Judy Moody, M.D.: The Doctor is In! (Judy Moody)

by Megan McDonald

  "But you said they were grapefruits," said Judy. "Maybe he has Grapefruititis!"

  "Grapes," said Dr. McCavity. "Not grapefruit. If he takes care of those tonsils, he won't have to worry about Grapefruititis." She laughed again.

  "Dr. McCavity, you should have been a dentist!" Judy cracked herself up.

  "You like jokes? What did the doctor say to the patient with tonsillitis?"

  "What?"

  "Have a swell time!" said Dr. McCavity.

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  Double no fair! Stink got to stay home from school (for real), drink ginger ale (for breakfast), and eat mashed-banana toast all day (the bratty diet). AND he got to have TV in his room, even though Dr. McCavity did not say one thing about TV in your room.

  Judy did not stay away from Stink as much as possible.

  She took his temperature (way not normal) and made him a hospital bracelet with his name (Stinker) on it. She let him use her crazy straw to drink ginger ale. She read him Rex Morgan, M.D., comics and Cherry Ames, Student Nurse, mysteries.

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  She wrote him a prescription on her doctor pad.

  She even took a Hippopotamus oath to be nice to Stink. Nicey-nice. Doctor nice.

  "Stink," she said, raising her right hand, "I swear by Neopolitan and Hygiene and Larry Lasagna that I will do everything I can to the best of my ability to help make

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  you better. Here. Pet Mouse." She plopped Mouse on Stink's stomach.

  "Ow!" said Stink. "She clawed me!" Mouse jumped to the floor.

  Judy picked up Mouse again. "Stink, you have to pet her twenty times. It's called Paws for Healing. It will lower your blood pressure. Trust me."

  "Are you sure it's not called Paws for

  Scratching?"

  "Stink. Just try it." Judy plopped her cat on Stink again. Mouse bolted off the bed, knocking over the glass of ginger ale.

  "Ahhh! Ginger ale! It's all over me," cried Stink.

  Judy got Stink a towel. And a new ginger ale. And a clean crazy straw. She got

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  him a not-wet blanket. She got him Baxter and Ebert, his stuffed-animal penguin and timber wolf.

  For four days, she fed Toady. For four days, she brought Stink his homework. For four days, she watched Megazoid and the Deltoid Bananas with Stink, even though she wanted to watch the Operation Channel.

  That's when she saw it. In an ad on TV not prescribed by Dr. McCavity. The one-and--only, for-sure cure for Stink. "Are you tired all the time?" Yes. Stink was sleeping right now!

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  "Are you sick? Want to be healthy? Live longer?"

  Yes, yes, and YES!! Judy told the TV.

  "We have a secret just for you. PRUNES!" said the cartoon lady on TV.

  "PRUNES!" cried Judy. "UCK!"

  "Bite them, chew them. Don't pooh-pooh them." said the TV lady. "CALIFORNIA PRUNES! The energy-packed super snack. Majorly delicious! Off to climb Mt. Everest? Take some PRUNES with you today."

  Judy did not think Stink would be climbing Mt. Everest anytime soon. He could barely climb out of bed. But it was worth a try. All she had to do was convince Stink to eat one prune.

  Judy tiptoed downstairs and opened the

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  kitchen cupboards. Tea bags, peanut butter, pretzels, crackers. . . . They had to be here somewhere. Judy pulled a chair over to the up-high cupboards. Ah-ha! A shiny bag!

  Gravy?!

  Gravy did not help you climb Mt. Everest. Gravy did not cure tonsils. Gravy did not make you live longer.

  She spotted a yellow sun shining on the front of a pink and purple bag. Finally! Judy stared at two shriveled lumps. Prunes were icky. Sticky. Prunes were wrinkly as elephants and looked like one-hundred-and-fiftyyearold buffalo droppings. hundred-year-old dried-up belly-buttons. Two-hundred-and-fifty-year-old tonsils.

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  Why do you have to eat bad stuff for good stuff to happen?

  The world was backwards, according to Judy Moody.

  Dr. Judy went back upstairs. "Stink! Wake up!" said Judy.

  "Wha... ?"

  "I have your cure! Right here in my hand. No more fever. No more grapefruit tonsils." Judy held out her hand. She showed Stink the prunes.

  "What? What are those?" asked Stink.

  "Prunes. The secret to not getting sick. The secret to climbing Mt. Everest."

  "They look like moon rocks. Or petrified prune rocks."

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  "They do kind of look like the owl pellets we had in Science "

  "Owl pellets! Owl pellets are hairballs. Owl pellets are spit-up."

  "Prunes are just plums," said Judy. "C'mon. One bite."

  "No way, Prunella De Vil. I am not eating a hairball. I am not eating spit-up."

  "Don't you want to live longer? Don't you want to have teeny-tiny tonsils again?"

  "Okay. Then help me. Say nice things about prunes," said Stink.

  Judy sniffed a prune. "They don't smell like buffalo droppings."

  "That's the nicest thing you can say about a prune?"

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  "They're not hairy."

  "Not hairy is good," said Stink.

  "I know,' said Judy. "Close your eyes. On the count of three, we'll BOTH eat a prune at the same time.

  "One, one thousand --"

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  Stink closed his eyes tight.

  "Two, one thousand --"

  Judy threw her prune in the trash.

  "Three--"

  Stink actually put the prune in his mouth.

  "Eee-yew!" cried Stink. Thwaaa! Stink spit out the prune. It went flying across the floor and landed in a dust ball. "I licked it! It touched my taste buds!"

  "It's supposed to taste MAJORLY delicious. The TV said so," Judy told him.

  "It tastes majorly disgusting," said Stink. "You tricked me!"

  "I was just trying to help you feel better," said Judy. "Now I'm a bad doctor and you'll never feel better."

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  "I feel better knowing I'm not going to eat that prune."

  "Stink, don't you get it? That was the last prune. Now it has cat hair and spit all over it. What are we going to do?" Before you could say majorly dust ball, Mouse pounced on the cat-hairy spit-up prune.

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  "No! Mouse! Wait!" said Judy.

  It was too late. Ga-loomp! Mouse chewed it up and swallowed. Hairball, spit, and all. Judy and Stink fell on the floor laughing.

  Prune lips licked her paws, face, and whiskers. "Mouse," said Judy, picking up her cat, "you are going to live a very long life."

  "Nine long lives," said Stink.

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  Doctor Day! The day Judy got to dress up like Elizabeth Blackwell, First Woman Doctor, and do a REAL LIVE operation for Class 3T. An operation was the best of all the brainstorms from her list. The best Human Body project ever. Better even than trying to doctor Stink.

  Her patient was special. Her patient had green skin and did not talk back. Her patient would not hog the TV and drink

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  all the ginger ale and spit out healthy prunes.

  Her patient was perfect. She could hardly wait.

  First she took one more bath.

  Stink knocked on the bathroom door. "Knock-knock!"

  "Who's there?"

  "Stink, minus one belly-button."

  No answer.

  "Mom! Judy's hogging the bathroom and she already took a million baths yesterday." Stink banged on the door. "Hurry up! I need to get in there!"

  Judy came out with a towel on her head, and all-wrinkly hands and feet. "I liked it better when you were sick," said Judy.

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  "I liked it better when you didn't look like a spit-up prune," said Stink.

  "Doctors have to be really, really clean, Stink. Elizabeth Blackwell took three cold showers a day!"

  "Elizabeth Blackwell didn't leave a lake on the floor."

  "Hardee-harhar."

  "Hip bone's connected to da le
g bone," Judy sang as she got dressed. Today was going to be the amazing-est human body day ever, from head to toe.

  At school, Judy had ants in her pants all through Spelling, bees in her patella-knees all through Math. At last it was Science. Mr. Todd said the magic words. "Time for our

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  Human Body projects. Rocky, why don't you go first?"

  Rocky wrapped himself in toilet paper like a mummy, and told how eating a mummy can help your tummy! No lie. Doctors in the old-old-olden days thought mummies could cure stuff like stomachaches. So they ground up mummies, bones and all, and used them for medicine.

  "Creepy!" said most of the class.

  "Fascinating," said Judy.

  Jessica Finch wrote medi-words

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  on the board. Words like intelligirl (really smart girl), brainiac (has super-Einstein, not-kidney-bean brain), and brain case (sick in the brain), which she added to the dictionary. Then she passed out a word search. Judy found all the medi-words at brainiac speed.

  Finally, Mr. Todd called on her. Dr. Judy Elizabeth Blackwell. She put on her doctor shirt, a stethoscope, and a left-eye patch. She taped plastic bags over her shoes. She colored between her eyebrows with a black marker and stuck fake bugs on her head with tape. "Today I am Elizabeth Blackwell, First Woman Doctor," said Judy. "I'll start with a poem." She took a deep breath, so

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  she wouldn't get a terrible case of nerves. Or a bad case of sweat.

  Elizabeth Blackwell lived in an attic

  Nothing was qutomatic

  First in her class

  What more could you ask?

  Became first woman doctor even though boys mocked her

  Opened a clinic helped poor people in it.

  Delivered babies. Gave shots for rabies, maybe. Opened her own school. It was way cool.

  Wrote a book, Wonder how long it took. Born, I don't know when. Died, 1910.

  Take after the example of Doctor Elizabeth Blackwell.

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  Everybody clapped. "Any questions before I begin the operation?" Judy asked.

  "Why are you wearing pajamas?" asked Hailey.

  "Scrubs," said Judy. "It's a doctor shirt. Doctors have to be really, really clean and take tons of baths a day."

  "Why do you only have one eyebrow?" asked Frank.

  "It's a uni-brow. Like Elizabeth Black- well had. Plus it makes me look smart. Like an intelligirl who is not a brain case."

  "Why do you have that pirate patch on your eye?" asked Brad.

  "Elizabeth Blackwell got an eye infection and they took out her eye, so she wore an eye patch."

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  "Ooh. Gross!"

  "Why do you have fake bugs on your head?" asked Jessica Finch.

  "They didn't really know how to fix her eye, so they put bloodsucking leeches on her head. They thought it would help."

  "EEE-yew!" said a bunch of kids in the class.

  "Did you write that poem?"

  "Well, it wasn't a gnome!"

  "Why do you have plastic bags on your feet?"

  "In case of blood," said Judy.

  "Class, let's let Judy show us her project," said Mr. Todd.

  "Time for a real live operation!" said Judy.

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  "Do it on me!" said Frank.

  "Not me!" said Rocky.

  "If you need a guinea pig," said Jessica Finch, "do it on Peanut."

  "I already have a patient."

  "Is it dead?" asked Bradley.

  "My patient is alive, not dead. My patient is better to practice on than a little brother. My patient has lots of guts. Ooey-gooey guts."

  "Who is it?"

  "Tell us!"

  "Does it have a name?"

  "Yes."

  "Oh no! Does it have green skin?" asked Rocky.

  "Yes!" said Judy.

  "It's Toady!" Frank called out.

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  "Her name is ... Ima," said Judy. She held up a zucchini with a Magic-Marker face. "Ima Green Zucchini!"

  The whole class clapped.

  Frank came up front to help. He held up

  Judy's x-ray drawing of the insides of a zucchini.

  "First, make sure you take an xray, so you know what you're doing."

  "What's that big black blob?" asked Rocky.

  "That's the thing I'm going to remove.

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  The appendix. Nobody really knows what the appendix is for, so it's a good thing to take out."

  "I had my appendix out," said Alison S.

  "I had mine out twice," said Bradley.

  "Before you start," said Judy, "don't forget to take the Hippo oath. Swear by the Hippo guy, Father of Medicine, and Mr. Clean and Louis Lasagna that you will do your doctor best. Then make sure the patient is clean."

  Judy turned to Frank. "Toothbrush!" She scrubbed the zucchini with a toothbrush.

  "Shot." Frank handed her the shot from her doctor kit.

  "Give the patient a shot, so they fall asleep. Use your nicey-nicey voice and tell

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  them they won't feel a thing. Or tell them a joke to make them feel okay. Like, what vegetable lives in a cage? A zoo-chini!"

  Frank cracked up the most at that one.

  "Knife!" Frank handed Judy a plastic knife.

  "Next, make the incision."

  "I-N-C-I-S-I-O-N," said Intelligirl Jessica Finch, Queen of Medi-words. "A cut, slash, or gash."

  Judy poked the zucchini with the plastic knife.

  "Scissors," said Judy. Frank handed her the scissors.

  Snip, snip, snip.

  "Blood!" Judy said to Frank. She pointed to the ketchup bottle. Frank poured ketchup all over the zucchini.

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  "Operations have lots of blood."

  "All this ketchup stuff is making me hungry for hot dogs and stuff," said Rocky.

  "Tweezers!" She whispered, "Clothes pin" to Frank.

  "Take out the appendix." Judy pulled out a hunk of seeds with the clothes-pin.

  "Sponge!" Judy picked up the zucchini and wiped off the ketchup-blood. The zucchini was so ketchup-ie, it slipped out of Judy's hands and fell to the floor.

  OH, NO!

  The kids in 3T leaned out of their seats to see what had happened. There, in the middle of aisle 3, was perfect patient Ima Green Zucchini, lying in a pool of ketchup- blood, broken in two!

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  "Rule number one: Stay calm," said Judy. "Admit 'I know not' what to do!"

  Then she had an idea. Judy picked up both halves of her patient and said to Frank, "Sutures!" So Frank handed her a needle and some thread.

  "I'll just sew the patient back up." Judy showed the class how to make nice neat stitches. In, out, in, out.

  "Don't just do a sew-sew job. Or your patient will have a purple Frankenstein scar. Or a pizza-shaped scar, like mine." Judy pulled up her sleeve to show her own bumpy pizza-scar, from the time she fell chasing the ice-cream truck. Judy and Frank laughed till their appendixes hurt.

  Frank helped Judy put Band-Aids all

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  over her patient. "Wait one week, then take the stitches out. Tell them to rest and eat prunes and plenty of Screamin' Mimi's ice cream. No, wait. That's for tonsils. Whatever! The end."

  Everybody clapped really hard. "Good job," said Mr. Todd. "Nice details. You really thought of everything. I'd say it was a smashing success!"

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  The very next day after Operation Zucchini, Frank Pearl brought a cardboard person to school. A cardboard person that looked exactly like him.

  "Awesome," said Rocky. "You have a twin!"

  "He's my clone. I'm Frank. He's Stein. Get it? We're Frank-and-Stein!"

  Judy hoped Frank-and-Stein was not better than Operation Zucchini.

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  Frank Pearl told the class how you get DNA from a bone or a hair. "One cell has all your genes. You can make another one of you, exactly like you, by cloning. Yo
u can't see your genes," said Frank. "But it's all there."

  "I can see my jeans. I'm wearing them," said Bradley.

  "Not blue jeans. G-E-N-E, genes. DNA is the stuff that makes you YOU."

  "Cool beans," said Judy.

  "Scientists cloned a sheep and named her Dolly. And they cloned a bunch of mice. And some pigs, right here in Virginia," Frank told the class.

  "Is that true, Mr. Todd?" asked Jessica Finch.

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  "It's science fiction," said Alison S.

  "Like Jurassic Park," said Rocky.

  "It's true," said Mr. Todd.

  "They found a mammoth frozen in ice and they might try to clone it with DNA so mammoths won't be extinct anymore. No lie," said Frank.

  "Thank you, Frank," said Mr. Todd. "Very interesting. Most of us just think of cloning as science fiction."

  The rest of the morning, Frank Pearl did not pay attention once. Judy wrote him a note, but he didn't write back. She told him a joke, but he didn't laugh.

  "Frank! What's wrong?" Judy asked.

  "My project wasn't good."

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  "Was so!" said Judy. "You're a geneius."

  "My project was cardboard. Dead cardboard. Nobody even believes it's real. Yours had something real. Something alive." He just stared at Peanut, the dwarf guinea pig.

  "Why are you staring at Peanut?" asked Judy. '

  "I was just thinking how she must be lonely all by herself," said Frank.

  "Judy, Frank, are you with us?" asked Mr. Todd.

  "Sorry, Mr. Todd," said Judy. "Frank's worried about Peanut. Do guinea pigs get lonely? For friends?"