A few weeks ago I noticed a small abrasion on
the back of my forearm, a few inches below the elbow. I didn’t think anything
of it at the time. I had a vague memory of bumping it a little too hard on the coarse
concrete wall of the public swimming pool, and figured I had scraped it on
that. So I ignored it—after all, these things tend to heal up quickly on their
own. Except it didn’t. It got redder and angrier by the day. Not to be deterred,
I started putting antibacterial cream on it and covering it with a bandage. And
yet larger and angrier it grew, like the Venus Flytrap in Little Shop of
Horrors, until before I knew it the seemingly inconsequential scrape had turned
into a red, criss-crossing mass of bumps and itchy scabs, which I found myself
staring at, bandaging, and feeding anti-bacterial cream obsessively, all the
while performing Jedi mind-tricks to convince myself that it “seemed to healing
up a little.” My will finally broke on Friday, and I busted out of work early
to humble myself at my local drop-in clinic. The verdict? Cellulitis and a concurrent
allergic reaction to the bandage adhesive. After 48 hours and counting on oral antibiotics,
and no bandages under the doc’s orders, it does, objectively, look much better.
It’s still bad, but it’s not…well, I won’t go into gory details, but let’s just
say it’s on the mend.
I don’t know why I waited so long to have it
looked at. I think it was a combination of cognitive dissonance and my
ingrained sense of stoicism when it comes to Things Going Wrong with My Body. It
was a scrape. A scrape is not a
medical emergency. You rub a little dirt on it and move on. The worried well
should not be sucking up our medical resources, fleeing to the doctor’s at the
first twinge of discomfort, surfing down web.md rabbit holes searching
obsessively for all of the deadly diseases that each passing pang could be a
symptom of. Plus, none of my real, actual medical problems have ever been fixed
by modern medicine. I gave up on having my knee fixed when no one could agree
on what was wrong with it after three MRI’s. And I still have annoying lady
problems, but I’ve just let them have their way, as nothing I do and no doctor
I visit seems to engender a permanent fix to the issue. Besides, I am a
semi-intelligent adult human who should be able to apply basic first aid to a
silly scrape. But this one beat me. I needed help. I was actually pretty scared
by the time I finally went in to see the nice doc at the walk-in clinic. I knew
I should have gone in at least a week earlier, but I was both stubborn and in
denial. I don’t have any real life lesson here, except that maybe if you have a
wound that is reverse-healing, you should just suck it up and see a
professional instead of trying to MacGyver that thing.
On a less gory note, I read “Vacationland” by
John Hodgeman this week. I haven’t read any of his other work, although I did
take a brief stab at “The Areas of My Expertise” a while back, which I found to
be too high-concept and just not for me. But I was willing to give him another
chance. For those of you who don’t know, John Hodgeman was that guy who played
the PC on the Mac vs PC commercials back in the late 90’s. Before the
commercials, he was an unassuming magazine writer, (albeit a Yale-educated one)
and has since been catapulted to a sort of obscure fame among highly-educated
hipsters. My personal journey with John Hodgeman has been a slightly bumpy one.
Year ago, I started listening to his podcast “Judge John Hodgeman,” and I loved
it at first, but after a while the endless parade of well-off Brooklynites with
their Problems Lite and graduate degrees started to wear on me. I still listen,
though, just because I really like John Hodgeman as person and think that he
actually comes up with very thoughtful, fair judgements that dig deeper under
the surface to get to the crux of what seem at first to be shallow issues.
Because I still associate still him with a
degree of hipster cynicism, I was very surprised to find that “Vacationland”
was deep, lyrical, poetic, humble and heartfelt. It’s basically a series of
essays that cover his time spent in Maine and New England, his relationship
with the people and land, his musings on adulthood and aging, and on his uneasy
relationship with what he sees as his unearned fame. It’s hard to describe these
essays in clear terms; they are stories that could only come from him and his perspective.
I refuse to use the word “quirky,” but these are very individual tales from an
ultimately sensitive, perceptive and forgiving voice. I haven’t been this
emotionally moved by a series of essays for a long time. I thereby
wholeheartedly recommend “Vacationland.”
Now, I’m off to go scrutinize my wound again. I
can’t have that thing getting away from me this time!
--Kristen
McHenry
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