Fun At The Free Clinic

Being that the awful cough and wheeze that I'd inherited from our housecleaning binge had largely passed just before Thanksgiving, I had been second-guessing my need to keep the appointment I'd made to the Lake County Free Medical Clinic all last weekend. I'd reasoned to myself that they weren't going to tell me anything I didn't already know, but Sarah's protestations (aided by a brief reappearance of The Wheeze during Sunday's temperature gymnastics) made me keep the appointment.

Needless to say, my day was off to a pretty iffy start when I pulled into 270 E. Main Street in Painesville (the stated location of this place) at 9 A.M. sharp and was greeted by a nearly-empty three-story office building with all of two cars in the parking lot and no listing of a Free Clinic anywhere in it. Marvy.

Irritated, I got back in my car and spent a few minutes driving a circle around downtown Painesville, scanning randomly about for any sign of the place and had no luck finding it. I eventually drove a further down E. Main Street in search of additional clues and came across some place called the Lake County Health District. It wasn't the right place, but one of the secretaries there was able to point me at the new location of the Free Clinic ... directly behind a Rite Aid in another faceless three-story office building about 1000 feet away from the one I had just visited. Dohh.

Located three floors up, my first impression of the Lake County Free Medical Clinic was the waiting room, which was populated almost exclusively by Hispanic folks judging by the unending flurry of murmured Spanish I heard all around me. As I briefly chatted with the receptionist while signing in, I quickly deduced why I was puzzlingly informed that she "will have no clinic until Monday" when I was called to set up the appointment last week: apparently English was her second language as well.

Thanks to the bungled address fiasco, I had arrived 15 minutes late for my appointment, but didn't wind up actually being seen by a doctor until almost exactly two hours later. The time between was spent being briefly screened by a nurse for about 10 minutes or so, and the other hour and fifty minutes skimming through a handful of thirty-year old National Geographic magazines in the waiting room. Ah well, I suppose it beats being stuck with Good Housekeeping ...

One thing about the clinic that struck me was how old everything looked in it. None of the fixtures or furnitures in the examination rooms were "chintzy" or "cheap," but rather very well aged, if you know what I mean.

On that note, I have to admit in retrospect that I had never given a lot of thought as to what kind of a doctor would work in a place like this. Thus, I really shouldn't have been as surprised as I was when the man of the hour finally toddled in the examination room I was in with the gait of an arthritic three-year old and greeted me in a voice so thin and low that it was borderline inaudible: Gregory House, he was not. When I told her about him hours later, Sarah had guessed that "he must have been retired and working for free." I'd replied "sure, but it appears he retired about three decades ago."

The doctor was a nice enough guy, despite the fact that he told me pretty much exactly what I was expecting to hear: I appear to have a tendency towards being asthmatic. *Shocking music.* This trip wasn't a complete waste of time, however: Herr Doktor did provide me with some Albuterol and a bottle of Robitussin DM which I'll be putting to good use the next time this condition recurs, which judging from our topsy-turvy weather could be as early as Thursday ...