I usually go to a guy who is my “primary care provider,” and who is part of a large university-based conglomerate. It’s not actually medical care that I get from him. No, I get a fifteen minute chat scribed by AI. I get his power of prescription, and his ability to refer me elsewhere. Sometimes I get a little advice.

So when I was having an asthma flare-up this week, even though my doctor recently told me I could just come in to his office and get a nebulizer treatment if I needed one, I went to Urgent Care, not to my doctor.

This is because my doctor’s office staff does not answer the phone when I call. He doesn’t answer messages I send to him on the “patient portal” until late in the day, and it’s usually someone else who responds because he’s too damn busy. When I go into the patient portal, it is not possible to find an appointment for the day when I’m having symptoms, or even this week. And if it’s so damn acute that I need to see someone today, I get shunted to an emergency room, where I would lose many hours, be exposed to every respiratory virus in the world, and be ignored.

No, it’s Urgent Care for me. That’s where a tired little waiting room has a couple of tired people manning the counter and there are a bunch of tired people sitting in the nice seats with a good view of the city street outside. They have run out of tissues on the counter, but someone gets more.

And you don’t have to make an appointment. You don’t even have to call ahead. It’s in my network, so I belong there.

After I have stated my birthday three times (how they verify that I am who I say I am), a nurse eventually takes me back into a room, takes my vitals, chats with me, asks me my birthday a couple more times, and leaves to make way for the nurse practitioner.

My adult kid has joined me by now. Apparently, the nurse said, older husbands always bring their wives, while older wives bring their daughters. My kid, who is nonbinary and often is taken for male, deals with misgendering with more grace and kindness than I do.

The nurse practitioner asks me my birthday, listens to my chest, and says it sounds “rough,” so she is going to have me get an X-ray to rule out pneumonia.

The nice tired young man who had been sitting at the counter when I came in arrives to take me to the X-ray room across the hall, and asks my birthday. It is the same as his wife’s. “Different year,” he says and takes two chest X-rays.

I do not want to go to the hospital, I tell my kid. My kid speaks kindly but firmly to me, saying if I have to go to the hospital, I will, which statement entirely justifies having a child as far as I’m concerned. They also say, equally kindly, that no, I can’t go back to my church (where they burn incense, which is part of the triple attack on my lungs that caused the flare-up) for the time being.

The nurse sets me up with a nebulizer, which makes a hellacious noise, and gives me two steroid pills. When the nebulizer finishes, the nurse practitioner comes in, says I didn’t have pneumonia, tells me not to overuse my inhaler, and gives me a bunch of nice things I can do for myself while I’m waiting for the steroids to work, which will be a couple more days.

It reminds me of being a kid again. We had a family doctor. First it was Doctor Fisher, and later it was Doctor Lowenthal. They were nice people who had their own practice. They were both friends of my mother, who had a Ph.D. in microbiology and worked for a pharmaceutical company.

But Urgent Care is my family doctor now.

I went to this same Urgent Care center seven years ago, the last time I let my asthma get out of hand like this. They did the same thing then that they did today, even though it as different people who gave me the treatment and asked me my birthday.

And here I sit, at home, still coughing a little, still a little beat up, but I have been cared for. Several people took care of me. That was awfully nice of them. They didn’t have to do that.