Fauxkemia

The other weekend, a pain started in the back of my head, at the base of my skull on the right side. I didn’t think much of it at first, but the pain got worse and worse until at 10:30 pm I decided the best thing to do was drink a ton of water and go to bed. My head was really starting to pound by the time I closed my eyes, but the soft sheets and fluffy pillows dulled the pain enough for me to drift off into Dreamland ... until I woke up at 3 am and something felt horribly wrong. My head hurt so bad it felt like it was swelling with each of my heartbeats and pressing against the inside of my skull, threatening bust through the bone and splat itself all over the walls. I slowly got out of bed, careful not to turn on any lights since I knew that would only exacerbate the pain, and with my eyes half open, started looking for a bottle of generic brand ibuprofen I got as part of a 'going away to college’ goodie package about 7 years ago. It was the only known bottle of headache medicine that could be hiding out in either a mess of bathroom toiletries, in the bottom of a cavernous bag, or behind my dresser. I never found it, and my irresponsibility and dislike of medicines gave the migraine the fuel it needed to fully push me over the edge, and at 3:30 am I was hovered over the toilet reliving the day's meals.

The next day, as soon as I felt it was safe to get out of bed, I bee-lined to the Walgreen’s down the street where I bought 1 bottle of 50 Advil tablets and added it to my ‘medicine cabinet' which currently consists of: an aluminum sheet of big white pills whose box I lost or destroyed a long time ago, 1 bottle of nasal spray, 2 bottles of Skin Shield (this’ll come up later) and 1 box of about 30 ‘adhesive bandages’ (nope, I was not willing to spring for the Band-aids even though my hand was bleeding and I was convinced I could see some bone -- again, more on this later). For as long as I can remember I have avoided taking medicine unless absolutely necessary, and by necessary I mean the doctor handing over a scribbled prescription and trying to convince me this is the only thing that will make me better, and I must take it now and follow the directions completely or things will only get much, much worse.

This actually happened to me. When I was working in news, I got very, very sick and allowed myself to stay that way for several months. I would cough uncontrollably, constantly have sinus blockage and feel tired all the time. I was hoping the symptoms were a result of the news station being packed with asbestos and as soon as I started growing a hump out of my back or some other deformity reared its ugly head, I could cash in on a law suit and buy a big farm and adopt 20 puppies and roll around with them all day when I wasn’t watching ‘Seinfeld’ on DVD or reading books by Augusten Burroughs by my pool. But at about month 3 of being on the verge of violently ill, mum pointed out that maybe the reason I felt tired all the time wasn’t necessarily because my shift had turned me into a vampire that produced a morning show from midnight to 9 am, but because I had been sick for 3 months straight. Mum knows best, so I finally made an appointment with a doctor I randomly chose out of our health care catalog. The doctor told me that I had an upper respiratory infection that had rooted itself so far into my lungs, I now had asthma! Yep, me not taking care of myself and waiting far too long to get checked ended with me GIVING MYSELF ASTHMA. Who does that? I feel like as punishment I should have gotten braces put back on and started talking with the quintessential nerd lisp (hey guysh, i shaw you over here jusht hanging out and shtuff ... I know lotsh of inthereshting fachts i could share ... about like the celeshtial kingdom ... shtars and shtuff) in between taking puffs from my inhaler on my way up the stairs to the physics building.

But even irrevocably damaged lungs weren’t enough of a lesson for me to go see the doctor when I had raging sinus issues a week before I was supposed to go to New Orleans for Mardi Gras. My solution was to get more sleep, and drink more water (because that has worked so well in the past)! So it should have been no surprise as I sat on the plane bound for Louis Armstrong International Airport that the sinus pressure in my head was so bad, I worryingly racked my memory for news stories involving head explosions at high altitudes as a result of untreated sinus issues. Then, I actually heard a pop from somewhere inside my head and started checking under my nose for blood and brain matter. Nothing ever came out, so I'm hoping that pop was the luggage shifting in the overhead compartment and not something that actually happened in my head that will reveal itself at a very inopportune moment like during a makeout sesh with FutureHusband Zack Galifianakis.

I currently live next door to a hospital and about a block and a half from my normal doctor, but visiting them didn't even cross my mind the night I overzealously ‘cheersed’ my friend’s glass with an empty high ball and it exploded in my hand, embedding shards of glass into several of my fingers and making a gash the size of a trout’s gill into the skin between my thumb and pointer finger. My solution was to immediately wrap the wound in about 20 layers of toilet paper, which were promptly soaked through with blood, and escort myself from the bar before I could get kicked out for breaking their glasses and making blood puddles on their floor. 

As soon as I got home, I washed my hand with soap and water but figured the gash could do with some more sanitizing, so I proceeded to pour squeeze after squeeze of Purell directly into the cut, which let me tell you, did not feel like a summer breeze, even after several whiskeys. At that point, I did not have any adhesive bandages yet, so I fell asleep clutching a giant handful of toilet paper. When I woke up in the morning, I thought I had nerve damage in my hand, but it turned out it was just asleep from having a death grip on the toilet paper all night. The fact that my hand was still bleeding wasn’t enough to convince me to walk next door to the hospital. Instead, I walked to Walgreen’s, and bought a 2 for 1 pack of Skin Shield and a box of generic adhesive bandages. Then I went home and applied about 25 layers of Skin Shield and a bandage. I continued to do this 3 times a day for about 2 and a half weeks, and wouldn’t you know it, it healed right up and looks and feels great. So unfortunately, my thought process of ‘Why wait in the ER for several hours and spend money on a co-pay for something an internet search, a 5 block trip to Walgreen’s and my own ingenuity may be able to fix?’ was proven right in this case.

Part of the reason I shun doctors and medicine is because I think we live in a society where all too often we reach for the quick fix without giving our body a chance to work it out on its own. I also have a fear that I could become immune to an important medicine and the Dr will be forced to give me news like, 'There's really nothing else we can do for this headache since you took 4 Advil that one time you had the flu. Looks like we're going to have to amputate.' But the biggest reason I don’t like ‘modern medicine’ stems from the fact that most psychological problems find their roots in something 'traumatic' that happened during childhood. (If you don't believe this, watch about 3 episodes of A&E's riveting and heart-wrenching show 'Intervention' and then come back and try to argue it with me.) Because of that scientific fact, I can confidently conclude this behavior stems from the time I was diagnosed with Leukemia.

When I was 3 years old, my parents went through a divorce. Now, before you start thinking ‘Uh oh, this hilarious and entertaining post just took a sharp turn toward Downersville,’ I should tell you that although having divorced parents is difficult, as a child I felt like it really paid off when I started getting double gifts for holidays: 2 bikes one Christmas, 2 Nintendos another Christmas, hundreds of Pogs for a birthday, etc. So it wasn’t all that bad. Anyway, so my parents are going through a divorce and one day I wake up and there are bruises covering my entire body. And by covering, I mean everywhere from my tongue to my big toe. Social services came to investigate, and if you know my parents at all, this would be like a social services representative checking on the kids at Mother Theresa and Ghandi’s house, you know, if they had kids. So after a few days of observation, social services were able to conclude my parents were not, in fact, beating me, and maybe I should go to the doctor. After an initial examination during which none of the doctors in the office was able to offer any explanation, I was sent to get blood drawn. Apparently, bruises all over your body = something in the blood may be causing it = we have no fricking clue what is going on, but will continue to syringe your blood in large doses and then peer into the test results hoping for answers like gypsies peering at the tea leaves in the bottom of their mugs. Every day for several weeks I went back to the doctor’s office to get blood drawn. Years later, I opened a childhood book about Paddington Bear and one of the Mickey Mouse bandages the nurses gave me slipped out of the pages. The doctors told my parents there were only a handful of other cases in the world that even resembled whatever it was I had. So after weeks of getting my little arms poked with a needle every day, the doctors diagnosed me with Leukemia. My parents, along with the medical staff, started researching the best ways to try to make me better and set plans in motion to get treatment going. But before I could be admitted to an intensive program, the bruises started disappearing just as mysteriously as they appeared. A week later, I was completely back to normal and the hospital plans were canceled. The doctors were still stumped, my parents were relieved, and I just wanted to go watch 'Sesame Street.'

So I think subconsciously my brain tells my body: If we can self-heal Leukemia, there’s no way a migraine or a bloody hand is going to send us running for the medicine and doctors.