Free Samuel Johnson Is Indignant by Lydia Davis

but also delighted. Although he frowned in pain and shook his finger in the air, the doctor took it very well and said it happened from time to time, that it was actually a reflex. I slightly antagonized my present doctor, or physician’s assistant, by saying that I did not like taking medicine because I did not like being dependent on any drug. What if I were lost in a jungle without my thyroid medicine? I asked her, and it is true that I always believe that some day I may be lost in a jungle, even though we do not call them jungles anymore, and we are losing them anyway, so that the word jungle is becoming just an idea. She said I would get along well enough without it until I could find my way out of the jungle.
    There was a small emergency situation quite recently, though, in which I was not tempted to make fun of the doctor. He was a young doctor, I admired his decisiveness and his technical skill, and I was also quiet because of my pain. I had bruised my finger badly, and what he had to do was to release some of the pressure under the nail. He did this in what he said was the best way, but also the old-fashioned way, using nothing but a candle and a large paper clip.
    The receptionist or nurse this morning thought I wasn’t “up” yet because I didn’t know the exact dose or the full name of my thyroid medicine. But I was careless about that information because of my skeptical attitude toward the health-care profession and because I do not try to conceal that attitude. I did not mean to be disrespectful to her in particular. But after she said this, I noticed two other possible signs of poor functioning: a real estate dealer I called on the phone later in the morning thought at first that I was another real estate dealer. I asked her why she thought this. She had trouble answering, but I guessed that it might have been my lack of enthusiasm, or a coldness in my tone of voice. Then, still later, when I was talking to my husband on the telephone, I was so confusing, contradictory, and long-winded that he compared me to a legal brief he was reading. This document is fifty pages long and concerns a possible class action against an insurance company for misrepresentation.
    After wondering for some weeks what to do about the tomato plants, my husband told me he was going to explain to the dentist that none of the plants was good enough to give him, though that is not strictly true. Then, just hours later, he told me that he had changed his mind. He was going to patch the soaker hose and give the plants a little more time.
    But on the other hand, it occurs to me that maybe my brain is working well enough but simply more slowly than usual. Maybe the quality of my work will be good but I will take longer than usual to make it good. Or maybe the dose of thyroid supplement I’m taking, which has been increased once without much effect, will be increased to the proper level soon enough so that by the time I reach the final draft of this translation I will be thinking sharply and quickly again. Then I wonder if I will think even better than before this whole condition began, because my brain will have been trying so hard in the meantime, without adequate support from my thyroid, that maybe it will have developed new cells. But I don’t know enough about the brain’s anatomy to know if that is possible.
    Or maybe some of the time I go ahead quickly enough but without producing very high quality work, while some of the time I go ahead slowly and produce better quality work, so that it is a choice: either go slowly and do good work, or go quickly and do poor work. But then, those have always been the two options in translation, I see, so I should say that now the choice is: go even more slowly than before and do adequately good work, or go more quickly and do really poor work.
    But with any luck, the dosage will gradually be raised high enough so that in a couple of months I will be able to do work that