Published Dec 2, 2003
I had to make a visit to the doctor’s office, so I climbed the stairs to the fourth floor of the building. I’d been to this office before, and I hated going — at the top of the stairs was a railing, and I had to climb over this railing and walk along a thin ledge jutting out next to a four-story drop in order to get to the hallway the doctor’s office was on. When I got to the top several people were climbing over the rail to go to the doctor, but I suddenly became very scared as I approched the railing. A nice blonde technician in scrubs said that many people become scared climbing over this railing and helped me get to the office.
After I left the office, I ran into my mother — who also saw the same doctor — in the waiting room, and we left together. She planned to take the elevator down, so we walked to the elevator which was just down the hall. There was a small hatch in the wall leading to a small shaft in which an elevator barely large enough for two must have traveled. I was apprehensive about taking this elevator and proposed using the stairs, but my mother assured me that the elevator was OK. The man in line ahead of us opened the door to the elevator shaft and reached in — I told him to watch his hand because the car might be coming. He shot me an odd look with his head cocked to the side, then pushed a button inside the shaft. A large platform rose through a hole in the floor and my mother and the man stepped on. I joined them, and the platform began to descend. It turned out that my mother had worked with the man, who was a lawyer, in the past; they talked about stories of the case they had collaborated on.
Suddenly, the elevator gave a lurch and the platform tipped sideways. The man was undisturbed, but I had to grab the floor to keep from falling. I yelled to my mother to hold on, but she fell into the shaft. We were only about a story down, so I feared she’d died in the three-story plunge. The man was totally unperturbed. I frantically asked him if he thought my mother would be ok, and he said yes; then, up the shaft came her voice: “I’m ok!”.
Then we reached the first floor.