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       On the list of things I don’t like about myself is my dweeby adherence to rules. I’ve been that way since I was little. I’ve never run at a swimming pool, for example. It says it right there on the sign: “No running.”

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       I’ve always been that guy who says, “Maybe we shouldn’t break into the cemetery and drink beer while leaning against the headstones.”

       Part of it — most of it, I guess — is that I don’t want to get caught. As a child I craved the approval of adults, which is a way of saying I feared their disapproval. While other kids were off egging houses I stayed behind, imagining my father putting his hand on my shoulder and saying, “Johnny, I thought you were better than that.”

       A lot of people prize rule-breaking and risk-taking. Rule-breakers and risk-takers are the people who move us ahead as a society. Sometimes I wonder what my life would have been like if I’d egged the occasional house, stolen the occasional car, torched the occasional liquor store. I probably would have invented Apple or something.

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       Even as an adult, I’m too eager to please figures of authority. Take doctors, for example. Or, more accurately for our purposes today, physician assistants.

       A couple of weeks ago I had a bad cold, my nose a phlegm volcano, my chest wracked with a barking cough. I get one of these every few years and often — not every time — some part of the viral infection refuses to leave. I develop a chronic cough that I suffer with for a few months before going to the doctor, who prescribes a course of steroids that miraculously cures it.

       The last few times, rather than wait three months, I’ve gone to the doctor sooner. I know what’s coming. I know what fixes it. Why should I suffer?

       Last week, after a few bad days, my body seemed on the mend. In fact, by the time you read this, I might be just fine. But I’m going away for Thanksgiving — out of the country, in fact — and so I thought I would prophylactically request some Prednisone and promise to take them only if I was still coughing a week later.

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       I don’t mind the new medicine, where you communicate with your doctor through email. Saves a lot of time. But this time my doctor wasn’t so sure. Better, he said, for him to see me in person than simply dash off a prescription. And if I couldn’t come in for an office appointment in my waning days in the country, I could schedule a Zoom consultation.

       I don’t mind Zoom consultations, either. In the future, we’ll never see our doctors. We’ll have iPads with dongles that can be inserted in various orifices to check our vitals.

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       So I went online and booked a virtual appointment with a PA. And I broke the rules.

       You see, the appointment software said this PA was licensed to work only in the District and could only do Zoom consultations with patients who were physically located in Washington. I live in Maryland. How would they even know?

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       After I booked the appointment I got an email from the PA. She was looking forward to helping me, she wrote, and she just wanted to reiterate that I had to be physically located in D.C.

       Again, I wondered: How would she know? Would my phone give me away? Had a tracking chip been inserted when I got the shingles vaccine?

       As the appointment drew closer, I started to get nervous. I’d repeatedly confirmed that I’d be in Washington for my virtual appointment. If they found out I wasn’t, would white-shirted goons kick down my door? Would the PA be arrested for practicing without a license? Would I never get my sweet, sweet steroids?

       And so, it embarrasses me to admit, I decided to get in my car and drive 1.8 miles from my Silver Spring home and across the DC/MD border.

       I thought: Wouldn’t it be ironic if I were injured in a car crash on the way to the “doctor”?

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       I parked my car in front of somebody’s house on North Portal Drive NW and had the video call, my dog, Archie, looking on from the back seat.

       In the end, the physician assistant declined to prescribe the steroids. From my description of my symptoms, it sounded to her like my cold was waning. She said Flonase, Zyrtec and warm tea with honey should do the trick.

       She did prescribe an albuterol inhaler in case I got wheezy in a foreign land. I’ll be sure to follow the instructions on it.

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       John Kelly’s Washington

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