Suction Cups

The room was cold. It was always cold. No matter what time of the year or day I came or what I wore, the gray sanitized steel was always frigid. My legs dangled from the top of the cold table and my hands, invisible as they hid inside the sleeve of my sweatshirt, gripped the side of the same table. The quiet in the room made me wonder once again if this is what it was like in outer space. Not just quiet, but ears straining to hear something - anything - and being met by utter nothingness.

I always hated this handful of minutes, when I was completely alone. Sometimes my energy could not be contained, and I hopped off the table and moved around a bit. Maybe I sang a tune and danced a little. One time I practiced a cheer my friend had told me she saw the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders do. And sometimes I just skipped. Today, I had decided to be “grownup” and just wait quietly.  I assumed this is what adults do when they are waiting for something to happen that they are not looking forward to.

Without warning, the heavy door swung open loudly. No knock. Adults never felt they needed to knock to warn a child of their impending arrival. 

It was a nurse, of course. A woman too, of course. I mused again how someone of power somewhere must have decided that women were the best option for administering these tests. There was probably an assumption that a) the tests did not require a lot of skill and b) women were gentler by nature. Oh, how I wished that powerful person had to take this test just once. They would see that there is critical skill in the placement of the suction cups. One time, I had to “lie still” for an hour while a nurse struggled to get them where they needed to be for an accurate test. She must have performed that test on me 10 or 12 times. I had to do a lot of skipping after that test to get all my pent up energy out.

As for being gentle, there was probably a bit more truth in that, especially if the nurse was old enough to have children of her own. But I had had the unfortunate experience on a couple of occasions with nurses who seemed to have no concern about how hard they were pushing down on my chest, or how their sloppy gel application was getting in my hair, nor did they care about the painful red circles they were leaving on my skin. And, then there was the time when one strangled me with one of the machine’s wires. She accidentally looped it around my neck! 

With no parents in the room – they always took test time to have super-secret conversations with the doctor about stuff they didn’t want to say in front of me – I really was left to fend these nurses off by myself. Most of the time, I handled it well on my own. But I will admit to tattling to my parents on the ride home about the one who almost strangled me to death.

I breathed a sigh of relief when she drew closer. I could see she was old. There was hope I would survive this time unscathed. She smiled at me and said, “Hello there! Aren’t you a pretty thing. I'm sure I don’t need to tell you about this test. I’ve heard you’ve done plenty of these.”

I already liked her. As a kid, you rarely got recognized for being an expert in anything. But this was one area where I felt like I knew just as much as the adults and maybe more. 

“Yup. I can do these in my sleep,” I declared with what I hoped was a grown up air of confidence. 

“Well, don’t fall asleep on me, now” she said laughing and giving me a small wink. “Assume the position. Shirt off, head on the pillow, feet up on the table.” I followed her instructions almost as quickly as she said them. She let me settle in while she folded my sweatshirt and gently put it on a chair across the room.

What went unsaid in the instructions was the need to lie rigid on the table. Legs stretched out, arms by my side, not bent and wrists turned to the sky. I quickly found my spot on the ceiling and tried to identify my first shape.

This was a game I had invented years ago when I discovered how interesting those office ceiling tiles could be. They often had little dots and were discolored in unexpected ways. It made for a fun game of shape exploration. Not as cool as finding shapes in clouds, but way better than lying on the table with nothing to do.

“Okay, you ready?” the nurse asked in an excited voice. As I turned my head to look over at her struggling to untangle the wires on the cart, I thought, “More ready than you are!” But, instead I simply replied, “Yup” with a forced smile.

Turning back to the ceiling, I had already identified three cool shapes - a beach ball, a diamond ring and something I had decided was a rabbit, even if it didn’t really have a nose - when she said, “Ok, you know this gunk is gonna be a little cold,” and then the pfft sound came as she squeezed the tube and the thick white cream formed a little puddle on the left side of my chest. I turned up my nose in disgust, but made not a sound, trying to concentrate on finding shapes over my head.

She was good. I was able to “check out” while she made all the puddles, and before I knew it I felt the first squeeze of the suction cup. Again, I was ripped away from the ceiling, as the little red, concave balloons were placed around my chest, ankles and wrists. When the nurse squeezed them with two fingers, they indented on each side of the balloon and the metal circle attached at the bottom of the balloon would use the air from the balloon to grab onto my skin. They always made me smile a little. They looked absurd standing at attention in all these strange places on my body. If they didn’t pinch and I wouldn’t get yelled at for touching them, they would probably be a fun toy to play with.  I admired her handy work, as she put one on each cream puddle. 

No pain I thought with relief. I was free to return to looking at the ceiling for the rest of the test. The wires and the strange lines that the machine drew onto long strips of paper were not interesting after you had seen them once. Plus, my lack of interest truly made her job easier. The less she and I talked the faster the test went.

She seemed to sense my interest and hope for a quick test and dispensed with the usual cookie-cutter questions about how old I was, what year I was in school, what my favorite subject was and if I had any extra-curricular activities. There would be tests in the not-too-distant future where I would relish the chance to brag about myself a little. But that was not today, nor did I think there was anything to brag about.

The whole test lastest only about 10-15 minutes. It yielded 12 ceiling shapes (although, if I'm completely honest, 5 or 6 of those required some serious work on the part of my imagination) and one long strip of paper, which proved I was still alive and my heart was still beating.