I’ve been pestering my 63-year-old writer husband to go to Dr. Taylor for years, ever since he was diagnosed with diabetes. Bob has preferred to go to X medical practice for cost reasons, but diabetes care isn’t so good there. Dr. Taylor has a special certificate for diabetes management, has great word of mouth, and is a lot more reasonable in cost than the endocrinologist our friend Cathy sees. Cathy loves her endocrinologist, but Cathy has health insurance. We don’t.
Several weeks ago a doctor from X medical practice called up wanting to put Bob on blood pressure medication when his systolic BP was only 126, and wanting to double his metformin dosage before looking at his lab work. That, plus the speaking and reading problems he’d been having the past two weeks led him to consider a different doctor.
Every writer should have a second pair of eyes copy-edit their work. On his last book I fixed the too vs. to errors, who vs. that errors, and other favorite Bobisms before he turned the manuscript in. Bob likes to read a lot of things aloud—the newspaper, the episode synopses of The Sopranos and Sex and the City on DVD. They put me in speed reading when I was twelve; I’m used to being able to sight read just about anything faster than Bob can. For this reason, I wasn’t worried when my husband first started mangling the Sopranos DVD blurbs during our nightly Sopranos marathon. Anyone who has the full set knows the color scheme on the first two seasons is difficult to make out; *I* was having trouble reading it. But when he made “Kris-tap-mum-mum” out of “Christopher,” it jolted me out of my complacency.
I looked over at him, narrowing my eyes in a nonverbal “Say-what?” “Sweetie, do you need new glasses? Can you see that OK?”
“I can see it, I just can’t make any sense out of it,” he said.
Something was definitely wrong.