At the Clinic

I had a cool experience yesterday. I was calling around trying to find a place to get a flu shot, and found out that the city department of health gives them out for free (along with all kinds of other immunizations - childhood, preventive for travel, etc.). My tax dollars at work! They only give them out on Thursday afternoons, during a two-hour window, at a municipal building a couple miles from my office. So, I hustled on over there and found the building, which looked totally dark and deserted. The doors were unlocked, though, and the security guard told me to go up to the third floor. It was also dark and deserted. I wandered around trying doors, but they were all locked for the night. A cleaning crew was running a vacuum somewhere.

Then I tried another door, and it opened onto a hallway full of light, heat, conversation, and people. It was amazing. There must have been a hundred people there, standing and sitting against the wall, whole families, kids, people coughing. How did they all know where it was? Most of the people were Spanish-speaking and everyone looked tired. I put my name on the sign-up sheet and took my place at the end of the line. With all those people ahead of me, I figured I'd be there an hour.

To my surprise, they called me almost at once. I felt uncomfortably privileged as I walked past all the people and into the clinic. It turned out most of them were there for more complicated things, and there was a much shorter flu shot line inside the clinic.

As I sat down, the woman next to me smiled and said, "When is your baby due?" I turned to her with a million-watt grin. She's the first person who has noticed. I'm hardly showing at all yet. I said eagerly, "You can tell? You're the first! It's due in June," and just then the two women on the other side of me chimed in, saying, "I thought you were pregnant, the minute you came in," and everyone was congratulating me. They all traded theories on the baby's sex based on the way I'm carrying (all thought that it was a boy) and said that I was "carrying well" for my stage, though I'm not sure what that means. I felt lapped in friendship and sympathy and part of a community of women in that wonderful way I've felt just a few times before in my life. We were all different ethnicities and ages, and all laughing together like we'd been friends forever. It was just great.