Waiting for a Biopsy Result

I am eating toast with strawberry jam and thin slithers of tasty cheese on top. This is something Graham claims to have taught me but I tell him we did it in my family too. He never believes me. The dog is chewing his feet with his incisors. Gnawing at their underside, between the pads, despite his expensive cyclosporin medication. Next door, the neighbour’s new baby cries like a wind up toy. I wonder if she feels the same ineptitude I felt at a baby’s crying. I get a phone call from a woman who used to be vet student in the clinic where I work. She wants me to be a referee for a job she is applying for. She has had two children and hasn’t worked in a while. She also wants my advice on her son. He is four and she thinks he lacks self esteem. I have a son too so perhaps I will know how to help her. How do you make a boy confident in himself, she asks me. I feel like every day is an experiment I am conducting, trying to find the right way, she says. It is like a one take movie making, she says in her Chinese accent. She is wise without knowing how wise she is. I tell her to find something he likes to do and help him to succeed at that. I think it is advice I have stolen from one of the many parenting books I read in those crying years. John Marsden perhaps. I tell her to get him Lego. Her phone call has taken my mind of the fact I am waiting to go to the doctor for a biopsy result. I think it could be the last morning before I start bargaining with God and in a hour everything could be different. I chastise the dog over the continued licking.

PS the result was – it was benign.