To help you prepare for your upcoming medical appointment, we have prepared a list of brutally honest details. Please read them and attempt to sign your name in the box, which is roughly as small as the box we will put you in if you are female and have a pain complaint.

For your convenience, we have scheduled your visit at one of our suburban outposts which we determined based solely on our need to fill those slots instead of logic, such as a geographic system using your zip code. You can use the trip to question all of your life choices, including but not limited to what demon has cursed you into needing medical intervention in the first place.

You’ll be happy to know that your appointment time is at the height of traffic. We have set your appointment time at a random ten-minute interval, making it impossible to determine when to leave your house in order not to miss your appointment. Please note, we will cancel your appointment if you are more than 15 minutes late.

If prior to this appointment you needed bloodwork or x-rays to ensure appropriate diagnosis and care, please take note that we will only order half of what is necessary. About five minutes into your appointment, your provider will ask you if you think those results are necessary before continuing. At that time, we will reschedule your appointment to the next available date. That date will be no sooner than the next geologic epoch.

If you visit urgent care or one of our emergency departments due to our lack of preparedness in between this partial visit and our next available date, we will receive sad faces on our next review. Accordingly, anyone admitting you to urgent care or the ED will work diligently to ensure you feel that you have made up any symptoms and will ask you to confirm that yes, it could be worse.

We will send you multiple texts and emails inviting you to arrive 15 minutes early so that you can fill out the same paperwork we sent you ahead of time via our web-based interaction designed by squirrels hopped up on Red Bull. It is also paradoxically true that we will run about an hour late. If you hadn’t started a deep internal audit of your life, consider this a bonus opportunity.

We will not read any of your answers to the five pages of questions and will require you to repeat each and every one of your responses to us. If you are female and your responses sound rehearsed, we will diagnose you with a conversion disorder. That will trap you in our mental health services department for at least the next five years. However, we do hear that they have shorter wait times to be seen.

We will present you with a lengthy document in small type that proclaims your rights and our responsibilities on a touch pad bolted in place to the least convenient viewing angle. You will have to sign this document with your finger. Please be prepared that none of your signature will be recognized by our out-of-date iPad. It will not occur to us to wipe down this out-of-date iPad between patients, even if you are in our infectious disease clinic.

You will also be asked to sign a HIPAA notice that explains how we will protect your private patient information, including the information we will loudly confirm with you at our front desk where it can be overheard by your neighbors, your fifth-grade teacher, and God. They too will be seated on chairs we’ve artfully designed to be impossible to get into and out of if you have any lingering back pain. These chairs will be most uncomfortable in our rheumatology and sports medicine departments.

We will escort you from the waiting room by walking at a speed roughly approximating the one you used when you blew $10 at Taco Bell. Please ensure that you keep up. We will deposit you in a patient room designed to resemble a meat locker: claustrophobia-inducingly small and kept at 0 degrees Kelvin, the temperature where all atomic motion stops.

We find this architecture keeps patients from lingering. Too long in the exam room and patients may find themselves fighting an internal war. We try to prevent them from succumbing to the inescapable truth of the failure of the human form and their potential demise. We also try to shoo patients along before they ask all of their questions.

Finally, please take note that our parking lots have entirely inappropriate amounts of parking. If you have been farmed out to one of our convenient suburban locations, the parking lot will be nearly equivalent to a football field, probably covered in duck poop, which we will not salt or shovel. However, if you do fall, you’ll be close to an orthopedic center.

If, for some reason, you feel that you would like to have your faith in humanity restored, please visit our pharmacy or check in with one of the nurses. We advise you to hurry: their claims for mental health support have been denied by their employer’s insurance and only God knows how long they can keep sustaining humanity.

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Maggie Russell is a writer and editor. Her work has been published most recently in Flash the Court, January House, and The Basilisk Tree. Maggie’s work has been nominated for Best of the Net and a Pushcart Prize. She received an Honorable Mention for The Prose Poem’s  2025 Spring Short Competition. Maggie volunteers with programs that teach writing in prisons and is an editorial reader for literary journals. Raised by the woods in Connecticut, Maggie now lives in Nashville with her husband and pets. Find her online at www.maggierussellwriter.com.