Monday, February 10, 2025

I WAS WISE TO MY HUSBAND'S EXCUSES...BECAUSE I INVENTED MOST OF THEM!

 

I have to admit that when it comes to appointments with doctors and dentists, I will make just about any excuse to get out of going. Like when I was about 10 years old and tried to convince my mother to cancel my dental appointment by faking I was sick. To add realism to my fib, I rubbed some baby powder on my face so I would look pale and be more convincing.

Unfortunately, I overdid the powder and ended up looking more like a mime than a pale, sick person. My mother mercilessly teased me about it for years…many, many years.

And even after all of that effort, I still had to endure the torture at the dentist’s.

I hate to say it, but my late husband acted very much like a kid when it came to his medical appointments…only he was a full-grown adult, not 10 years old.

I still remember one particular incident when he had an appointment for his six-month checkup with his endocrinologist. And true to form, he didn’t want to go.

“I feel lousy,” he whined to me about two hours before his appointment. “I’m going to call the doctor and cancel.”

I was unsympathetic. I mean, I already was familiar with most of the tricks he usually used when trying to weasel his way out of a medical appointment…mainly because I was the one who’d originally invented the majority of them.

“The fact that you’re feeling lousy is a good reason why you should keep the appointment,” I said to him.

A few minutes later, he called out to me from the bathroom as I walked up the hallway, “I think I’m going to be spending a lot of time in here. We’d better cancel my appointment.”

Again, I offered him no sympathy. “Then you'd better move things along faster, or we’re going to be late.”

During breakfast, after he spilled his morning coffee on his shirt and swore he had nothing else to wear – and I pulled a freshly washed one out of the dryer and handed it to him – he finally sighed in defeat, grabbed his keys and we went out to his van.

 He turned the key in the ignition. Nothing happened. He tried again. Still nothing.

“I think the battery is dead,” he said with a lot more pleasure in his tone than someone with a dead battery normally would have.

I narrowed my eyes at him. “Did you sabotage something just to get out of going to the doctor’s?”

He climbed out of the van and checked a few things. “The hatchback wasn’t shut tight,” he finally said. “When that’s open, the overhead light stays on. It must have killed the battery. I wonder why it was open? I swear, I haven’t even touched it.”

I was relieved he wasn’t in the van at that moment because he would have noticed my guilt-ridden expression. Maybe he hadn’t touched the hatchback, but I had – when I’d been searching for a bungee cord in the toolbox in his van the morning before. In my defense, a hatchback door on a van is…well, pretty darned heavy.

“I guess that does it,” he said, shrugging and releasing an exaggerated sigh worthy of an Oscar. “We’ll never make it to my doctor’s appointment in time now. We’d better call and cancel.”

The man was beginning to sound like a recording playing in the continuous-loop mode. I actually wondered if everything going wrong might be an omen…that maybe I should just give up, take his advice and cancel his appointment.

But I quickly dismissed the idea. I wasn't about to let him get away with it that easily.

“Well, I have a car,” I reminded him. “Hop in, and let’s get going.”

“I hate driving your car,” he said. “It’s really uncomfortable.”

“Then I’ll drive.” I searched my purse for the key and couldn’t find it. So I figured it was in the pocket of one of my jackets, hoodies or sweaters...somewhere.

“Do you have your key to my car?” I asked my husband.

“Uh, I don’t know where it is offhand,” he said. “I think it might be in one of the drawers in the bedroom. There’s no time to go looking for it now.”

That was when I happened to notice the keys on the key ring still in the van’s ignition…and my car key was one of them.

I grabbed the keys and hopped out of the van. “Hurry up, get into my car.”

We arrived at the doctor’s 10 minutes late. The doctor wasn’t pleased…not because we were late, but because the first thing she did was weigh my husband, and he had gained six pounds. 

Suddenly I realized the reason for his reluctance to see her.

“That’s a pound a month since the last time you were here,” she said to him. “I really would like to see your weight go in the other direction, especially since you’re diabetic. I’m going to put you on a special high-protein diet.” She then turned to look at me. “And I’ll give you a menu plan that will help you prepare his meals.”

The menu plan turned out to be about as thick as a dictionary and needed someone like Wolfgang Puck to interpret many of the ingredients. On the way home, I spent over $100 on groceries for the new meal plan.

And that night, my husband turned up his nose at the very first meal I cooked, saying he wouldn’t even feed it to our dogs because they would take revenge on him afterwards and attack him. He then got up from the table and announced he was going to Wendy’s for a triple cheeseburger and fries.

He got as far as the door before I said to him, “Well, you’ll need my car because your van’s battery is dead, and I still have your key ring, remember?” I smiled sweetly at him. “So I guess you’re not going anywhere. Now come sit down and eat your broiled haddock and spinach.”

Sometimes fate really does work in mysterious ways.


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Sally Breslin is an award-winning syndicated humor columnist who has written regularly for newspapers and magazines all of her adult life. She is the author of several novels in a variety of genres, from humor and romance to science-fiction. Contact her at: sillysally@att.net.