I Like to Cover the Walls in Rashes

Well, I went to the Community Health Center for the first time yesterday. I remember taking my kids to the clinic at the health department back when we lived in Oklahoma and I have come to a realization. When you can't afford to put up expensive art work, you have a tendency to fall back on posters that were given to you for free. Posters from drug companies, posters from magazines, and posters that are on the wall because they have always been on the wall and oh my GOD! DON'T TAKE THAT POSTER OFF THE WALL!!!!

I think I might become a consultant for esthetics and design for free and low cost clinics across the world. They can pay me in tongue depressors and drug rep pizza.

I would combine my interest in art with my background in medicine and compile a list that looks a little like this:

1. Atmosphere is everything. It not only includes what is hanging on your walls, but also what passes as reading materials in your waiting room. Magazines that are four years out of date are pushing the limits of good tasts. Might I recommend a trip to the local public library fund raising book sale? I believe you could find more recent magazines for a buck-0-five per pound.

2. It is obvious that you recently painted your walls. Were you forced to pick institutional green or is that just a character flaw on your part?

3. I know you are short staffed. I know your people are wonderful employees who are working for sub par wages and doing their best. I also know that as a patient, after being directed to the lab where I waited and waited, the poster depicting all of the different "things" found in urine samples was a little much. Not just germs, not just crystals, but also things like "cotton fibers from underwear". Aren't you being a bit presumptious? How do you know I don't store ten pounds of cotton balls up my whooo whooo? And do your lab techs really need to refer to this poster? And don't you think that having that poster at the patient's eye level when they are sitting there, waiting for their bodily fluids to be drained, is a little, oh, I don't know,
depressing?

4. Do I really need to see the poster with all of the rashes on it? Is it imperative that I know what smallpox looks like? Is there a high incidence of smallpox in Duluth, MN?

I suppose I should chime in here and say that I am an obsessive reader when it comes to dr's offices. Got brochures? I'll read'em. Got posters? I'll have them memorized before I leave. I'm like a moth to the flame. I like to call it "interested", others would probably call it OCD.

Maybe I should see a doctor for that.