Vlog the Inhaler, or The Occasional Video Blog Musings of Jim Thornton

Forgive what is almost certainly going to be perceived as--and rightly so--today's somewhat lazy vlogging effort.

Yesterday's savage indictment of American healthcare prompted a goodly number of responses, including inquiries about familial cross-dressing tendencies, the notorious Pittsburgh "O", Carnegie Mellon University's old pool, and a new round of diagnosis regarding my finger buboe by none other than Dr. Tom Jaegermeister Jaegar, Mayo Clinic swimming vunderkind extraordinaire.

I replied to all of these comments with a comment of my own, which ran on at some length. Only this morning, when the Nyquil and Sonata wore off, and the buboe continued to stare at me from its perch on my finger, did it occur to me that my comment was actually longer than most of my vlogs.

A friend mentioned she was enjoying the comic hilarity of my corporal misery. I told her I didn't understand what she meant. There was an uncomfortable silence.

Anyhow, I have taken the liberty of cutting yesterday's comment out of the comment section and pasting it in here as today's vlog.

To encourage readership, let me just say at the outset that my teammates' consensus diagnosis--syphilitic spirochetes (see picture)--is almost certainly not correct. Neither is Hanson's Diseease.

This picture is NOT me. At least not yet. The usurped commentary vlog to follow.





Thanks one and all for your kind words and counsel.

In terms of the cross dressing, that is more my brother John's world than mine. Granted, we both went through a period in our youth when we referred to each other as Susie and Sally. By age four, however, I thought we had both emerged from this. We called each other "Other Man" for a number of years, then this switched to "Brother," then "Bruddy"--an amalgam of "Brother & Buddy"--and it has been Bruddy ever since. Sometime in the last year or two, Bruddy John developed this character Libby Ellen Spooner. Perhaps Susie has been dormant within him for years.

Maybe Sally is trying to escape from me in the form of a pustulant buboe?

In any event, the O is still going strong--a rat-infested rat hole of ancient hotdog detritus and french fry oil from the Vietnam era, where the presence of pustulant buboes appears to be a job requirement for the cooking staff. My son loves the O. I am ambivalent.

I didn't know that CMU had an old pool. The new one, designed by local septuagenarian masters swimmer nonpareil, Jimmy Goldman, a swimmimg pool architect, is one of the nicest 25 yard pools I have ever swum in.

Tom, thanks for ruling out the herpetic "whiteout" (or whatever the proper term is) along with dyshidrosis, AKA pompholyx and vesicular hand and foot dermatitis. The possibility that I have instead something that sounds like hoof and mouth disease is sort of intriguing to my hypochondriacal sensibilities. Didn't Paul Newman in the movie Hud try to sell a bunch of cattle infected with this to restaurateurs before the health inspectors could order the herd culled?

I went to practice tonight and swam very slowly. The buboe on my finger, though not so much the one on my abdomen, seemed to really disgust the young females on my team, especially the ones I attempted to cajole with exhortations such as, "Please kiss my finger and make it feel better."

I overheard one of the spunkier lasses say that she had just had to swallow a little vomit that had reached the back of her throat.

One very nice guy on our team is an eye doctor, and he looked at the lesions and said that they looked a little like MRSA but almost certainly weren't because they would have gotten much worse instead of a little better over the past 24 hours. He also said that viral infections tend not to produce lesions with pus.

Every one of the team with the exception of the eye doctor and myself were for me taking a sterlized needle and popping this thing open. The eye doctor said that if it was on his finger, he would probably end up doing that himself, but he would try not to. I figured if an hour of swimming in a heavily chlorinated pool, followed by immersion in the Jacuzzi's hot roiling waters, did nothing to erode the carapace covering the buboe's creamy center, then my body was containing the vileness for a reason.

We all agreed that liquid skin was not a good thing to try--what with this serving as a further impenetrable blockage for the bacterial escape.

Anyhow, I have decided to adopt for the time being a policy of watchful waiting. If it evolves in the direction of leprosy, I will redouble my efforts to see an actual doctor of fingers as opposed to eyeballs. If it gets better, I will move on to other vlogging topics, because if there is one thing I have learned, it is that infirmity is neverending.

And if it stays the same, which I suspect it will, like our economy, a festering staglationary nightmare of a finger buboe, then I will try to put the best face on my new reality as I can--and apply for a job at Pittsburgh's legendary O, or Original Hotdog Shop.