In my pediatrician’s waiting room there was a wooden horse whose rocking comforted me every time my mother announced that there was no choice but to go to the office of a man who spoke as strangely as he wrote. His chaotic diction (only when I grew up did I discover that even adults understood nothing of what he explained) corresponded millimetrically to his proverbial bad doctor’s handwriting, with which he distributed recipes for anise-flavored syrups, just before saying goodbye with a cherry sugar. The verbosity of that kind and somewhat comical man especially relieved my mother, a very young novice who needed someone wise to assure her, even at unexpected hours, that her child would not die from this. For me, however, I was a girl in pain, constantly consumed by Valyrian fever that brought with it excruciating earaches (I had no children, so this is the closest thing to the torment of childbirth I’ve ever experienced), the only thing that truly healed me was feeling his hands, resting on my earmuffs like earmuffs made of human skin. Yet how confident I felt on that Roman-like weight scale, where my ass remained cool while he noted that I was making adequate progress. My immune system strengthened, I had a growth spurt, my breasts grew, I got my period, I changed doctors because the law of life dictates so and I never saw him again, but my sister, who had children, also took her daughters to that consultation, where she discovered that the older one had a kidney problem just by looking at her ear and told the younger one that she was healthy as an apple. In the waiting room, the same rocking horse continued to soothe the children with its swing, three generations later. He confirmed this to me last week, when our mother sent us a whatsapp In short: “Dr. Rojo is dead. It made me very sad.”
Goodbye, Cherry Sugus | Opinion
