The Lunatic Goes to the Doctor

“So,” the doctor said to me, in the soothing, gentle voice he likely reserves for the crazies, “I can see coming to the doctor makes you anxious. What else causes you anxiety?” Boy, he’s really good at this, I can’t help but to think. I’m there about my foot, but he realizes perhaps my mental stability is a more pressing issue than the foot, which gets tingly of late for no apparent reason. Of course, I assume the tingly foot can’t possibly have anything to do with an old, untreated tendon injury that involved the dog, the dog’s stretchy leash, and my riotously funny husband. Surely it is something far more serious, hence, my visit to the doctor’s office.

Doctor visits can be very stressful if raised lunatic. “Well, doctor’s offices, obviously,” I reply. “And airplanes,” I add. “Really,” I say, “I’m not normally like this.” Like this meaning trembling slightly while a cold sweat runs down my back, my pulse races, and my blood pressure is so high I’m surprised my veins are not all puffy raised surfaces on my skin.
I’m not sure he’s buying it. Regardless, he lets it go temporarily to tell me I have peripheral nerve damage in my foot, possibly due to the old injury. I nod and say, “I thought so, but figured I’d better get it checked out in case it’s something more serious.”

“Oh? Like what?” he asks. I can tell he is again probing my mental stability with this question. But that’s okay. Who can blame him? I am not exactly the picture of calm as I sit there. I once had a very opinionated doctor tell me that I should really take something to overcome my fear of medication, just because I told her I didn’t like to take allergy medicine as it put me in a fog and I’d rather be slightly congested than in a fog. I much prefer this doctor’s softer approach to mental health.

Granted, just the mere thought of having to take medication daily is enough to make my head feel, well, drugged. Another lovely family trait. The doctor senses this when I ask about my blood pressure. “I don’t think we need to treat it yet,” he says. “But when the time comes, it’ll be just like taking a vitamin every day.” Just like taking a vitamin. That almost sounds pleasant. Like I said, he’s really good.

As I leave the doctor’s office, I feel such tremendous relief to be out of there that it occurs to me, as it often does when my inner lunatic takes over, that we are all completely fucked. We, meaning my siblings and I. And it’s no wonder really.

Growing up, we never really went to the doctor. I’m sure it was very expensive and I don’t think there was such a thing as a co-pay back then. You’d have to have tripped and split your head open with a nail, just barely missing your eye, or have had a face that was half paralyzed from some bizarre virus before you were taken in to the doctor. And when you got there, Mother would sit perched nervously on a chair, her pulse likely racing, her blood pressure sky high, while cold sweat ran down her back. And she would be so tense that she likely couldn’t follow what the doctor was saying and never asked questions. Instead, she would say every so often, in a tone reserved for that of a bishop, “yes, docther” as the nerves would bring out the Irish brogue in full force. Mind you, she once said of the bishop’s mistress that she happened to spot walking about her hometown in Ireland one year, the mistress that had fathered the bishop’s illegitimate child, “ah, sure, they ought to stone the bitch”. So revered was the bishop, that she felt he was clearly without blame in this situation. It was that sort of reverence my mother felt was required in the presence of a doctor.

Never going to the doctor, we generally never took medications. Though we should probably all be taking some type of drugs now on a regular basis to combat the lunacy, either prescription or recreational, we generally avoid them at all costs. Not surprising really as we grew up putting “dandelion juice” (the white milky secretion from the stem) on warts to get rid of them. (And yes, it really does work when applied repeatedly.) We ate “anti-Aids” spinach that was grown in our backyard. Although, I’m not really sure why my mother felt we needed anti –Aids spinach, being fine young Catholic girls. Perhaps she did actually notice what can only be described as the wanton behavior of certain siblings when they were being dropped off at home by their beaus. Really, though, you’d have to be a blind mute to not notice what was happening in the car that had pulled up to the curb mere feet from where you stood watering the grass on a hot summer’s night. So maybe it was a good thing we were fed anti-Aids spinach. As genetically and mentally fucked as we are, none of us are in need of anti-virals.

The problem, though, is that now we feel hyper, sleepy, sick to our stomachs, or just not right whenever we do have the misfortune of needing to take medicines produced by pharmaceutical companies. I don’t know if it’s because we didn’t build up a tolerance in our youth to such substances, or if we have overly sensitive metabolisms, or if it’s due to utter madness. Regardless, it makes it really hard to get sick. Then, of course, there are the warring ideologies of invincibility and certain death that hijack our brains when a bug does strike.

Like my tingling foot. It couldn’t be from all the running, or the pain I still feel from the dog leash incident. It was more likely due to a blood clot that would soon move out of my leg and into my heart, or some sort of rare, horrible disease that starts out as a tingling in one’s foot. Madness, I know. But I am the queen of bizarre illnesses. I try to procreate (a really bad idea when one considers the genetic implications of this for our species) and instead of a baby I end up with a type of pregnancy cancer named after a small burrowing mammal (a mole). When I was a sophomore in high school, I got not only the mumps, but also Bells Palsy (hence the paralyzed ½ face). So is it any wonder, really, that I assume the worse? And with my track record, there’s no doubt that the heinous imagined disease that was causing my foot to tingle would, of course, have an absolutely humiliating name.

On top of actually being prone to weird illnesses, I was conditioned to always believe the worst. I spent the better part of a vacation one summer coughing violently in a futile attempt to breathe. That happens, apparently, when you have asthma. Of course, the word asthma never came up when I was finally taken in to the doctor. The doctor diagnosed some sort of bronchial infection and gave me antibiotics. Naturally, the antibiotics didn’t actually help the asthma so I still couldn’t breathe, but my mother and uncle (we were in my mother’s homeland at the time visiting her now dearly departed brother), were able to rest easier knowing that I did not actually have a hole in my lung as they had deduced.

I frequently couldn’t breathe as a child. I remember my siblings being put out by this as sometimes they’d have to wait for me, as I rested, bent over with my hands on my knees, futilely trying to get air into my lungs. I had a great grandfather actually die of asthma and my uncle on my father’s side is a pulmonologist. Odd, really, that no one ever considered the fact that maybe my frequent inability to breathe wasn’t necessarily because I was a nuisance that had somehow managed to puncture her own lung, but rather because I had inherited asthma , along with disproportionately short legs and bad hair. But that’s where the invincibility part comes in.

For us lunatics, the trick to being sick is to simply not accept that you are sick. My mother was having a massive stroke and instead of heeding the doctor’s advice, she signed herself out of an emergency room. She ended up spending a total of six weeks in the hospital for both treatment and then rehab. One day when I went to visit her, I had the son, a mere six months old, strapped to my chest in a baby carrier. We were both all bundled up against the cold when we got on a crowded elevator that would take us up to the sixth floor of the hospital for a very stressful visit watching my mother wail as she tried to regain her ability to walk. It should go without saying that the elevator got stuck. Did I mention that it was hot, crowded, and I had a baby known for his tendency to suddenly begin screaming bloody murder secured tightly to my chest? Thinking back on it, the miracle of it all, really, is that I now don’t spend the day rocking back and forth while staring at a blank wall.

My father’s attitude toward illness is possibly even worse than my mother’s. Well, I guess that depends on how you look at it. In my mother’s case, at some point panic takes over and the sense that death is surely imminent eventually silences her belief in her invincibility. Not true, however, of my father.

My father is highly allergic to bee stings. When Sibling #4 would swell up after eating fish or rubbing up against a tomato plant, he would wax poetic about how a bee would sting him when he was in the army. He’d be out in the middle of nowhere in Texas, tarantulas and rattle snakes everywhere, when a bee would bite him and he’d swell up. As he tells it, he’d go about his normal business of survival, sleeping up against a tree so as not to be crushed by the rampaging herds of wild cattle, and would just ignore the aftermath of the bee sting.

I came home one night, many years ago, to find him sitting on the couch, ignoring the said aftermath of another bee sting. His head had swollen to enormous proportions. His lymph nodes were visible as large, blue, golf ball type protrusions all over the exposed portions of his body. “You look awful,” I said. “You need to go to the hospital.”

“Ha!” he laughed. “You think this is bad, you should see my groin.”

Eventually I convinced him, the whole while trying to sear the groin comment from my mind, that when he fell asleep, his bronchial tubes would likely swell and he’d suffocate in his sleep. I vaguely recalled reading that somewhere and while I think it’s true, I hoped it would alarm him enough to make him go to the hospital. “Look,” I remember saying, “you can die if you want but you sure as hell aren’t dying in this house.” We all tend to be a little spooked by talk of ghosts and spirits and the like. So, off to the ER we finally went.

Back home the next day, he mentioned that the E.R. doctor had told him he should thank me for saving his life. I could tell he was momentarily humbled by this thought. Then, reality quickly kicked back in and he reminded me of Texas, where he’d spent many a night, avoiding rampaging cattle and ubiquitous tarantulas, all swollen from a bee sting and nothing bad had ever come of it. (He repeated the nothing bad ever coming of it part of the story numerous times for emphasis.) I made a mental note to just let nature takes its course when the next bee sting occurred.

And while that may sound rather harsh, such is the mentality one develops growing up lunatic. Take, for instance, Mother’s recent open heart surgery. I imagine normal families might gather by their mother’s side to comfort her in her time of need before the surgery and then hover nervously in the waiting room while the surgery occurred, occasionally breaking into spontaneous hugs. In our family, we bickered amongst ourselves, sarcastic text messages flying. On the day of the said surgery, the only available sibling was the one that had earned herself the title the Undertaker, Sibling #3. This is the sibling that Mother has never been overly fond of. When Sibling #3 visited her in the hospital, Mother asked her if she had gotten fat, while Sibling #2, who has always been revered with a doctor-like status , and who had actually gained some weight over the years, was told she looked as if she’d lost weight. So, it fell to the Undertaker to be the sole comfort for our inconsolable mother who clearly felt she would soon be breathing her last. I can only imagine how much worse it was for Mother to know that she was conceivably spending her last waking moments with the least favorite of her offspring. Not one for tolerating histrionics, however appropriate they may have been, Sibling #3 was quick to ask the anesthesiologist when he walked in to check on Mother a few hours prior to the surgery, “Can’t you put her under a little early?”

To her credit, despite the stress of the situation, Sibling #3 did not need to don a protective tin foil hat. At least not in public. Although, there did seem to be an inordinate number of paper towels in use at Sibling #3’s house, possibly proving an earlier supposition that Sibling #3’s paper towel usage rises in direct correlation to her stress levels. And Mother, I should note, is now home recovering. She’s sent away all the nurses and therapists. The invincibility has set in. As for the siblings, I imagine at some point we’ll be able to speak to each other again without our now well practiced “go fuck yourself” tone of voice. Surely we all know that we can’t help but to be lunatics.