Thanksgiving: Dr. Brandi Nichols

Hey, everyone, as we get nearer to Thanksgiving, I'm posting about some of the things, or people, I've been thankful for this year. It’s a chance to share some gratitude with the universe, or, at least, the Internet. A new bit of gratitude! Let’s get started!

Thank You, Dr. Brandi Nichols

Thank you, Dr. Nichols and all your associates at JCMG who eased my mind and took care of me last November, December, and January as I moved through the slow, unnerving (scary) process of determining what my, um, postmenopausal female symptoms were being caused by. I haven’t needed to go down this aisle of the supermarket for some years, now.

This was especially not fun during a pandemic, before the vaccine, and it was not fun during the holidays, either. And I should never have Googled my symptoms, nor should I have done keyword searches on the precise terms y’all provided. I should have just listened to you and your nurses (and my better sense): we don’t know anything until the biopsy comes back, but the odds are very great that it’s no big deal, so no reason to worry.

. . . But you know.

I have to be honest, I felt kind of out of place in your waiting and exam rooms, with glamour photos of very-pregnant women and of cutie-pie babies with those flowery headbands hanging on the walls everywhere you looked.

I’m a fifty-something lesbian, not much about me is maternal, and that mommy stuff is soooo not my scene. But I can see why you have to kind of promote and celebrate what amounts to the bread-and-butter part of your practice, the “up” side of female anatomy and physiology, since the other end of it—which my case kind of represented—isn’t particularly joy-filled.

I apologized to you for no doubt being a bummer, when you probably got into being an ob/gyn because of the miracle of reproduction, but you surprised me by saying that you are really interested in all facets of your job, and that you really like to remove polyps, too, and you kind of get a charge out of it.

I don’t remember much about the morning of the procedure when I was groggy from the super-early appointment and then woozy from the anesthesia and from the weeks of being on edge over the whole thing. But while I was waking up, you did take the time that morning to talk to Sue and reassure her that everything went well, and that nothing problematic was anticipated.

The last time I saw you—and hopefully, indeed, the last time I will ever see you (look, nothing personal, okay?)—it was seven weeks after the procedure, in a follow-up visit. Your office had already called me with the results (benign, yay!) a week after the procedure, but I was glad to have the chance to talk with you and ask any remaining questions.

Again, not only did you take care of my unwanted polyps, but also, you really helped ease my mind. And I really appreciate it. I realize that a lot of it was just my luck, but you really set me at ease. I consider it a blessing that I could just move on with my life, basically as if nothing had happened.

So thank you very much.

Addendum: Since the events I described, this year I found out that two of my friends did have the dreaded, less common outcome. Both are fighting, one particularly hard. So along with the relief I feel for having dodged the big-C, I’m comforted to know that you’d take good care of me if that had been my diagnosis, too.