By Courtney Day

If only I could have gone to Walgreen's.

It would have been so simple: Walk in. Meet with a pharmacist. Plunk down the cash. A breeze. But no, just a few months ago you needed a doctor's prescription to get emergency contraception. If I had a physician and a health plan – and the luck to have had the condom break during the business week – my afternoon might have been more pleasant.

Instead I was a medical free agent who happened to be spending the weekend in a campground several hundred miles from the nearest Planned Parenthood.

• • •

We begin our search for emergency contraception at an urgent care clinic near Lake Tahoe. There's a girl behind the counter with big, bulging brown eyes and greasy neutral-tone lipstick. I want to say that she was smacking gum, but that might be, at least literally, untrue.

"Hi, um, I need to get a prescription for the morning-after pill. Would that be possible?"

She stares up at me, long lashes, sagging jowls, expressionless, cowlike. "I'm sorry, but the doctor on duty? He won't prescribe it? Because it's, like, against his religion???"

"Oh. Well, is there another place in town where I might be able to go?"

Odd, utterly vacant pause. "The hospital. Right down the street?"

We walk down the block and end up wandering around in the hospital, in and out of empty corridors, until we land in the emergency room. There's a glassed-in booth labeled "Patient Check-in" with a chair and a little silver bell, which I ring. A woman in scrubs appears, mutely walking toward the thick glass. Disoriented, I start to talk – lucky for me the glass isn't soundproof, and I manage to communicate to her the reason for my visit.

"Why don't you come in?" she mouths, barely audible. I walk through a big double door and glance back at Tom, who mouths "HOW MUCH???" from the sitting area.

"I don't have health insurance," I say as she pulls up two chairs. "So I'd like to know how much this'll cost, before we get started."

"Well, we'll see what we can do," she says, giving me one of those encouraging little pats with the flat of her palm. "But it should be around a hundred dollars. That's for the prescription. You'll be able to pick up the pill from a drugstore; it shouldn't cost much."

We sit. I smile. "Wow, that's pretty, well, outside my budget."

She smiles too. Another pat. "Well, it's a whole lot cheaper than a baby, dear."

"That's true," I say.

Eventually we find another clinic. No insurance accepted. We park in the dirt lot next to an old Ford pickup and go in what looks like a side-alley entrance but is in fact the main door.

Inside the waiting room a woman in her early 70s is asleep in one of the mauve-upholstered chairs. The glass partition is open, and there's a cheerful girl, probably about 14, seated behind the desk.

I give her my little speech. "Oh, sure," she giggles. "The doctor will be right with you."

I wait about 45 minutes in an examination room, trying to fend off boredom without resorting to the copy of Parent's Day sitting in a plastic magazine rack on the wall. I curl up as best as I can in a squeaky plastic chair and try to nap until the doctor comes in.

"Hi there, sweetheart, and how are you today?" the doctor says with a big toothy grin. He pulls a chair up, right up, and sits down, his leg resting against my left thigh. Smile, and the hand goes right down on my knee.

There's some small talk, during which I politely smile, maneuver out of physical contact, and try to ignore all of the sweethearts, honeys, and other charming little pet names that are being thrown my way. Finally I manage to steer him around to the question of the pill. He grins and reaches into his back pocket.

"Now look here, beautiful." In his hand he's holding what looks like a sample packet of birth-control pills – not his telephone number or a picture of him naked or any other perverse possibilities. He awkwardly opens it and begins to explain which pills I should take, gets confused, reads and rereads the label, giggles, and then finally scrawls the dosage on the cardboard package. "Now that's four yellows ... oh wait, no ... that's greens, ha-ha, take them, the green ones that is, right away, and be sure to eat something with them – we don't want these babies upsetting that pretty little stomach of yours! And then set your alarm clock, honey, because you need to take four more exactly 12 hours, that's 12 hours, later. OK sugar? Now let's get you signed out and on your way, let me ... " As one hand reaches out to give me a hand up, the other "accidentally" slides up the side of my rib cage. Before it can get any farther, I jerk in the other direction.

"Whoa there baby! You just help yourself up then!" he laughs.

"Excuse me," I say, imagining kickboxing moves and well-thrown punches but managing only to walk out of the room.

The underage-looking receptionist is in the front office. "That'll be $75," she says. I grab Tom out of the reception area, and we cough it up, thanking our lucky stars that the whole escapade is over.

We walk out of the clinic into the car and drive back to our campsite, unsure whether we should pat each other on the back for doing the mature thing – and not, as usual, leaving our lives up to the fertility crapshoot – or slap ourselves for being swindled and call some legal organization about that swingin' clinic doctor. I go to bed early after a hot bowl of chili and rice and proceed to spend much of the next morning dry heaving into a camp toilet.