Okay, so sorry about the skip day yesterday but I’ve got a doozy for you today.
Your pal Plummy is not without a certain air of intimidating glama. I do not, as a general rule, get pushed around. Now it may be because I’m so painfully sophisticated as to be beyond reproach OR it could be that when approached by a fat girl with violet hair and a non-ironic parasol the best possibly action is to give it what it wants until it goes away. Six of one, half dozen of whatever.
ANYHOO.
Because I am a delicate petal, I need a regular infusion of the blood of virgins some crazy expensive drug made out of unicorn tears to keep me at my best. For three years, my sexseminal (which is an excitingly dirty-sounding word I just made up to mean “every six weeks”) infusion sessions have gone a little something like this:
Nurse Jabby McStabberson escorts me back to the infusion office
Nurse Jabby McStabberson SAYS MY NAME WRONG for about the mazillionth time SERIOUSLY IT IS NOT THAT HARD OKAY.
Nurse Jabby McStabberson takes my vitals, plops me in this enormous Barcalounger of the Damned and proceeds to stab me in various tender parts of my person, blowing veins with a sort of carefree insouciance not usually seen in the medical arts and eventually hooks me up to my unicorn tear IV where I hang out for a few hours until I’m done and she unjabs me.
SO.
Yesterday she escorts me past the Barcalounger of the Damned and plops me in an office chair. Fine. That’s new, but whatever. I asked her why I wasn’t going into one of the regular infusion rooms, and she said some guy came in late and blah blah blah.
Clearly she was lying, so I gave her The Look.
Turns out there’s a weight restriction on the BLs of the D.
You can’t sit in them if you weight more than 250 pounds, so instead of sitting in the ENORMOUS industrial grade chair that weighs more than my car I have to get my infusion in a seven-pound office chair.
Ooookay.
Except here’s the thing:
I had been over 250 pounds since the time I started getting my infusion nearly three years ago. Sat in the chair every time. Never broke the chair. Never fell through the floor piercing the earth’s core with my enormous heft and plummeting ass-first into the creamy nougat center of our humble island home. Nothing.
Now I gotta say, I’m not really that irked. I am a little, because I know Something Is Up, either someone got sued because an infusion chair broke on them, or who knows, but I’m sort of at a loss.
Was sitting in the office chair inconvenient? Not really. I liked it just as well as the B of the D, plus that office has a door instead of a swinging curtain.
Was I humiliated? Again not really. Weight limits are weight limits and I get that. It’s a safety thing, and although I wonder what sort of enormous thousand-pound chair can’t support more than a quarter of its weight, whatever.
But I AM annoyed. I’m annoyed the doctor didn’t tell me. I’m annoyed that they can’t be bothered to get ONE infusion chair that will support more than 250 pounds reliably. I’m annoyed that the nurse would lie to me, and I’m annoyed on behalf of all my fat brothers and sisters who have the Fat Shame and where, instead of it being a minor irritation to me –because I gave up shame the same time I gave up scrunch socks– could WRECK them and maybe stop them from getting the medical help they need because they don’t want to deal with the shame of NOT being accommodated the way more slender patients are.
I also wonder: would they make my brother, who is 6’2″ and built like a football player –big, not fat– and probably over 250 sit in the office chair?
What do you think about it?