Meds

So, yeah, Penny's doctor appointment collided with her field trip, but it worked out -- the appointment was toward the end of the field trip anyway, so I just picked her up from the park where they were playing (which is closer to my office and the doctor's than her school anyway) and she didn't miss more than maybe half an hour of running around being crazy.

The doctor told us we had an ear infection in her left ear, and that's why her eyes were getting goopy, so he wrote us a stack of prescriptions, gave her a sticker, and turned us loose. Of course, that was after we'd spent most of an hour in the waiting room and another half hour in the examining room, so there wasn't much point in my taking her back to school, so we went home and I managed to do a little work while she was watching Sesame Street and Dora.

I swear, the child has more meds right now than an old lady. From the end of dinner until we tucked her into bed last night was one long string of medications. Insulin and then eye drops and an antibiotic and cough medicine and another kind of insulin and stuff for her wart. It's incredible.

The weirdest part of the whole thing was that, while Penny and I were sitting in the doctor's office, I recognized -- and was recognized by -- someone I haven't seen for something like twelve or thirteen years.

I knew Rob back in college. He was a friend of Paul's, one of a trio with Carl and Rick, until he seduced Rick's on-again-off-again girlfriend of several years and they stopped talking to him. That happened after I'd more or less lost touch with them, anyway (which happened almost immediately after I'd broken up with Paul, until Carl resurfaced several years later as Colleen's boyfriend) -- I heard about it later through a third (or possibly fourth) party.

Weirdly, I'd actually seen Rob last week -- I'd recognized him as I was coming out of my chiropractor's office, but I thought I was seeing things. But he said no, he really does work in that building and I must have seen him heading out for lunch. He's still married to the girl he "stole" from Rick, so I guess that was a good move, in the long run. (She was there, too, but I'd only met her a handful of times, and barely recognized her.) They have three daughters; the one they had with them at the doctor's office was quite adorable, and the pictures she showed me of her sisters were just as cute.

It was weird, in the way those things are, like going back to your hometown after college and finding that buildings have gone up or been torn down and everything's the same except that it's completely different.