Category Archives: health

My In-Law and My Ink

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I expected a total freak out. I really did. So I tried to work it into a phone conversation as naturally as I could.

“Say Mom, did Dan tell you I got a tattoo?”

Instead of the expected shriek, I got a fairly calm query.(1) “Where?”(2)

If I were being a smart ass I would have said “At Monkey Bones Tattoos.” But I took the sensible route for a change and said, “On the inside of my left wrist.”

Then she asked, “What did you get?”

Again, any number of possible responses crossed my mind. But I decided to play it straight and told her the truth: “I got a semi-colon.”(3)

The next obvious question was, “Why?”

I could have said because I’m a huge grammar nerd, which would have been the truth about me, but not about the tattoo.

I explained as best I could. The semi-colon tattoo is a symbol of mental health awareness and suicide prevention. I rushed through the grammatical part of the explanation: In writing a semi-colon is a place where the writer could have stopped, but chose to go on. The idea is that someone will see the tattoo (4) and ask about it. Then you can explain the symbolism and how you are trying to combat the stigma of talking about mental illness. Like I just did.

I wrote about this on my other blog, Bipolar Me (https://bipolarjan.wordpress.com/2015/08/09/a-tattoo-is-for-life/) when I first got the tattoo, so if you saw it there, I apologize for the repetition.

Actually, no I don’t. The message is one that bears repeating, as often as we can and in as many ways as we can. You know someone with a mental illness(5) and that person is afraid to talk about it because of the stigma that still exists around the subject. I have bipolar disorder, type 2, and I talk about it all the time on my Bipolar Me blog.

Talking about mental illness is risky. You often get one of the standard reactions: a fixed, awkward smile; unwelcome advice about cinnamon or apple cider vinegar; outright disbelief; a decrease in contact with that person; sudden bad reviews at work. Perhaps worst of all, you get, “Isn’t that what the guy who just shot up the shopping mall had?”

Ordinarily, I post to my blog on Sunday. But this is National Suicide Prevention Week, so I wanted to post now. You can find out more about the tattoos at http://www.projectsemicolon.com/.

As Mom R. said about my tattoo, “It’s for a good cause.”

 

(1) My father-in-law was a Navy man and sported a few of the more common nautical tattoos, so I guess Mom R. had had a while to get used to the idea. Anyway, at least she didn’t go all, “The body is the Temple of God” on me.

(2) Apparently this is the first required question if someone announces a tattoo. Unless it’s on your face, neck or other readily observable spot. I suspect that everyone who asks imagines that it is located some place at least mildly kinky.

(3) Monkey Bones is locally known for extreme, large, and disturbing tattoos, like zombie cows. (I’m not kidding, either.) I think they must have been so embarrassed at being asked to do a pitiful mark of punctuation that they hustled me in and out in ten minutes.

(4) And if we had been Skyping, Mom R. would have, but Skype has been glitchy lately since I changed browsers. So we have our weekly coffee chats over speakerphone. This prevents a lot of Dan handing me the phone and saying, “Here. Say hello to Mom.” Especially when I’m not prepared with any tidbits of conversation, like a new tattoo. Here’s a picture, if you’re curious:

finished
I guess Mike at Monkey Bones isn’t embarrassed after all.

(5) Depression, anxiety, OCD, ASD, whatever. I guarantee it. Someone you know is struggling, and may or may not be getting help for it. A semi-colon tattoo would show you care.

The Worst Sex-Ed Book. Ever.

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Dr. Seuss is my all-time favorite author of children’s rhyming books. He did not write a sex education book.(1)

Shel Silverstein took over from Seuss as my favorite children’s poet. He did not write a sex-ed book either.(2)

IMHO, no one has equaled those two in writing rhyming books for children, though many have tried. Lord, how they’ve tried. And for the most part, failed miserably.

I once edited a magazine called Early Childhood News, which was intended for an audience of child care center owners, directors, and possibly staff. It was occasionally entertaining.(3) I got a lot of children’s books to review.(4)

Which is where the sex-ed and the poetry come in.(5)

One day an amazing book came across my desk. It was titled How Dad and Mother Made Your Brother, which should have been my first clue.

The book was obviously self-published. To say that it lacked the services of a professional editor and a professional illustrator would be a charming understatement.

The text was written (and illustrated) by a real medical doctor, so I guess that was one up on Dr. Seuss, but it didn’t help. The main characters were – I’m not kidding – Stanley Sperm and Essie Egg.

One memorable illustration(6) showed Stanley and Essie sitting on a bench, courting, I suppose. As I recall Essie had long eyelashes and Stanley had either a top hat or a bow tie. Maybe both. Behind them was the gate to a park, with a sign identifying the location as “Cervix.”

You can probably tell from the bow tie and the park bench that scientific accuracy was not the author’s primary concern. Also, Essie and Stanley were the same size.(7)

And now we get to the poetry. Here’s a sample. The author was attempting to tell where Stanley Sperm had lived, before he met the coy and comely Miss Essie. Somewhat confusingly, it seemed that Stanley had come from one or the other of two towns:

The towns are both named “Testicle”
and they look like two round eggs.
They’re not located on a map,
but between your Daddy’s legs.(8)

Do I have to say I did not review the book? (I thought not.)

I kept it for a time, though, to show disbelieving friends. And possibly as the basis for a party game, with each person reading aloud from it until exploding with laughter, when it would be passed on to the next reader.(9)

Of course, given the sex-ed books currently used in schools, there may be other texts out there that are just as bad, or at least as inaccurate. But for sheer unintentional awfulness, How Dad and Mother Made Your Brother has won its place in the annals of scary books that will make kids never want to have sex. Ever. That being the point of most sex education in schools anyway, as far as I can tell.

(1) That we know of. He did write advertising, so who really knows where he drew the line?
(2) Though he certainly could have. He’s the author/artist of Different Dances and the songwriter of “Don’t Give a Dose to the One You Love Most.”
(3) The ad sales department once insisted I add a column about food, as they desperately wanted to attract Lunchables as a client. Yeah, right. Lunchables. For child care centers. I had no choice in the matter, except for the title of the column, which I made as repulsive as possible – “Food Digest.” Well, it amused me, anyway, even if no one else noticed.
(4) Also, sometimes companies sent me samples of toys they hoped I would promote in the magazine. Not sex toys, though. I also received, for some reason, an anti-circumcision newsletter. I used to count the number of times the word “foreskin” appeared in it, just to look busy.
(5) You were starting to wonder, weren’t you? Go on, admit it.
(6) I’ve been told that only shock treatment will erase it from my memory.
(7) Reminder: The author went to medical school and, presumably, graduated.
(8) I hope that’s enough of a sample, since it is the only verse I memorized. I do recall that the conception scene would have been a real production number, had the book ever made the transition to film.
(9) With bonus points awarded for imitating the voice of Bullwinkle the Moose or possibly Daffy Duck.

The Great Linguini Divot

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Dan is not a doctor.(1) But once he did take a scalpel to my tender flesh and excise a horror I had lived with for years.

Here’s how it happened: I had a recurring cyst that would appear on my torso from time to time, like a giant zit that just wandered off to be alone. Swollen, bright red, tight skin, pain – the whole works. Usually it went away after a few days.(2)

But it always came back. The timing was random, but the zit was not.

A friend saw it when we were changing clothes to go out. She didn’t take it seriously, though, so I told her that I had been to the doctor, who diagnosed it as “polymammia,” which meant I was growing a third breast.(3) It fooled her for a moment. But just a moment. A brief one.

Eventually, it bothered me enough to really see a doctor. He never said a word about “polymammia,”(4) but called it a recurring cyst. “Come back in a couple of days and I’ll lance it,” he said.

So I did. He looked at it and poked at it with a (gloved) finger and said, “It’s not ready yet.”

“You mean it’s not ripe?” I said. “Couldn’t you at least try to lance it? It hurts a lot.”

He allowed as how he could try. And did. And found a pocket of pus lurking underneath. “Wow! That must have hurt!” he said.

I gave him the sideways squint.

“Not that I didn’t believe you,” he stammered. Then he changed the subject. “Let’s put a drain in there.”

Here’s where the linguini enters the story.(5)

I had never had anything on or in my body drained before, so I thought maybe he would draw out the gunk with a hypodermic or at least take a tiny rubber hose and stick it into the cyst so the pus would just run out.

But no. It turns out a “drain” is an object that looks like a piece of knit linguini. He stuffed it in there and bandaged it and it healed nicely (after bleeding through the bandage and my shirt for a while).

Some time later, though, I noticed a slightly raised black dot, about the size of the roller from a roller ball pen, where the cyst used to be. Oh great, I thought. I’ve exchanged a wandering zit for a wandering blackhead.

The darned thing itched at times. It looked like I could squeeze it like the blackhead it resembled, or if I could get my fingernails under it, it would pop right out. I never could manage it, though, perhaps because I bite my fingernails off and spit them across the room as soon as they grow an eighth of an inch.(6)

Here’s where my husband and the scalpel come in. To be truthful, it wasn’t a scalpel. It was an Exacto knife. He sterilized it with flame and alcohol, and swabbed all around the blackhead with more alcohol. Then, since we were both just a wee bit nervous, we both applied even more alcohol(7). Internally.

Wielding the Exacto with surprising delicacy, given the size of his bear-like paws, Dan cut around the blackhead and began to lift it out.

It kept coming. This alarmed us both.

When the Thing was finally extracted, it proved to be several inches of drain, wadded up and solid. The doctor had neglected to remove all of it, the blood had dried and turned it black(8), and there it had resided in my torso for several years.

We goggled at it for a moment, then applied more alcohol(9), and slapped a Band-aid on it. I never heard from it again.(10)

Dan had thought that the skin would heal over smoothly, without a trace. And it did. Mostly. There was no scar, just a teeny little roller-ball-pen-ball-sized depression where first the cyst, then the linguini had been. A linguini divot, if you will.

Which I have to this day. Viewings by appointment only.

(1) Nor does he play one on TV. He has been a medical orderly, back when that job existed. Now he’s just disorderly.
(2) Or wandered off again to someplace or someone else where it didn’t bother me.
(3) I don’t think there is a medical term for growing a third breast. If there isn’t, I would like to suggest “polymammia.”
(4) Which, now that I think about it is a Good Thing. I would have had to throw out all my bras and get new ones custom-made. I assume that’s expensive. Plus I’d probably have to send a picture of the third breast* to the manufacturer and it would be leaked to the Internet, go viral, and I could never be on the Supreme Court.
*I was once presented a serving of shepherd’s pie that had three scoops of mashed potato on top. Guess what it looked like.**
**Three breasts, that’s what. Stay with me here, people.
(5) You were wondering, weren’t you? I can tell.
(6) I grew them out exactly once, for my wedding. The salon used a nail color called “Pepperoni,” which was probably the only time they used it for a wedding manicure.
(7) Rum.
(8) Cooking tip: If your linguini turns hard and black, it’s overdone.
(9) Both kinds.
(10) For all I know, Dan may have kept it. He always wants the scans from our colonoscopies and the time they took pictures inside my bladder. He wanted to keep his own appendix, but they wouldn’t let him. Unless it’s that thing in the back of the freezer. I don’t really want to know.

Moonshine Reality

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In my last post I joked about moonshine. The reality is quite different.

Moonshine is sometimes presented as a defiant protest against the government, which wants to tax everything fun and make a profit on it while soaking the common people. And right now, that’s a pretty popular – even populist – sentiment.

Media portrayals of moonshining, while not universally positive, have sometimes given it the cachet of harmless, if illegal, rebellion – think Dukes of Hazzard. Let’s outsmart them pesky revenooers (actually ATF agents) and race fast, sexy cars and yell yee-haw a lot.

And I’m not denying that can be a good ol’ way to spend your time, as long as you don’t crack up that spiffy car trying all those impressive special-effects stunts that defy the laws of physics as well as traffic.

And we all know that Prohibition didn’t work. You can’t keep people from drinking if they really want to. It’s as old as civilization itself.

But during Prohibition, alcohol consumption and rates of alcoholism actually increased. The temperance movement was counter-productive.

And “bathtub gin,” like moonshine whiskey, being unregulated (more outlaw fun defying the damn gummint!), had no quality controls. A lot of moonshiners didn’t care, or maybe didn’t even know, the effects of using the wrong copper tubing or automobile radiators for their stills, or mixing the product with wood alcohol (methanol). They probably should have suspected that the rat poison, bleach, embalming fluid, or paint thinner added to give it an extra kick would be less than ideal, though. The lead and antifreeze were bonuses.

Blindness, liver damage, alcoholism, and death were the best-known side effects. Others included seizures, nerve damage, and partial paralysis, either temporary or permanent.

So yes, I did grow up in a family that thought “That Good Ol’ Mountain Dew” was a fun song for children. And I did have an uncle that made or bought moonshine – we kids were unclear on that – and hid it in the corncrib. (Digression: Ironically, he was named Uncle Sam. There was also an Aunt Jemima somewhere in the family tree. True story.)

But I’m not going to encourage drinking actual moonshine. I won’t even buy the cute Mason jars of whatever it is they sell in state-approved liquor stores labeled as moonshine. And I’ll pass on Outback’s moonshine-flavored entrees, thanks.

Mammograms – Why?

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I had a mammogram today and it raised questions in my mind. Not about whether mammograms are a good thing, despite the new study in the British Medical Journal that said they don’t really help. My mother had breast cancer and a mastectomy. She survived. A dear friend had a lumpectomy. (Digression: By accident, it almost became a complete boobectomy. Her breast survived.)

When my doctor told me to schedule the test, I  admitted to him that I don’t do the breast self-exam thing every month. I told him I couldn’t feel anything out of the ordinary, not even after another doctor gave me the fake boob with the different sized lumps to practice on. “My breasts are weird and lumpy,” I told him. “All women’s breasts are weird and lumpy,” he replied. Good to know. And, yes, there have been plenty of volunteers who’ve offered to help. So don’t even go there.

I dutifully scheduled the test, especially since I think that now, thanks to the ACA, insurance has to pay for the whole thing. (Further digression: The thing that caused the most resistance to the ACA, in my opinion, was letting its opponents get away with calling it “Obamacare.” That and not emphasizing that it wasn’t health care reform, which scares people. It was insurance reform, which only scares insurance companies.)

(I think I was working up to making a point somewhere. What was it? Oh, yeah, mammograms. Questions. That was it.) My questions were not about the actual test, but about the process.

When I entered the elaborate medical photo booth, the tech asked me, as usual, to remove my clothing above the waist and put on a cloth gown with the opening in the front. She told me to open the door a bit when I was ready.

Leave me alone with nothing to read and I start thinking.

I said to myself, “Self, why does she want me to put on that extremely fashionable gown when she’s going to see my weird, lumpy breasts anyway?”

When I discussed this with my husband later, he said that some people are modest.

“About what?” I asked. “They know the tech is going to see their boobs.”

I thought some more. “When the mammogrammers snap the pics, the techs ask you to uncover one breast at a time. Why is that? Are modest people okay with exposing one boob to a stranger, but not two at once? Plus, the tech touches them. If they’re going to be modest, isn’t that the bigger issue?”

I was on a roll. “And that whole leaving the room while I change is silly. They could save time – and laundry bills for the gowns – if they just said, ‘Strip to the waist and stick ’em in the machine.’

“They should reserve that delicate sensibility crap for first-timers. Everyone else just wants to get it over with as quickly as possible. Am I right?”

My husband said he didn’t know, which is probably true, since he’s never had a mammogram.

So, what’s the take-away here?

When I have a mammogram, I already know that someone will see and touch my breasts. And I’m okay with that.

But if I see my pictures on the Internet, I’ll really be pissed.

UPDATE (IRONY ALERT)

The mammogram I was so flippant about revealed a cyst, which has gotten larger. Tuesday I go for a follow-up mammogram and ultrasound. Even more people will see my breasts, and I’m still OK with that.