Vlog the Inhaler, or The Occasional Video Blog Musings of Jim Thornton
Red Letter Day...So far
by , November 3rd, 2009 at 12:09 PM (2836 Views)
I returned to the office of the beautiful blonde dermatologist sans merci and was escorted into her parlor by a brunette nurse. The nurse instructed me to remove my pants and underwear, the elastic in the latter of which she could not fail to see was exhausted. She gave me a paper drape with which to cover myself and then she briefly left the room, leaving my unguarded medical chart on the formica table.
As soon as she was gone, I bounded over and looked at the results:
Results negative for herpes simplex 1 and 2 and herpes zoster.
Then the nurse reappeared, and I said, "So I don't have sexual leprosy?"
And she said, "I don't know, I haven't looked at the test results yet. The doctor will be in to go over these in a minute."
Despite this waffling, my heart was doing somersaults. The lesion was still idiopathic!
The nurse snipped the stitch and pulled it out and left.
A few minutes later, the beautiful blonde dermatologist knocked once and entered. Perhaps it is projection on my part, but she seemed to have found in the one week interlude a portion of merci for wretched minions like me.
Wretched, albeit not incurably venereal, minions.
She smiled and said the tests for herpes and shingles were negative.
There is a certain obsessiveness in me that likes to narrow things down to the 10 to the minus 12th power of certainty.
"So," I said, in hopes of clarification, "you are saying I don't have sexual leprosy?"
She smiled again and said, "Leprosy was never one of the suspects." But then, perhaps having some familiarity with patients like me, she added, "You DON'T have sexual leprosy."
So much for the swab test results.
Unfortunately, however, the pathology lab results (cookie cutter biopsy) had not yet come back. The beautiful blonde dermatologist, who now seemed to kind of like me, promised to call my cell phone as soon as these did come in.
I asked her if groin cancer had now emerged as the next likeliest suspect.
"I don't think malignancy is very likely, given how suddenly the lesion appeared," she said. "Malignancies usually take a long time to develop."
More likely agents, she thought, were some sort of fungus, bite, poison plant, or other cause of the inflammatory process. It could still theoretically be another form of bacteria, but that's unlikely given the fact that I already went through antibiotic treatment without benefits.
I told her that the area, which is clearly healing, still itched like crazy. She asked if the steroid creme she gave me free samples of was helping. I told her I stopped using it because it didn't seem to be making any difference, and she replied that it can take up to a week for that to work. She recommended I resume auto-anointment (my phrase, not hers).
She said whatever it was, it wasn't contagious anymore (if it had ever been), and that it was okay to resume swimming. I didn't have the heart to tell her that I had already done that.
In any event, this whole episode has resulted in collateral damage of multiple stripes to the innocent. I will dedicate myself to making whatever amends are possible--and take the ongoing maddening itch in the spirit of much deserved punishment and penance for my sins.
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