twisted." My Spanish failed me with the "twisted" word (torcido) so he supplied an English translation: "screwed up." I told him that I had broken my nose as an eighth grader and spared him the details of adolescent pain that the broken nose, my boy haircut, acne and braces had brought me. But he had plenty to say back. "You have an asymetrical face." "You deserve to have a normal face." "You deserve to be normal." At this, he ushered me into the examination room where (and I swear to you) there were many cloudy plastic bottles of dubious substances, one of which was labeled "magic drops" (gotas magicas). After a cursory look up my nose, he told me I had a sinus infection, but didn't forget his true purpose: to convince me that I was deformed and needed rhinoplasty to secure any chances of a viable existence. 

"You see, your nose sits like this on your face," he said gesturing as if my nose looked like it belonged on a Picasso painting. "Our faces should be symmetrical. You have lived a long time like this. You really deserve to look more normal." 

I could have felt like some harelipped, deformed, or injured child you see on Sally Struthers commercials, living in a decrepid, waterless Sub-Saharan village. "For only 75 cents a day, this child could have critical surgery that would make a normal life possible." I could have felt anxiety that when my nose was broken in eighth grade that I ended up looking like a boxer and no one had the heart to tell me. But instead, I saw through this guy's smoke...literally. I thought of the masses of Mexican people I had seen with their noses bandaged. They probably had been sold in to this surgery too because their noses were too fat, too native, too whatever. I took my prescription for my own magic drops and ran down the stairs faster than you can say "otorrinolaringologia."