A complicated morning

[smokingboot]

Not about the single counselling concept assignment that multiplied into four care of yesterday morning's post; that's all sorted. No, this concerns a visit to the doctor this morning, not Dr Death but the one I barely see, Dr Maim.



Now, this story begins back in the mists of time, when I was a girl who lived in the West Country, among trees and fields of barley and wheat or just plain long grass...and if you lived in such a place, especially if you owned cats or dogs, chances were you started developing crop circles of your own, mainly on your torso; fungal spores known as tinea or more commonly, ringworm, would start marking your skin in little circular patterns; they were neither dirty nor debilitating, but they were unsightly, so if you were a normal person, you would use such creams as Canestan on them and they would go away; or if you were my mother, you would boil everything in the house, cordon off the neighbourhood and then use the Canestan; to her, any evidence of nature impacting on the bod was heresy; I swear if we had ever come home from school with nits she would have disowned us on the spot.

Well, the Canestan worked sometimes and sometimes the little brown patches went away of their own accord, and it's been years since I had them. Then last week, a whole host of strange little brown patches sprang up across my torso. Made sense, I thought, two cats, near parks and farm land, same old, same Canestan. It didn't work straight away though, and I was impatient...and this is where I concede it may start to sound a bit strange.

Ringworm is no big deal, but it doesn't look nice and I wanted to get rid of the lesions quickly. A jaunt around the web brought me to a site where someone claimed that nail varnish got rid of them when other remedies didn't. It was a forum thing, and despite some derision, many people had responded with a 'By golly, you're right!' So I decided to try it.

Yes yes, I know. But hey, it works! Peels the stuff right off! I've only been doing it for a couple of days, but what with stomach problems and pressure from larians (who perhaps is sick of our bedlinen smelling of nail varnish) I visited the doctor this morning. I scraped most of the varnish off before I went.

It was only when I showed him that I realised how, in the cold daylight of the surgery, the two colours I've been using ('Sugar Princess Pink' and 'Winter Chestnut') have not really come off, but have combined to create a palette resembling stigmata across my body. I admit it looked more dramatic than it did in my bathroom. The doc fell back in his chair. ''That's not ringworm!' He said, 'That's psoriasis!'

I felt I had to correct him, and reluctantly told him about the nail varnish. I wish I could forget the look on his face, his mouth slowly dropping open, all attempts at imperturbable doctortude deserted. I was hoping for a knowing chuckle and a 'Well, we get everything here you know,' instead of which, I got a gasp of 'You did what?' And he looked closer at the patches I hadn't painted.

'This,' he said eventually, 'Is stress induced psoriasis.' I asked him if it wasn't just as likely to be varnish enhanced ringworm. He shook his head, though there was a wild expression in his eyes which haunts me yet.

'Psoriasis,' he repeated loudly, as if trying to convince himself, 'Probably induced by stress.'

'I'm not stressed, ' I said.

'You get a rash and you put nail varnish on it. I think you're stressed.' He started clicking things on his computer screen. I think he's stressed. 'You've probably had it all your life. You say you've had rashes like this before.'

'Which went away with Canestan, because they were ringworm.'

'Which sometimes went away without Canestan because they were psoriasis.' Clearly, he had the bit between his teeth. I decided not to argue with him. He's just wrong.

I am puzzled. I have seen psoriasis, and it seems to be deeply unpleasant for the sufferer; the great sore silver and red patches are painful and irritating, nothing like this trivial little rash, and nothing like my past experiences, which were never more than a bit itchy. But the guy is adamant and clearly a loon, and he's given me this stuff called Dermovate with which to cover myself.


I give it a week. If it doesn't work, it's back to the nail varnish for me.

Comments

[smokingboot.livejournal.com]

Pshaw! Don't try any of that straightforward commonsense with me, we both know it doesn't work:-)