health issue column

The Fall of my Discontent
or: The Weirdest and Most Embarrassing Disease I Ever Had
or: Doctors are Fucking Hacks but Who Can Blame Them?

It had to have been November of '07 when all this shit went down. Probably. I remember because it was pretty soon after Halloween, or rather, pretty soon after a Halloween show at my house at which some sweet bands were covered, all lady-fronted: CCR, Minor Threat, and the Ramones. The Ramones one headlined despite their extreme sketchiness. They didn't think they were going to play and then ended up trying to play spontaneously, despite the singer being on shitty E and the bassist being falling-over drunk and the fact that they hadn't actually practiced, together, all four of them. The guitarist left in the middle of the set and no one really noticed. There were a lot of awkward lulls in which the band tried to figure out what they were doing; the audience compensated with a steady stream of crowd-surfing during the silences. I kept shoving my face into the mic and starting songs I knew they hadn't learned because they were going for an artistically obscure set.

So it must have been November when it happened, within the next few weeks after Halloween. It began as a crater on the side of my mouth accompanied by some bumps on my jawline. The night this eruption before I'd accidentally eaten some tomato (my bane, my allergy that is snuck carelessly into everything ever). Half a year earlier, I had eaten some tomatoes and became allergic to the sun for about a week. Like if my forearms were exposed to bright sunlight, the result were these boils, this this gnarly Ham On Rye, Bukowski-type shit. Was this related? I didn't know.

Every day, it spread. It felt weird. Tingly. I showed it around the house.

“That's not acne?”

It wasn't acne. It was too quick to scab for that.

I ran into this kid I had rolled hard with around the end of high school. We were both at the local cheap breakfast hipster diner. He wouldn't look at my face. I was disgusting. I immediately went to the closest walk-in clinic.

It's Vancouver and if you didn't grow up here, you don't have a doctor. No one accepts new patients. Despite what you might have heard from some Micheal Moore documentaries about Canada being a utopia of socialized health care, things here are a little fucked too. I think what happens is that doctors are offered a higher salary in America, and therefore, Canadian doctors are enticed to emigrate. I can't blame them, though, because, although university tuition is significantly lower here than it is down there, it's still pretty high and “financial aid” means you use the Canada Student Loans program, which is actually run by some asshole bank corporation that is hella stoked on the increasing amount of interest you have to pay each month. The amount of debt looming over your head after eight or more years of medical study must be fucking nuts.

So, as I was saying, I didn't have a doctor because there is a shortage of doctors in Vancouver. I had three clinics I would frequent. I usually went to the youth clinic, which I'm eligible to use until my 26th birthday. It was 15 blocks up the boulevard. They are nice as a policy, but I was figuring out that they may be a little condescending. Also, they have weird hours.

Sometimes I would go to a drop-in clinic open pretty often that is right underneath the youth clinic, but that one's iffy. It's okay if, say, you know exactly what is wrong with you and what will cure it. Like if you had a UTI but now it's really bad and your lower back hurts, so you know it's a kidney infection and can just ask for the appropriate antibiotics. Or, say, if you were bitten by a baby rat at the donut dumpster and need a tetanus shot. The big problem with that one, though, the Care Point clinic, is that you'll always get the liver-spotted old doctor who resents having to do STD tests. The man who once, when I was in getting some "I got hurt at work" forms signed, thought I was a dude, I think because I don't shave my legs.

So. On this day, the day my face disease was spread around a significant portion of the left side of my face, I went to the clinic right by my house, the Care Heart Clinic or something. The receptionist is a total dick. She will treat you like you are complete garbage, which is not what you want when you are sickly and need sympathy. But I use this one if I'm trying to avoid the outside world as much as I can because I don't have to walk far. My doctor was young and hip and attractive. He looked like Rivers Cuomo in business casual. I looked disgusting.

I pointed at my face.

“Impetigo,” he said.

“Really?” I said.

“Oh, for sure.”

He was starting to write me up a prescription.

“Um.”

“What else would it be?” he asked.

What I didn't want to say was: Dude, I've had impetigo. Twice. I'm a punk house-living, travelly punk scumbag. This is different. The whole vibe is different. I don't want to insult your long university training and expertise, but can you not do some swab tests?

I said, “Okay,” kind of sarcastically. I took the prescription and left.

In the next few days, it got worse, as I was popping the antibiotics. I kept showing it around the house.

“Well, it looks less angry but it's definitely spreading.”

“Dude, it's getting really close to your eye.”

I went back to the other clinic, the youth drop-in one. Okay, they were nice. But, as I said, I was getting increasingly weary of that one too. A few months back, I had come back from a five-week North American tour seriously really sick. The sickness started before I left and got bad pretty early in the tour; I'd get my period like crazy, oh, every three days or something but I thought it was just from traveling with lots of ladies or something. I ended every set with a throbbing pain in my abdomen I would ignore. When I got home, I went to this clinic and was told that I had pelvic inflammatory disease, that it was really bad and at risk of spreading into my whole abdomen, and that I needed to take pills to kill off all possible causes of my affliction, including the ones for chlamydia and gonorrhea.

Okay, listen. I don't want to be a dick and act like having those STIs would be deplorable and there's no way I would have them, like, ew, gross. Because the reality is that if you are fucking outside of a completely monogamous partnership (and we all know that monogamy is for squares, duh), you could contract those infections. But, guys, it's the 90s or whatever, and I get tested on the regular and so do my partners and I practice safer sex, and with the math and figuring out who I had did it with lately and when they were tested and when I was tested, I was positive I did not have those afflictions. And I the antibiotics for STIs are fucking harsh—they are important when you have these STIs, obviously, but aren't the best for your body in general. They tend to wipe out any bacteria in your body altogether, even the good ones, therefore wreaking havoc on your digestive and immune system. However, I wasn't a doctor and she was, and did I want to die? I was weak. I was sick. I took them.

So when my test results came back and it turned out that I didn't have those things, I wanted to punch her in the face. Except it was a different smiley-authority youth doctor. Fuck that clinic. But when my face-melting was clearly misdiagnosed by the Care Heart and I was too unsure to try the Care Point, I didn't know where else to go.

By this time, I had been into the youth clinic at least twice a month that fall. I mean, they were clearly idiots, but at least they knew I was girl and didn't really lecture me. They were starting to get annoyed with me, though. Like I was being a hypochondriac because I had both a serious uterine infection and a series of painful red scabs all over my face in one season. Oh, and I had gotten hit by a car right around the beginning of October and had needed a doctor's referral to get physiotherapy because it wasn't enough for me to say “I fell on my right side and now can't use my right hand” to warrant some sort of medical care for this. I needed a doctor to write that down for me.

“What is it this time?”

“Look at my face.”

“Oh, that's new?”

By then, my whole face was covered. It was bubbling.

“Yeah, this is a recent development.”

“Hmmm...”

“Can you test my face for herpes?”

“That's not herpes.”

I recounted for her the Halloween show episode. How I kept shoving my mouth into a microphone being used by my friend that had a cold sore she was trying to cover up with lipstick. How the last dude I had kissed was claiming to never had a mouth herpes outbreak in his life, but clearly had this thing on his lip.

“Well, what's that?” I had asked him, pointing.

“A fever blister!” he answered, indignantly.

(Fever blister: synonymous with cold sore; what people say when they don't want to associate their mouth thing with the crotchy sexually transmitted disease.)

I explained these things to her. I patiently told her that I would like to be tested for either strain of herpes, because this things was taking over my face and I would like to have the appropriate tests and then the appropriate treatments.

She said, “We don't really have a test for herpes.”

“Bullshit!” That was what Billy said. I ran into him outside the clinic. “Go to the British Columbia Centre for Disease Control.” That was his clinic of choice. They meant business there. All testing on premises. No going to a lab for blood work or nothing.

But going there entailed a bus ride. Brutal. A good test for figuring out how much you actually care what the general public thinks of you, like how much you've embraced the “fuck it, who cares, I'm punk” philosophy is to try being the scabby mess of a face on public transportation.

The BC Centre for Disease Control is a drop-in establishment although it is “recommended you make an appointment.” I got there was told I couldn't be seen, that it was booked up. In case this happens to you, I recommend bursting into tears, saying “There's something really wrong with my face.” They might agree to try to squeeze you in.

After a few hours of some Reader's Digest, maybe some People magazine, I was in a room with a light shining in my face and three doctors squinting at my face, humming and hawing. I mentioned the herpes thing. One of the lady doctors had the classic light bulb reaction—a lighting up of eyes. I think she even pointed into the air, said, “Ah-ha!”, and ran to the library to find a text book.

“Eczema herpeticum!” She was excited. So was I. She showed me a picture of striking similarity to my face, a dark brownish red spotting on someone's cheek, and asked if I had a problem with eczema. I listed off my allergies which will cause my skin to break out into rash: tomatoes, walnuts, chamomile, Herbal Essences shampoo, making out with people who use anti-dandruff shampoo, any kind of incense, cologne, perfume, too much dairy. I guess if you have a herpes simplex outbreak (and especially if it's your first outbreak, which tends to be the craziest because your immune system doesn't know what the fuck is going on) concurrently with an excema outbreak, these two afflictions can join forces and take over the surface of your skin. It's rare, but it happens, and it can be fatal because of the amount of area of your body that can become an open wound! Cool.

Some swab tests and a giant paper sack of Valtrex, I was on my way to health. Two days later, my face was clearing up. My faith in modern medicine was restored! Herpes Simplex 1! No big deal! All I had to deal with now was my shoulder that had, muscularly, ripped off the rest of my body. I waltzed to my local physio office.

“I have an appointment with Carrie.”

“Um, Carrie isn't in today. But Daniel will fill in.”

“... Okay...”

I looked around the office. It was empty save for some suits milling around, taking notes. No physiotherapists, no other patients.

He's just have a meeting right now,” the receptionist said, gesturing towards a curtained-off area from which there were some raised voices.

“You can't lie to me! We have the proof! How can you have billed these appointments when you were in Alaska!”

I looked at the receptionist. She shrugged. Fuck. Trust no one. Eat more garlic. Get in touch.
julsgeneric@hotmail.com