“Have you had any prior testing done on the area being scanned today?”
Since treatments started, Laika has come here every four weeks. It’s always the same receptionist who checks her in, the young man across the desk with a name tag that says ‘Ocean’ who now poses the question without looking up. However, when necessary, “Ocean” can be hyperalert. Laika has watched him calm down the husband of a woman who suffered an anaphylactic reaction and was being intubated right behind the glass window that separates reception from treatment areas, in view of everyone who was waiting at the time, and everyone pretended to look away. After handing Laika the required paperwork, he goes back to reading poetry from pastel-colored paperbacks bound so tightly, they barely open at all.
Laika signs the Medical Disclosure Form. Proud to be a patient who is no bother and doesn’t ask unnecessary questions, she heads next door unaccompanied and goes straight to the wooden cabinet where S- and XL-sized gowns, stacked into mint-green towers, gently lean into each other. The pile with the larger sizes is always shorter in height and the S-gowns slide over to make up for the difference. No one needs to tell her that these frocks open in the back, not in the front, and she never returns to the waiting area to complain when the tie strings are missing, every single one of them.
The Patient Intake Form can be filled out within a matter of seconds. Rather than checking off each box individually, Laika draws one single line, lets it droop through the “NO” column from the top of the page down to the bottom, an approach that saves time because she, too, wants to read while she’s there.
“Are you claustrophobic?” “Pregnant?” “Were you ever exposed to metal splinters?” “Are you allergic to Gadolinium?” “Do you have tattoos? Wear cochlear implants? Are there aneurism clips in your body? A pacemaker?“
NO! drools a thin thread through box after box.
The questionnaire brings back memories of past summer vacations, specifically of the moment when she fills out the I-94W Visa Waiver, issued not by the American College of Radiology but by the Department of Homeland Security, and distributed not by nurses but by flight attendants, an oblong piece of green paper handed to passengers halfway into their voyage, right above Greenland if they travel as Green Card holders from Europe to Chicago. It’s around the same time that she eats her blood pudding sandwich which her best friend in Frankfurt always prepares on the morning of departure with extra mustard. Once that’s been eaten, they’ve reached North American airspace, and she says good-bye to home for another year unequivocally.
“In the past, were you ever registered as a member of a Communist organization? Did you take part in persecutions committed by the Nazi party and its allies? Have you ever engaged in espionage and/or genocide?” the form inquires. “Are you seeking to engage in criminal or immoral activities, e.g., are you planning to abduct an American child? Have you been accused of transgressions involving moral turpitude?”
Turpitude is a foul-smelling word. Given the context of the document, it’s also capable of throwing a wrench into a foreigner’s journey who wouldn’t necessarily consider endangering the welfare of a US toddler but marks yes because he lacks familiarity with the term; it is one she has only ever encountered on overseas flights.
On this form, too, Laika marks nothing but “NOs” but does so as neatly as is possible on a bumpy plane, gives each box its own and decisive “X” because drawing one single line on an official document like this one is akin to drawing ire. And she knows the consequences for marking “YES” behind any of the questions on the list above, for example, the first one. Her father once did, a man who had seamlessly transitioned from a sixteen-year-old Nazi to a seventeen-year-old communist in Germany’s post-war, Soviet-occupied Eastern zone, just like everyone else. Border control in Chicago almost sent him back home on the next flight when they collected his form. (He had marked “NO” for all other questions, including number two, and all her life she’s been hoping that he spoke the truth.)
Her political affiliation is of no concern to hospital staff. Everyone gets scanned at the same dosage.
Doro Boehme is a visual artist and writer. She holds an MLIS from Dominican University and an MFA from the Staatliche Kunstakademie Stuttgart, Germany. Her work has appeared in print and online, for example in Yew Journal, Canopic Jar Journal, Nailed Magazine (Editor’s Choice), Art On Paper, Art Documentation, and Art Journal, among others. Awards include two writing fellowships at the Ragdale Foundation and a 12-month artist-in-residency fellowship from the Ministry for Science and Culture Baden-Württemberg which brought her to Chicago. Her current place of employment is the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she heads the library’s Special Collections. www.doroboehme.com