Apple Store


5/29/26 

Today was my infusion. When Kayla, my usual nurse, saw the neck brace she was startled and asked me what happened but the nurse she had been training that day said "I remember. You told us you were having a tumor removed." She was the one who put in my IV today and because I had several regular IVs and an arterial line during the surgery, she was struggling to find a spot. She missed the first one, but then she got it on the second try.  It took an hour and a half for them to send the medicine up from the pharmacy. They don’t mix it ahead of time because it costs almost $6000 a bottle and they don’t want to waste it if I don’t show up.

After the infusion, I had to get to the Apple Store at Grand Central so I decided to take the 57th St. bus to Lexington and then the southbound bus on Lexington. At the bus stop, I encountered two elderly ladies also waiting. One had a more traditionally grandmotherly appearance- white hair, a paisley shirt, a couple of decorative scarves and a walker. The other one was very thin in a striped shirt with straight gray hair down to her shoulders. The first woman asked me if I knew if the bus stopped there and I told her it should since it was clearly marked as a bus stop. "They keep going by without stopping," she said. I watched a couple of buses pass by and then I realized that we were looking at the express buses that go between boroughs,  so I explained that to her. Eventually, the one we needed showed up. "Does this go to 14th St.?" she asked me.  "We’re trying to go to the farmers market."


I was wearing my fuck Trump shirt and getting approving comments from various people as I moved around the city but then when I got to the Apple Store, the tattooed young man who was assigned to help with my broken computer lowered his voice and said “I agree, but your shirt has profanity on it and some of the people who work here might be offended. But don’t worry, I’m handling your repair.”   My first impulse was to say "in nyc?" People in nyc are worried about profanity? But he genuinely seemed to be trying to warn me, so I just nodded. While he looked up our insurance info, I thought to myself it was interesting that what he had singled out as potentially offensive was not actually the political message at all, but just the specific profanity.

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