Covid Chronicles. Chapter 42: Appointments

Read chapter 41 here

Monday, May 18, 2020

As of yesterday, my life started to take a few baby steps back to normal. During the morning, I received a text message from Hartjes Dental. Not the one I had been anticipating, though. A few weeks ago, I received a phone call regarding the rescheduling of an appointment with my eye doctor. A late April examination date was pushed back to mid-September. Knowing that our dental clinic offered only emergency service during the first weeks of the safer-at-home order, I assumed a similar outcome regarding my next dental cleaning visit. 

 By late Sunday afternoon, I started to question the legitimacy of the text. 

Maybe their automated system isn’t necessarily in sync with the actual schedule, I thought. 

I didn’t want to show up and be told I needed to reschedule. But a call to the reception desk this morning confirmed that my appointment was indeed on the books. 

“Just give us a call from your car when you get here, and we’ll let you know when you can come into the building,” the woman instructed. 

The dental clinic’s waiting room is large enough to accommodate social distancing for the number of patients scheduled at any particular time of the day. In fact, on all of my visits going back nearly 34 years, there have never been more than 4 people waiting at one time. Nonetheless, I’m pleased that that Brad and Joel, the two brothers who jointly own and operate the business, are taking a cautious approach to reopening. I have to admit, though, that after weeks of constant reminders to keep our distance, it’s going to feel weird to have someone poke around inside of my mouth. 

And then this morning I received a call from Ron to schedule an appointment for a haircut. He’s reopening his salon/barber shop on Tuesday the 26th and has been working on getting plastic dividers installed and other social distancing measures in place. Two women work for him, so at most they’ll be 6 people in his shop at any one time in a space of about 450 square feet. Ron’s barber chair is already located in its own little cubby space. My hair hasn’t been this long since the early 1990s, I’d guess, though not nearly as long as I let it grow in the early 1970s. Its baby-fine texture and fly-away quality – the Nelson genes at work -- require that I practically shellac my hair to keep it in place. Lately, though, the condition of my hair isn’t a big deal. The pandemic is preparing everyone for life as a ‘shut-in’. 

(Sidebar: This common term has become less acceptable than when we were growing up, for example. I remember the church members and others Dad visited at the Watson Home and other care facilities in Warren were routinely referred to as ‘shut-in’s, no disparagement intended. Now it’s considered by some to be offensive, a description that lumps people in the category of “useless, has nothing to contribute.” (The postcard is one of a series of black-and-white photos from the 1920s.) 

In the meantime, we’re looking forward to the big step of taking a road trip to Warren.

Read chapter 43 here