I spuddle.

I think it’s possible that I’ve blogged about this before but I’m too lazy to go through my own archives to check.    It’s also possible that I just thought about blogging it but then blogged about The Bachelorette instead, which is also on tap for today or maybe tomorrow because it’s not like it’s particularly time-sensitive information.   Maybe, just maybe, this post will eat up all my blogging energy and I’ll be reduced to lying still in a darkened room until bedtime, or at least until The Bachelorette starts, but then I’ll be too tired to blog about it until the morning.  Oh, I fantasize.   I don’t get to lie in a darkened room unless it just happens to be dark and I’m lying down because the kids are climbing on my head.   In reality, I promised the kids PlayDoh in the back yard and maybe some extra fun play, such as “watering the garden” and “weeding”, in case you’re wondering.   They go in for that sort of thing, and who wouldn’t?   You can come over and work help play, too, if you’d like.

But back to my Random Story Of The Day.

I used to have this doctor, let’s call her Dr. K., because that is actually her name.    I’d write her whole name but I’d have to look up how to spell it and I’m far too lazy to go to that degree of trouble over accuracy.   This is a blog, not the news, which thankfully I don’t write.   Dr. K. was (well, presumably she still is) from somewhere in Eastern Europe, which means she had a glamorous accent, nice clothes and inexplicable behaviours which can only be written off to cultural differences.   For example, if I went to see her about back pain, she’d look me up and down and say something along the lines of, “Your skin looks horrible.  TERRIBLE!   You have the worst skin I’ve ever seen.   You have to do something about your FACE.”   Only she was dressed so beautifully and she’d say it with a smile and an Eastern European accent, such that it made her summation seem extra dramatic and also intensely accurate.   Every time I left her office, I’d have no idea what was wrong with my back or any of my other body parts, but I’d certainly feel self-conscious about my FACE.   My horrible, terrible face.

Then one day, The Birdy started screaming for no apparent reason.   Real, full-on, intense-pain kind of screaming, with no break between screams.   I let it go on for a bit thinking she’d wear herself out or whatever was causing the screaming would become apparent, but it didn’t, so I rushed her in to the doctor’s office and because The Birdy was only one at the time, Dr. K. agreed to see her even though generally she’d be too booked up to see anyone at the last minute.    By the time I got to the office, about two hours later, the screaming had stopped because that is The Rule:   Your child will appear absolutely fine when rushed to any emergency medical appointment.  (Once I took her to ER for a head injury — a giant enormous melon-sized lump on her forehead — and by the time it was our turn to see a doctor, she was energetically playing peek-a-boo with the other patients and actually climbed up onto the examining table herself, screamed “JUMP!” and leapt into the doctor’s arms.  In other words, totally normal.  For a monkey.)   Dr. K. gave her the cursory once over, laughed (at me, I suspect, as opposed to with me because I actually wasn’t laughing) and then closed the appointment by saying, “She’s fine!  But look, you’ve given her your AWFUL SKIN.”   In all fairness, The Birdy’s face was red from crying and she has PERFECT SKIN but I was so trained to simply hate myself for the disgraceful state of my face that I wordlessly took the proffered cream to fix my baby’s WRETCHED COMPLEXION and left still not knowing what caused the screaming but understanding that whatever I took in to see this woman was going to result in a skin-related complex and some cream and a whole whack of self-esteem bruising.

But I still went back.   I don’t know why.   I think her brusque European-ness made her seem like she was really smart and perhaps always right.   I am apparently intimidated by accents and good dress-sense.  It was like being treated by Stacey London only she didn’t buy me a new wardrobe or make me feel good about myself.  I still had a completely scuppered back but she assured me that it wasn’t my disc because she had bad discs and I obviously didn’t because I wasn’t in as much pain as she was.*   Why I accepted this, I have no idea.   I think it’s because I was feeling so otherwise shell-shocked about the TERRIBLE STATE of my skin.

Isn’t this a long story?   Somehow it isn’t as amusing in the telling as I thought it would be.    In any event, I’ve started and I’m not one to waste words that I’ve written.   It’s all gold, people.    Savour it.   Or at least pretend to savour it because I need constant applause and validation even when my hilarious anecdotes turn out to be just straight-up, drink-inducing depressing.    This one gets better, I promise, if by “better”, I mean “worse”.

The time rolled around for my annual physical.  Apart from the rosacea and the back pain and the numb leg and inexplicable electric-shock feelings in the base of my neck and occasional migraine, I was muddling along OK.    Or so I thought.   But actually, that wasn’t the case, as you’ll soon see.   I prepared for the appointment by practicing insulting my skin in the mirror, which wasn’t hard, as I pretty much did that every day anyway.   So I was braced for a few insults about my complexion, I was.   I knew it was coming.

But that is not what I got.

This was a different sort of appointment.   It was the sort that involves stirrups.   Then I was weighed and measured.   I weighed less than I thought, so I was pretty happy with that.  My BMI was 20 or something pretty low, so that was good.

Or was it?

“Well,” she said.  “Your weight is technically good.   It’s fine.”

“Thanks,” I said.   “I’ve been working out.”

“No, you haven’t,” she said.

“Er, yes I have,” I said.   Then I said, “Well, I’ve been rowing on the erg.”

“No, you haven’t,” she said.

“I haven’t?”  I said.   I was pretty sure I had, so I was confused.   Didn’t she want to insult my skin?

“No,” she said.  “I row, and you would have muscles in your back if you rowed.   You don’t row.    Actually, you don’t have any muscles whatsoever.”

“I do so!” I said.   Then I flexed.  “I do the rowing machine three times a week.   And I do the Total Gym!  And sometimes the Stairmaster!   Basically any exercise equipment that has ever been featured on an infomercial!”   My pipes were pretty impressive.   Or so I thought.

“See?” she said.   “That’s not muscle.   Everyone has that.”

“OK,” I said.  “This is ridiculous.  I work out.  I’ve lost all the baby weight, and I did that by walking and rowing and infomercial stuff, like that sit-up thing.   OK, I’ll admit, the rowing I only do when my back isn’t too scuppered.”   [When I talk about my back, I always use the word "scuppered".   I have no idea why.   It's just one of those things.   When else can you say "scuppered", really?] [I like the word "scupper" because for some reason it makes me think of a tiny, silver fish, like a herring.   I have no explanation for this but somehow contrasting back pain with a tiny, silver fish is amusing to me.]

“You are thin,” she said, smiling in her European sophisticated way.    A smile that said, “But wait, I’m going to somehow insult you now.”

“Thank you,” I hissed.  “It’s from working out.”  (Like I said, I swear, at the time, I WAS actually working out.  I’ve since stopped.  Because seriously, what is the point?) (Also, I don’t have time.)

“But,” she added.  (And this IS the punchline of this post, FYI.) “It’s what we doctors, in fact, call…”

At this moment, I would have paid a million dollars for her to have said, “a tiger”.   If you watch Monty Python, you’ll know what I’m talking about.   It’s my favourite Monty Python line EVER from The Meaning of War skit in The Meaning of Life, only up until I looked it up to write this post, I thought it was “It’s what we in the medical profession, in fact, call a ‘tiger’.”   I was wrong.   So I may have edited my actual conversation with Dr. K. in order to fit the line, because if it doesn’t fit with that, this post is much less funny.   (I know what you’re thinking.   You’re thinking, really, it couldn’t get less funny.   But it could.  If those lines didn’t match.  MUCH less funny.)

Anyway, that’s not what she said.

What she actually said was:

“It’s what we doctors, in fact, call a ‘Fat Thin’.   You are a Fat Thin person.   Which means that although you appear thin, you are really, technically, fat.”

“?” I said which is my standard response to information that I cannot process.   Sometimes I say “?” in French, which is also “?”  Canada is, after all, a bilingual country, which means nothing in terms of my ability to speak French.  “Quoi the hell are you talking about?”  I said.

“You have no muscle tone,” she said.  “You are all flab.   Soft.   You have cellulite on your arms.   You are completely unfit.”

“Oh,” I said.  As though that explained anything.  “I like your shoes.”   She was wearing really nice shoes.   She was always very well dressed, as I mentioned.   And I always like to counter horrible insults with compliments.  It’s a defense mechanism, albeit a very ineffective one.

“Thanks,” she said.  “I’m going to give you some cream for your face.   It looks terrible.”

“Thanks,” I said.

I’d like to say that I fired her as my doctor at that exact moment, but I didn’t, I waited about a year and I went to her about a Girl Issue, an issue for the record that she had diagnosed in the same appointment as the whole Fat Thin business.   I wanted a referral to an OB GYN to fix my Girl Issue because she had said that we had to wait until I was sure I didn’t want more kids before having my Girl Issue fixed and in the space of that year I’d become very very sure that we didn’t want more kids and I was ready for the fixin’ to begin.

“You don’t have that Girl Issue,” she said.  “I would have written it on your chart.   All I wrote was, ‘Early Menopause’.”

“?” I said.  “QUOI?”

“Early menopause,” she enunciated slowly.  “You know, with all your hot flashes.”

“?”  I said.   “?”  Then I said it a whole bunch of times, so there was like an entire school of not-very bilingual “?”s (or “scuppers”, as I prefer to think of them as) swimming around in the air between me and her nice dress, splashing us with their confusion and poorly accented French.

“I would have written Girl Issues on your chart if you actually had Girl Issues,” she said.  “That’s a serious issue.  I wouldn’t have written Early Menopause if your actual problem was Girl Issues.”

“Did you write Fat Thin?” I asked.

“What?” she said.  “Why would I have written that?  You need something for your skin, by the way, it looks worse than ever.”

“OK,” I said.  “Well, thanks for your time.  I like your dress.”

Then I left and I never went back.   I have a new doctor now, who speaks LOL unintentionally and doesn’t really register the state of my skin, which is OK because it’s really cleared up in the last little while, and I really have bigger things to worry about, like how to lose the Fat part of my Fat Thinness.

Is there a cream for that?

* She was completely wrong, and I do actually have a disc issue.   So there, Dr. McWrong Wronginess Wrongperson.

Filed under: Actual Transcript, Me, Myself and I, Random Story of The Day