Dr. Gao

After six months of my bike seat serving as both my Metro Card and my gym pass, I was forced to leave it be. It sits in the basement of Scholastic gathering dust and loneliness, wondering where I am. I want it to know that I’m here, but that it hurt me, that it gave me scrapes on my knees and a large dent in my radial head, better known as my elbow. I think about it down there, waiting for me, as I go throughout my days with my broken wing, wondering when we’ll meet again.

I think about it while I’m in Dr. Gao’s office, my lovely Chinese physical therapist just off of Canal Street. I’ve seen him twice a week since the accident, and it seems that he and I have become lifelong friends. I usually start out by sitting in his tiny waiting room stuffed with chairs and water coolers and machines that look like they belong in the gymnasium on the 2nd floor of the Titanic. I catch up on my pictures of Lindsay Lohan with raccoon eyes and lots of bracelets, and who had an ugly baby and who caught Mel Gibson in a hat and mustachio disguise, and then Dr. Gao comes in and saves me from the insanity.

“How’s the pain?” he asks, as I lay down on the bed with three pillows propped under my head and three pillows propped under my kneepits. I tell him it’s going away every day. “Lots of typing today?” he asks, and I nod profusely… He shakes his head and places two circular rubber things attached to a machine on my elbow. He wraps it in a warm cloth, turns the machine on so that my arm buzzes like I’m ever-so-slightly being electrocuted, just in that spot. “Goodnight,” he says. From there I am left in the dark for 15 minutes, and usually I fall asleep right away.

I wake up in a daze as he is taking the towel and the electrocuters off of my arm, rubbing it with icy-hot lotion, talking about the weather and what his kids were for Halloween. He tells me he needs to exercise more, (while I think, he might need to eat more), asks me about Wisconsin. He says, “they eat a lot of milk there, yes?” Yes.

He tells me not to open doors. To ice it. To make people give up their seats for me on the subway. To relax, relax, relax. He wants to do acupuncture on the back of my neck. He wants me to not feel stressed anymore. Little does he know, it’s about to be all gone.