Grown-up Girl

I'm been doing my best to be a grown-up these past few years.  I clean my own toilets without being asked, I wash my sheets regularly, I pay my bills on time, I have a car payment, I get regular dentist appointments, etc.  One of these days I'll even manage to send birthday cards to my nieces and nephews.  Then someone can give me a medal.  A big medal for being a grown-up.  They give those out right?  There's a ceremony and streamers and a big sign that says "CONGRATULATIONS!  You Made It!"  And then someone presents me with a certificate redeemable for a husband, 2.5 kids, and a blue house with a .75 acre yard in some suburban neighborhood.  And chocolate cake.  There'd better be chocolate cake or I'm not doing it.  Unless there's pie.  I'd grow up for pie, I guess.

But anyway, as I was going through the mental list of "things that grown-up girls do," it occurred to me that grown-up girls sometimes go to the doctor.  In fact, they go on a regular basis.  Then I realized that I haven't had a physical check up of any kind since....high school?  Seven years?  I don't have a primary care physician.  I've never picked up a prescription for myself.  Then it occurred to me that grown-up girls go to girl doctors to talk to them about girly stuff.  Was I supposed to be doing that, too?  So I asked my roommate who is a nurse; I ask her all of my medical related questions, whether or not she should be able to answer them.

"Am I supposed to go to a gynecologist sometime?" I asked.
"Well, when was the last time you went?" she replied.
"I've never been," I said nonchalantly.
"Never?!" she said, her eyebrows climbing toward her hairline.

I inferred from this that this was, in fact, something I was supposed to be doing as a grown-up girl.  So I dug through my wallet until I found my insurance card, dug through the internet until I found a covered provider, and then picked a name of the list and called to make an appointment.  The receptionist told me to go to a website and fill out the registration and health forms before I came in.

So, this morning, I sat down to fill out the forms.  Besides asking me my name, birthday, social security number, and what surgeries I've had (tonsils out when I was two, Lasik eye surgery when I was 21), they also  asked for a family medical history.  I stared at the screen trying to remember, did any of my uncles, aunts, grandparents, etc. have cancer, strokes, diabetes, etc.?  As the youngest child of a youngest child, my grandparents are all long gone, and my aunts and uncles on my dad's side are all retired with grandchildren older than I am.  Luckily, I'm at home for a few days, so I tripped my way upstairs to my dad's office to ask him how my grandparents died and if his siblings are healthy.

That's how I learned about sewer pipe.  Old fashioned sewer pipes, the kind that had homemade gaskets made from hemp and molten lead.  The plumbers would pour melted lead on the hemp they had pounded around the opening.  They would boil the lead right there in the enclosed, underground space, inhaling the the vapors from the lead.  Did you know that?  I didn't know that.  But that's what I learned form my dad this morning.  How does this relate to my family medical history?  When of the many professions my paternal grandfather had was a plumber.  He got some sort of poisoning several times and eventually died of bone cancer when I was in second grade.  Then Dad and I spent another ten minutes discussing cheerful topics such as nursing home neglect and old fashioned sewers.  Then he went back to work, and I filled out my forms, musing on the nature of life, death, health, and the way you never know where a conversation is going to go.

Maybe my gynecologist doesn't know about old-fashioned sewer pipe, either.

Grown-up girls climb big rocks, too.