LETTERS From CAMP Rehoboth |
CAMPOut: No fleas on me |
by Fay Jacobs |
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 crme 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 wasa 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 haveneed 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. |
LETTERS From CAMP Rehoboth, Vol. 12, No. 14, October 18, 2002. |