Category: In Which We Mock Our Illness

All day yesterday my entire house smelled like chocolate cake. Delicious. Only there was no chocolate cake in my house. I, of course, thought of my Canadian friends, and their belief that those having a stroke smell toast. I tried to track down the genesis of that and got sidetracked by the wonderful video debunking…

So, after I passed the blood test to see if I was allergic to penicillin, I had to prepare for skin tests. I had to buy one capsule each of the penicillin-derivatives Amoxicillin and Keeflex, plus one from a different family, Cefdinir. I brought them to the doctor’s office. I took the morning off. I…

I thought the initial blood test was to determine if I was allergic to your basic penicillin, but on further reading, no. It seems the initial blood test determines if you are at risk of anaphylaxis when you get the skin test. I passed the first test, so my next visit is the skin test.…

Well, Mom-in-my-head, it could be that all your concern about penicillin was for naught. The first test, the blood test, came back negative. The Centers for Disease Control sort of agree with the first allergist’s claim that you can be “allergic one day and not the next,” if you rephrase it as “allergic one decade…

When I was 22, Mom took me to an allergist. I had just gotten engaged to Gary, and I guess she wanted to hand me over to him with all my medical difficulties documented and disclosed, as if she was selling a house. “Don’t give her raw egg whites, or the sewer will back up.”…

You need to do these things in this order to get your RSV shot. I believe I might have had RSV once, and it was so miserable that I obediently did all the steps below. They don’t know how long the the shot is good for. Two years at least, but maybe more.

I remember when my brother was first diagnosed as bipolar, he told my Mom he’d had a blood test that proved the diagnosis. She didn’t buy it and still stuck to her diagnosis, which was that he was just a jackass. Evidently there really is now a blood test for bipolar. Blood Test Could Speed…

Well, that was fast. I got the okay from TeddyJ to work from home in a week and a day. There will still be days I have to come in: once every few months, I believe. And if my absence will inconvenience anyone, like if they would need to schedule a special meeting room with…

I had several reasons for visiting the GP on Friday. The form, the prescription, and and the referral were easy. Regarding the libido, the doctor speculated that my thyroid might be off. She also mentioned my brother died recently. “Why would that make me horny?” I wondered, and some articles say it definitely does. You…

I got a call yesterday from the urgent care, saying that the pink pee culture came back as indeed a urinary tract infection. Not a typical infection, though, a special one. For this one was not caused by errant e-coli bacteria trekking on their own across Vagina Valley into my urethra, (not being transported there…