The Vanishing of Doctor Jane Smith

I called it again, double checking each digit.

We’re sorry. The number you have dialed is no longer in service. 

I swore a little more vociferously than is usually considered appropriate on a Sesame Street Grover the Waiter sketch.

I googled the doctor’s name and got nothing. There is no pediatrician by that name anywhere in this town, at all. There never has been. Retired doctors, such as the one my insurance company assigned my daughter to see, show up on Google searches for eternity, confusing patients, so this doctor was not only not currently practicing but not an actual human person. The closest I could find was a general practitioner in the state of Virginia, a six-hour drive away, who had never had an office in the Ohio Valley.

I googled the address I’d been given. It was right on my usual bus route to the library. I decided to take a trip to the library just to ride past and scope out the address.

It was a party goods store.

I kid you not. The address I’d been given, for the office of a doctor who never existed, was a strip mall containing a formal gown consignment shop and an enormous party goods store. There were festive mylar balloons in the window in the shapes of palm trees.

Somehow, I’d gone from a Grover the Waiter sketch to the nineteenth story in Wayside School. 

I had the urge to hop off the bus, run into the party goods store and feign a heart attack to coax Dr. Smith out of hiding, but I thought better of it. I went to the library. It’s safe in the library; fictional people and things have their own section, and the Dewey Decimal System serves to categorize everything that does, in fact, exist. You know what’s what in a library. Not so in real life.

This is even more surreal than the time I searched that same insurance company’s web directory, desperate to find an Ob-GYN. The number they listed for an Ob-GYN turned out to belong to a male urologist. I used to be equally clueless about the anatomy, when I was six, but you’d think a medical insurance company would remember which unspeakable genital opening the Ob-GYN attends to. Not the urethra, the other one. A urologist simply won’t do.

Some people envy the poor their medicaid. I don’t envy the non-poor their lack of medicaid. I don’t envy Grover her job in customer service either. The only person I envy is Dr. Jane Smith, safely concealed among the jungle of mylar balloons with no patients to interrupt her tranquility. Someday, perhaps, I’ll track her down and say “Doctor Livingston, I presume?” or “What’s up, Doc?” or some similar quip, and demand she give my daughter her Dtap booster. For now, though, the designated month to transfer medicaid insurance providers is only several weeks away. That might be simpler.

I doubt it will be, though. Things are rarely simple.