My father calls it the organ recital. You know,
when everybody sits around complaining about ailments. Frankly I try not to
bore people with that sort of thing since we’re all starting to leak at
the seams from one thing or another these days.
But over the past two weeks several medical
oddities surfaced and I thought I’d share them with you. If sitting around
in person kvetching is a recital, I guess I’m publishing the sheet music.
It’s Tin Pain Alley. (ba-da-bing.)
First, the doctor called me intolerant.
I’ve been called a lot of things in my time, but intolerant was never one
of them. But then I never expressed a prejudice like this before either. All
of a sudden, I’m anti-dairy. Lactose intolerant, and it’s a bitch.
Me, who never met a frozen custard she
didn’t like; me, who’s equally happy with a bowl of Cheerios and milk as
a gourmet dinner; me, who lives for crème brulee.
So I opened negotiations with my stomach,
offering to trade half and half for skim and a future draft choice. Even
that watery stuff caused trouble. I was stuck with the disgusting powdery
non-dairy creamer, and for a while I saw no point in going on.
My doctor gave me a prescription for one of
those remedies advertised on TV. And If I might digress here, what the hell
are drug companies doing advertising prescription drugs in the first place?
Call me old fashioned, but shouldn’t that be the doctor’s call? Why
should I go to a doctor asking for the drug I saw advertised by showing us a
dog doing Tai Chi or people standing on mountains to cure their throat
lesions? It’s not like Madison Avenue is trying to convince me to buy
soup. They’re pushing me to
buy something I’d be arrested for getting without a prescription. Does
this bother anybody else?
And while I’m off the topic, how about
those second generation drugs, like Sneezinex that replaces the older
Sneezatin. The original drug didn’t stop my allergies and the new one
won’t either. From what I hear, it’s just a drug company ploy to keep
making money once the generic of the original drug is released. Why is the
public so gullible? Maybe we need a drug like Naivium, which will no doubt
be followed by Naivium Nexeum……
Okay, so I gladly stayed away from cottage
cheese and skim milk, which wasn’t really the problem, and grudgingly
skipped the Kohr Brothers, which was. One day, sitting at my desk, eating my
dairy-free lunch, I looked down and discovered a couple of little black
spots on the hem of my khaki pants.
That darn stray cat I’d let into the office
for a drink of water the day before must have had fleas. I walked to Highs,
purchased some over-the-counter flea spray, gave my office a little shot and
went home.
Back at the ranch, Bonnie gleefully told the
dogs not to get near me because I had fleas. She rushed to apply
prophylactic flea soap to the boys and threatened to wash me with it as
well.
Overnight, in Rehoboth’s own Monsters,
Inc., the fleas propagated their entire species in my place of employment.
By morning, when I walked in the door, literally, thousands of little black
spots attached themselves to me, my clothes, my desk chair, etc.
In the time it took me to call an
exterminator, open my e-mail, get my phone messages and flee the flea
circus, the attack on my person was akin to the first forty-five minutes of
Saving Private Ryan.
If you’re wondering if I’d sat down in my
desk chair, let me assure you I had. Benedryl lotion was required head to
toe, including, as Noel Coward once said, right up to Trafalgar Square.
I had flea bites down my shirt, up my pants,
in my ears, it was disgusting. I didn’t know whether to go to the
dermatologist or the vet. For those three 85-degree days in October,
everybody was in shorts but me. I didn’t want people to think I had
leprosy.
And I couldn’t even soothe my agony with a
Dairy Queen Blizzard, which made me both intolerant and grumpy.
Fast forward, several days later. The
exterminator had thousands of notches to add to his bombers’ nose cone and
my bites began to disappear. Except for a peculiar-looking one in the
plunging neckline of my shirt. Hmmm, now that I looked at it in the mirror,
it didn’t look like a fleabite at all. This odd red blemish looked, well,
more sinister.
Now here’s a sentence you don’t often
hear: “It’s a good thing
you had fleas.”
But that’s what my dermatologist said as
she did a biopsy of my non-fleabite.
Turns out that waaay back in my 20s or 30s
I’d probably gotten waaaay too much sun in a low cut bathing suit and
there it was—a small skin cancer that required attention.
I don’t know about you, but upon hearing
this news my first thought was “get that thing off me!” Of course, my
second thought was “Exactly how are they going to get that thing off
me?”
The biopsy was just a little scrape, so I
figured the trip back to the doctor to remove the thing was no big deal.
Okay, I was delusional. Turns out the dermatologist gave me a local
anesthetic and hoped I wouldn’t notice that she and her team were using
what appeared to be a front-end loader to make an incision. The damn thing
took ten stitches to close. Who knew I was going to have a quasi-lumpectomy?
Apparently Bonnie did, but had the good sense to keep it to herself.
So there I was with stitches in my cleavage.
If you bump your head or hurt your arm you’re allowed to favor the injury.
What could I do, walk around saying the Pledge of Allegiance?
Well, this whole organ recital thing finally
came full circle on our drive home from the dermatologist. I decided to
write about these events since the disgusting attack of the flea circus
seemed, after all, to have some higher purpose. I could warn you sun
worshippers to use more sunscreen or at least check for things that don’t
look like flea bites. Really, please get a check up by a dermatologist to
see if any of those specks —the ones we all seem to have—need to be
removed.
But the really odd part of this medical
mystery happened as I had my hand to my chest, giving the impression I was
doing a Mea Culpa. I already felt queasy from the minor surgery, so I
figured that having a good old fashioned milk shake to make myself feel
better couldn’t hurt. The hell with intolerance.
Funny thing was, I was just fine. That night,
pushing my luck, I coddled myself with a grilled cheese sandwich. Again, no
problem. The final test came the next day when I gleefully put milk in my
coffee. Yippee! Seems my lactose intolerance may have been stress-induced
and temporary. I can be a dairy queen again. And that’s a good thing.
And so is making sure you don’t overdose on
the sun. Go get checked out, please.
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