LIKE ONE OF THOSE VICTORIAN BITCHES WITH A CONVERSION DISORDER

Hi! Since we last talked, my body has been freaking out a little. My fingers have erupted into an itchy lizard skin of tiny blisters. Husband thinks the cats have been prowling through the nettles, and when I pet the cats, I get nettle transference. Google says I might have something called Dyshidrotic eczema, which is caused by  ¯\_(O_o)_/¯ stress.

Later, I googled whether I should be worried about how I’m sighing all day and air doesn’t seem like it’s working so great for me. Son of a bitch, if this isn’t the first time Dr. Google has actually been all, Hold up. I think you might have garden variety anxiety rather than being imminently about to die.

I literally sat in front of the computer and WTF’d. I mean, if Dr. Google is reliable for exactly one diagnosis, it’s that you’re about to die. Plus, I was typing up shit about skin bubbles and difficulty breathing. How was that suddenly yielding a patronizing shoulder-pat and gently murmured there-there?!?

It crossed my mind google’s finally leveled up its data mining/search engine profiling into circa 1985 TERMINATOR territory. Some newly sentient BOT in some dark corner of a Mountain View warehouse was like, Oh Jesus, here we go. ANNE, Listen. You’re FINE, you’re just sad.

Communicating this message, of course, via an intelligently culled page of mediocre diagnostic search results.

I also have painless, itch-less blotches on various body parts and here’s some TMI for you, so I can meet my cringe quota: a yeast infection in my belly button.

So there are no secrets between you and me, I have never had any other kind of yeast infection my whole damn life, so I was quite puzzled for a number of days before Sentient Google was like, You’re killing me with these searches, ANNE. JFC, bake me some bread from that starter you’ve got brewing.

My husband has been the unwitting recipient of all my medical reports. I keep telling him each new symptom in this casual, “I know it’s nothing, and you know it’s nothing. It’s just stress. But also, witness this new thing, so in the event I die, you can tell the medical examiner to put on his hazmat suit. Because for sure, this is like all the lesser known plagues of Egypt happening in various bodily locales on me.”

Telling him about a yeast infection in my navel has been by far the worst. Even as a child, I’ve had a weirdly deep belly button, and with time/pregnancies (thanks kids!) it’s currently like an inch and a half deep, and narrow enough I can’t actually stick my finger completely in. Quit making that face. I am beautiful in other ways.

“Oh don’t worry, I’m pretty sure they sell treatment over the counter,” my husband said. I joked I could probably literally stick a vaginal insert in my navel. My husband, coming from a knowledge base largely vagina-maintenance-less (or at least this is what I tell myself in understanding why he totally did not laugh), broke in with, “Nah, just get some of that spray. You know, like they do with the shoes at the bowling alley.”

Internet, you have never seen someone more mortified than me, in bed, thinking of a body part as a tiny vagina, and my husband talking like it’s a size 9 community shoe.

DAD KNOWS HOW TO LEAVE ON A LINE

Mom emailed yesterday, demanding I come up to sign some legal papers. Specifically, I needed to be there this Tuesday at a certain time, to sign papers in front of a lawyer. Mom made similar demands of Middle, who was slightly less put out as she doesn’t have to drop her whole life and drive 10 hours.

To be fair, my mother does not usually command me to do stuff unless there’s a good reason, and I understood the request was not to do anything shady, and because it deals with Dad’s estate, it’s time-constrained.

To be less fair to my mom, she does sometimes drum up drama, rather than face sadness. I read the email and wondered if this was the first in some fire-cracker line of increasing drama, in which I was gonna be asked to jump through more aggravating hoops until ultimately we fight, because Mom would rather be fighting than living through this undistracted.

Middle said she’d go over, see Dad, report back on the situation.

Turns out, I was being massively unfair. Dad has mostly stopped eating and drinking. He’s yellow from jaundice. “I’d give him 40 days or less,” Middle said. “When I saw him, I actually made him come over and say goodbye to the kids. That’s how bad it is.” A few minutes later, “I almost took a picture, so you could see, viscerally, how bad it is. But I just couldn’t. It felt too vulture-y.”

Maybe you and I will talk about the details later? Right now, I just want to tell you that when Dad came to her house, Middle reported he was unusually coherent with her kids. Which is still far from actually being coherent according to normal standards. He called them, ‘sweet’ when they hugged him, and was able to hug Middle’s boys back.

At the end of their visit, Middle’s husband walked Mom and Dad to the door. In his casual banter, my brother-in-law said, “OK, see you later.”

According to Middle, Dad said pretty clearly, and in a factual but light tone, “No. I’ll be dead.” Smiled, turned, shuffled out.

Telling the truth even though doing so is socially cringe worthy (and so easy to avoid! God, just stick to the script! All he had to do was smile and nod!) is so completely my dad’s style, I can’t even. True to himself all the way to the end.