February 22, 2006

• CROTCH ROT AND OTHER FUN

  Poor Toto!
  

  I bet you thought we were
  getting out of Kansas,

  didn’t you?

  I did say, “I reserve the right to pick up the thread at some later
  date if more stories come to mind.”  It

  isn’t that I don’t want to get out of Kansas and on with the Texas

  portion of my memoirs.  Well, maybe it is,
  partially.  There

  are some truly unpleasant memories coming up, which may have some

  bearing on the way I’ve been dragging my feet with this writing and

  dwelling tiresomely on the peaceful and relatively pleasant

  present.  The nature and quality of this current crop of
  memories

  might have some bearing on my not having remembered them before

  this.

  Enough preamble, let’s get this over with.

  Back up in time, to Halstead, circa 1954.  In the midst of
  the

  symptoms of muscular pain and stiffness, weakness, and transient

  paralysis that puzzled and baffled my doctors at the time but now seem

  to be the same as what the World Health Organization and I now call

  ME/ICD-CFS, and the CDC persists in calling, “fibromyalgia,” I had a

  few other physical problems to deal with as well, some of which
  brought

  with them some mental/emotional baggage, too.

  I started having trouble with my feet.  While Mama and I were

  still living on the little loft over the back part of the sundries

  store, I got athlete’s foot.  It itched horribly, bad enough
  that

  the sting of the Absorbine Junior I poured on it felt better than the

  itch.  I liked the smell of the liniment so much that I stuck
  my

  nose in the bottle and took a big long sniiifff.  That gave me
  a

  nice rush and a little buzz, so I did it some more. 

  Those
  little

  bottles of Absorbine Junior didn’t last very long.  After
  about

  three of them, Mama asked me if I was bathing in the stuff.  I
  had

  sense enough not to tell her I’d been inhaling it.  She had

  already indirectly
  made it clear that anything that felt good was
  forbidden.  In years to come, I’d find a lot of other pleasantly
  psychoactive inhalants to use surreptitiously, including Benzedrex
  inhalers (amphetamine), Whip-it chargers (compressed nitrous oxide),
  and nail polish remover (acetone).

  The fungus cleared up, but before long I started feeling as if there

  was a rock in my shoe all the time.  I checked the shoe and
  didn’t

  find anything.  I complained to Mama and she checked the

  shoe.  Then we noticed that there was a bump on the ball of
  my

  foot.  The doctor said it was a plantar wart. 

  The prescription for it was X-ray treatments.  Afternoons
  after

  school I’d walk to the clinic before I’d go home.  I’d sit in
  the

  waiting room until the X-ray tech came out in her lead-lined leather

  apron and took me into the little room with the big X-ray

  machine.  I’d lie down on the cold hard table on my tummy and bend my
  knee

  so that my left foot was elevated, and the tech would pile sandbags

  around the leg to hold it in place.  Then she’d hide behind
  her

  shield wall and turn on the buzzing machine for fifteen
  minutes.

  On those trips to the clinic, I also had a standing appointment with
  my

  doctor’s office nurse.  She’d check my swollen lymph nodes
  and

  listen to me whine about hurting all over and being too tired after

  school to drag myself up the stairs to our apartment without resting along the

  way.  I don’t suppose she knew any more than anyone else did
  about

  what was causing my problems, but she did realize that I was scared
  and

  that the fear and tension were making my pain more severe. 
  She

  tried to calm and encourage me, and taught me relaxation techniques that I
  still

  use and that I in turn taught to Doug as he was growing up.

  Previously, I mentioned an
  ear infection for which I was given sulfonamides and aureomycin,
  some early antibiotics.  Maybe I really needed the antibiotic, who
  knows?  I had an adverse reaction to it that only worsened when my
  doctor responded to my mother’s frantic phone call by telling her to
  increase the dosage.  Another doctor probably saved my life
  (again, assuming that the antibiotic saved it in the first place) by
  switching me to a different drug.  When the fever went down and
  the pain in my head went away, we thought that episode was over.

  If anyone ever associated the sticky and smelly vaginal discharge I
  started having with the antibiotics I’d taken, nobody told me about
  it.  The doctor in Wichita I went to when the discharge made me
  itch to distraction and my scratching the itch in my crotch got my
  mother’s attention, didn’t mention any connection with
  antibiotics.  Nobody mentioned yeast to me.  If anyone had, I
  would have remembered that.

  Maybe he mentioned it to my mother, and neither of them thought it
  worthwhile to tell me.  Or, maybe they hadn’t yet made the
  connection between antibiotics and yeast infections.  I had
  numerous such itchy smelly infections after that, but it was at least
  fifteen years before anyone ever suggested to me that the itchy, smelly
  crotch rot was caused by yeast overgrowth that resulted from
  antibiotics.

  That first time, after the uncomfortable and embarrassing experience of
  the gynecological stirrups and speculum, the doctor prescribed a tube
  of some oily yellow stuff that was supposed to be applied to my vaginal
  area.  Not trusting me to do it myself, my mother further
  embarrassed me by laying me out on my bed to apply the salve.  She
  got a little too thorough or enthusiastic about it, and pierced my
  hymen with her finger. 

  The bleeding that resulted led to another trip to the doctor, the
  stirrups, the speculum, and his reassurance to my mother that I was
  really okay, just not quite virgo intacta any more. **sigh**

  Well,
  after that, I guess the silly slumber party story is anticlimactic, but
  it’s a dangling yarn and I’m going to spin it.  The girl in
  pajamas on the right in this pic is Deloris Weesner, one of my two best
  friends in Halstead.  I’m the one in the long flannel nightie.

  One night, I talked my mother into letting me have a few of my friend
  sleep over.  The girly practice of the slumber party was something
  that all my friends did frequently, but I either wasn’t invited or my
  mother wouldn’t let me go.  My being sick all the time might
  account for the lack of invitations.  I don’t know.

  Anyway, a total of five of us spent a wakeful, giggly night in our
  apartment above the movie theater, waiting for the sunrise.  That
  sunrise thing was my bright idea.  There was a ledge of gently
  sloping roof beneath the windows at the back of our apartment, and I
  told my friends it would be a great place to sit and watch the sun come
  up.

  I sat out there sometimes at night and looked at the stars when Mama
  wasn’t home.  As soon as I heard her feet on the stairs, I’d come
  in and shut the window because she’d freak if she knew I’d been out on
  the roof.  I  had never watched the sun come up there, but it
  seemed like a good idea.

  It might have been a good idea, except that those windows at the back
  of our apartment faced west.  We were out there perched on the
  roof as the sky grew light and the sun rose over the buildings on the
  other side of Main Street and shone in our front windows.  **heavy
  sigh**
  

  • 11:48 pm
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