It's a rottweiler stick.

The other day I went to our local hospital for a blood test. The real test was finding my way around and the help provided me by a cleaning person.

I walked into the main lobby of the medical offices, my several-month-old walking stick I have dubbed defensively as my rottweiler stick bearing some weight for my "healing" leg. In the lobby, I immediately found myself "turned around." I've been "turned around" in the woods a few times, but a little common sense and, if needed, the compass got me out safely.

But in the hospital's maine lobby being "turned around" was putting it mildly. I didn't have my compass or the GPS a Southwest Harbor friend gave me for some volunteer work on the Appalachian Trail's boundary corridors. The GPS wouldn't have done me much good, anyway, as I have barely learned to find the spot where I am on it, let alone find the "route" out of that spot.

I assumed blood work would be done in the laboratory, so I looked for a sign indicating where it might be. No sign. No sign indicating where anything might be.

There I stood, thinking things over, when the cleaning woman came along, pushing her cart.

"Can you tell me where I might find the laboratory?" I inquired.

"Oh, yes, sir," she responded, looking pityingly at my rottweiler stick, "follow me. It's on the third floor, and I'm going right up there on the elevator I'll show you."

"Yes, sir?"

I've noticed unhappily that since I began using my rottweiler stick, people have begun calling me 'sir.' They also ask if they can "get the door" for me, or they reach out to grab the door. A week or so ago, a woman visiting the recycling center asked if I needed a hand with the box I was lugging in to the center. I replied that, thanks, I didn't a hand; I needed a leg. She smiled, which was nice, because few nice looking women except Dolores smile at me.

Disconcerting. Just because I carry a rottweiler stick, doesn't mean I'm a 'sir.' I'm afraid when those helpful folk say, "sir," they're really communicating, "Yes, old helpless man, I'll be happy to help you."

The cleaning woman exhibited worse 'sir' behavior.

"It's right down the hall there," she said, as we both exited the elevator.

I began walking and noticed the two-foot-long sign stating, "Laboratory," and that antenna Dolores says I have regarding people acting the wrong way loosened my non-cynical tongue.

"Might that sign saying, 'laboratory,' be were the lab is?" I asked her.

"It's right there, sir," she said. "Can you read the sign?"

There it was! When Dolores was in the hospital repeatedly with her initial disabling brain aneurysm problem, hospital staff treated her as if she were old -- definitely not -- and hard of hearing.

Along with being hard of hearing came not being present. One minute a nurse would holler at her as if she were either half a football field away or stone deaf. Then, a while later, she and/or other nurses would stand by the foot of her bed and talk about her as if she wasn't there.

The word 'stupid' also comes into play here somewhere. Because all the hollering and, oh yes, baby talk, "Do you want your orange juice now?" -- usually when Dolores was being examined or had something in her mouth which another nurse had just placed there -- made her feel stupid.

And, of course, those nurses acted as if she couldn't read. Now here was a hospital cleaning woman acting as if I couldn't read.

I wanted to scream at her that she was pitying a real man -- an imported Maineiac, in fact -- who had been in his earlier life a teacher, a news reporter, and now in his retirement an Island Explorer bus driver -- not to mention the writing I still do which includes a good bit of volunteer computer work for the Maine Appalachian Trail Club.

But I didn't scream anything. Instead I said, "Thank you," and entered the lab where I had the blood test and was sort-of assured that I was not only able to read but still alive.

The lab technician, during our casual talk while he jabbed me for awhile to borrow my blood, asked if I had ever read Come Spring, an eight-hundred-and-five-some page historical novel of the founding of Union, Maine. I responded that I was up to page three hundred and fifty something and hoped to live enough years longer to finish it.

It was nice to find a hospital staffer who treated me like a fairly normal person, instead of a deaf, dumb, illiterate cripple. I didn't feel tempted to defend my present state of just-past youth at 29.5 and clinging by telling him how the rottweiler stick and I had recently hobbled down and up again a steep, rocky woods road in a successful attempt to find my corridor-monitoring section of the Appalachian Trail a dozen miles west of Monson in Horseshoe Canyon.

I had read in a book on walking -- yes, I could already walk when I read it after finding it in the recycling center without the help of a nice-looking woman who wondered if I could carry the book by myself and later read it -- that suggested not calling a leg that makes you limp a "bad" leg. Call it a "healing" leg, the book recommend. It also suggested that a walking stick could take some of the weight off the "healing" leg, help you walk better with less pain, and even improve your posture. Like the doctor of my childhood kept urging me to do.

I tried it, not that I'm a cripple or deaf or dumb or illiterate, but because what I had read seemed reasonable. It worked, just as the book had suggested.

Of course, the book failed to also suggest the right response when old duffers I've known for years -- the ones who haven't yet kicked the bucket with their "healing" leg -- look in astonishment at my walking stick and say, "I didn't know you had a bad leg."

"I don't. I have a "healing" leg," I answer, "and it's not a walking stick. It's for rottweilers."

I just hope I never had to use it to fend off a rottweiler.

But it's a rottweiler stick.

Milt Gross can be reached for corrections, harassment, or other purposes at lesstraveledway@midmaine.com.

Milton M. Gross Copyright 2007