House Call

I signed up for a life insurance policy with my new job a few weeks back. I didn’t think anything of it, really. I checked the 3x salary box because it was very affordable. I thought, ‘This will come off really noble if I die.’ I thought, ‘If I die, and Jenny gets this check, she’ll think I did a good thing.’ Then I forgot about it.

Well, I guess life insurance isn’t some cheap thing you sign up for and forget about. No, it’s a little more complicated than that. Is it my age? I’m not sure. But a couple of days after I signed up for this life insurance, I got an email from the HR folks telling me I had to fill out a special health form by such and such a date.

I’m not a big fan of forms. Especially paper forms, where I have to hand write in all this information, which supposedly everybody already knows, like my social security number and birth date and marital status and disease history (which, in case you’re wondering, is totally clear). So I procrastinated and didn’t fill out the damn form until the last possible moment. I filled out the form and turned it into HR, and then I forgot about it.

Well, they wouldn’t let me forget about it. The life insurance company, that is. I’d say it was about a two weeks after I filled out the form that I started getting calls at my desk, at work. I don’t get many calls at my desk. Everyone emails and instant messages these days. Who actually uses the phone? When I got a call, I picked it up and said, ‘This is Darby,’ and I immediately heard that strange background noise that tells you it’s a telemarketing call. You know what I mean? You can hear about a hundred voices in the background, along with keyboard tapping, phones ringing, people talking urgenrly, and a general loud hum. There would be a pause. A long pause, then someone with an accent would start asking for ‘A mister Barbie.’ So I hung up. First off, get my damn name right. Don’t you think I might be sensitive about being called Barbie? Secondly, don’t they have a first and last name designation on whatever form you’re reading? Thirdly, if you can automate the phone call, can’t you automate something whereby there is no tell-tale pause? How about a voice or something that tells me, instantly, what the hell you want.

Well I endured about four of these calls until someone got through to me and told me what was going on. Hats off to this person. No pause, no craziness, just saying my name right off and saying, before I could hang up, ‘You must see a doctor.’ That worked. I had to have a doctor’s exam to be approved for this life insurance. Man, I thought. What a pain in the ass.There was that aspect of it. But, that wasn’t the big problem, not really. No, it’s more emotional than that. I’m the type that usually feels like the next doctor’s appointment will, in all likelihood, result in a dire prognosis. Essentially, I’m living random doctor visit to random doctor visit. I’m sure with each exam that the doctor will discover cancer, or worse, and what measly pleasure I wring out of life currently will be drastically reduced, if not eliminated.

But this got stranger. I learned in the phone conversation that this outfit could send a doctor to my house. Really? Like an in-house visit. It sounded so 1950s. I couldn’t believe it. Really? Sure, they said. Then we discussed visitation times, and eventually, we landed on seven in the morning a week off. That’s where I was a few days ago, bright and early, when the doctor knocked on my door. Somehow I’d managed to get up and put on some clothes.

I escorted the doctor into our dining room room, and we sat a table, and he asked me a bunch of health related questions, i.e. medical history, family history, social security number, etc. The whole thing was very odd, break of dawn, with this pleasant pudgy man sitting at my dining room table and mildly interrogating me. Tallulah stood and watched for a while, a Little Mermaid plate of Raisen toast in one hand and a cup of orange juice in the other. “What’s wrong with you, daddy?” “Where to start?” I quipped. Then I ushered her into the kitchen with Jenny. I had to give a urine sample. Not sure how to explain to a five year old why I needed to give my pee to a doctor. She went, reluctantly. The urine sample was done by going into my bathroom and peeing into a cup and a couple of vials, then placing caps on each vial to seal them. The cup had a thin black line across the bottom of it. Do I keep the cup or give it to the doc? Throw it away, he said when I started to bring it out to him. “What do I want with that?” I felt silly. But there was one thing I had to note. The pee activated something in the line, and a green 94 appeared. What the hell did this mean? The doctor nodded his head and said, “Good.”

Then it was time for the blood test. The doctor moved swiftly, pulling a kit out of a small cardboard mailer box. Talking all the while about Boston, where his son was in school, he plunged the needle and sucked out the blood, all painlessly. He had small, stumpy fingers, and they were adept with the needles, the rubber band around my bicep, and the guaze pad he applied to the teeny wound. The entire time, my hand is lying on his knee, and my daughter Tallulah is calling my name through the closed door.

We talked briefly while the doc held the gauze pad for a few moments to my small blood wound. He seemed impressed that I’d traveled some, earning the remark, “You’re one of the cool guys. People here in the South, they never leave.” He wasn’t from the South himself, not that I could tell, because when I asked him where he was from, he sort of shrugged. He didn’t want to say.

After the doc left, I wondered, for a little while, if he was legitimate. I’d asked for his card, but he’d scrawled out and address and written a new phone number. I could barely read the handwriting. What was happening here? My thoughts raced. He’d just poked me, taken my social, and taken a bunch of my urine. What could a stranger do with this information? I looked the card over intently. Was this a real service or part of some crazy scheme that I’d stumbled into, all under the ruse of “life insurance.” He’d said the blood was for an AIDS test; but what if he was some incredible con man, what if he’d given me AIDS? That was it, surely. The life insurance company sent the man here to give me a disease so…..

Don’t be crazy, I finally told myself, despite the fun I was having. There in the door, watching his headlights back out of the drive, I shuddered. A part of me wanted to run across the lawn, hail him down, and invite him in for breakfast. I needed more. I needed to know more. I needed to trust him. Maybe he could be my doctor in Atlanta? Maybe this whole strange affair could amount to something. But I didn’t move. I closed the door when the headlights faded into the dawn. I picked up Tallulah, and I started answering questions about the thick, blood splotched band-aid in the crook of my elbow. “Daddy, what’s wrong with you?” she kept asking. “Nothing,” I said, finally, lying really. “Daddy’s perfectly fine.”