In 2004, I was working as a Store Manager for a department store in Silverdale, Washington called Gottschalks. Some organizational shuffling in the company meant some shifting around of managers, and I had to leave my store in Bellevue behind and accept responsibility for a store on the other side of the Puget Sound. It came with a raise, though, so I wasn’t too upset.
Knowing that all things are temporary, I refused to move to Silverdale. I didn’t want to lose my beloved apartment in Seattle, and I didn’t want to give up my exciting life in the city. A long commute was better than ceding my 20s to a life in a shitty little Podunk town. I quickly discovered that not only was the ferry not a faster way to get across the water, it was much more expensive than driving around. When I was offered a raise to take the position in Silverdale, my Regional VP had also offered to include the cost of the ferry in my salary. I looked it up online and told him that a monthly ferry pass was only $70 a month, so he increased my salary by $840 a year. What I didn’t realize was that there is no monthly pass for taking your car onto the ferry, and the price I’d seen was for walk-on commuters. My store was another twenty-minute drive from the ferry landing in Bainbridge, so I still needed my car. It was too late to correct my mistake, so I abandoned the ferry idea and began to drive. Every morning, I’d leave my house at 4:30 and drive the ninety minutes around the horn. Getting home during rush hour took even longer.
One summer day, I had big plans to overhaul one of my stockrooms—tearing down shelves, moving fixtures, destroying old displays. I had morning meetings, so I dressed in the dress-code mandated slacks and dress shirt, but I took a pair of jeans with me to change into when I started the dirty work. Around noon, I took my jeans into a fitting room to change. When I took my slacks off, something caught my eye in the mirror—red blotches on the side of my left leg near my knee. Each blotch was about the size and shape of a quarter, and I had about a buck-twenty-five of them.
I freaked the fuck out.
I’m typically not one to go to the doctor. I don’t go to the doctor when I’m sick, and I don’t go to the doctor when I’m injured. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for people receiving adequate healthcare, but when it comes to my own health, I tend to think that bodies have a way of working shit out on their own. Rub some dirt on it, and it’ll be fine. But, I lost my damn mind when I saw this disgusting rash. I called Group Health and scheduled an appointment for that afternoon, and I left work early to rush back to Seattle for my visit to the doctor’s office.
It was a hot summer day with temperatures ranging in the 90s. Because of the long daily commute, I was in the habit of rolling down my window instead of running the air conditioner so I wouldn’t kill my gas mileage. I spent the next hour and a half roasting in my car, sweating the nervous sweat of a New Mexican outlaw heading to the gallows.
When I arrived at the doctor’s office, I checked in at the desk, forked over my $10 co-pay, and let a nice old nurse ask me some questions, measure my height and weigh me on a balance scale while she filled out the necessary forms. Then she led me to an examination room, told me to have a seat and that the doctor would be with me soon. I sat down on a stool in the corner and picked up a copy of Newsweek from a magazine rack.
The air in any medical facility is as sterile as a fresh syringe. That’s probably why I noticed that there was something foul in the room. That something foul was me. I could smell my own acrid, ammonia-like sweat radiating off of me. I smelled like a lucky gym sock. Today would have been a good day to splurge by using the air conditioner in my car, but it was too late now. I stunk. I kept sniffing every few seconds to see if the smell was fading, but my own pungent odor hung around like an uninvited house guest.
That’s when the doctor came in. It wasn’t the same doctor I’d seen a couple of years before when I’d gone in for a physical and all the responsible blood tests. That doctor had been a kindly old man who’d spent the time examining me by engaging me in a discussion of our favorite works by F. Scott Fitzgerald. With Group Health, though, you don’t necessarily have the same doctor each time you visit unless you request them. Like a walk-in barbershop, you get whomever is available.
This doctor was absolutely beautiful.
She was the kind of doctor you’d see on all of those television medical dramas. She was the one that you knew would land George Clooney in the early seasons ER. She was the one who turned down suitor after suitor because of some heightened sense of principle and dedication to her noble work, but who had an undercurrent of sexual adventurousness that could only be unleashed by surrendering her inhibitions to exactly the right guy. She was a sheep on the streets, a wolf in the sheets. She was too pretty to be real.
She smiled at me as she introduced herself. I didn’t even catch her name while I rerouted my life’s timeline to include sex, marriage and children with this woman. My mouth hung open like Cletus the slack-jawed yokel. She had a smile that made you see rainbows and unicorns—a warm and sincere smile that appeared around her brilliantly white teeth and her deep brown eyes at the same time. Her pixie-cut auburn hair amplified the perfect symmetry of her face. I drew hearts all over my mental photographs of her.
She glanced at the copy of Newsweek I was holding. “What’s going on in the world today?” she asked.
“Oh, I’m just reading about how easy the war in Iraq is going to be,” I told her.
Nodding at the magazine, “It’s that old, huh?”
“It is.”
“You’ll have to tell me how that turns out,” she laughed.
Her laugh was genuine; the only contagion allowed to remain untreated in a doctor’s office. I laughed with her. Not only was she pretty, but she was kind and funny. Check, check, check. Our wedding invitations would be lovely. I wondered if the unspoken rule about never hitting on your bartender applied to doctors as well. Where would I take a doctor on a date? The symphony? Do doctors like to hang out in dive bars like I and my friends do?
Then I noticed the smell in the room again. Holy shit, this angel was here to heal me, and I was the stinky patient. She’d probably laugh about the smelly guy with her colleagues in the cafeteria. I was mortified.
“So, what can I help you with today?” my doctor asked me in that kind of voice that makes you feel so comfortable you forget you’re there because of a health issue.
“I’m–” Holy fucking shit! Health issue! I’ve got a gnarly rash on my leg, and I’m going to have to show it to her?! Oh Jesus! Oh sweet, sweet baby Jesus!
“I’ve got some skin irritation around my left knee,” I told her as calmly as possible, as if the thing that nearly gave me a panic attack earlier was actually no big deal.
“Let’s take a look at it,” she said.
“Well, they’re these kind of spots, about the size of a quarter,” I informed her.
“Let’s see them,” she said.
“They’re reddish, and there’s about five of them,” I told her, motioning to the area to the left of my kneecap. Unless I absolutely had to, there was no way I was going to show her.
“Show me,” she said, tapping on my knee. “Pull your pant leg up.”
Fuuuuuuck.
I slowly pulled the leg of my jeans up over my knee, revealing my shame.
“Wow,” she said, her eyes registering surprise for a fraction of a second before her professionalism had a chance to override her instincts. I wished I was dead.
“Let’s see if we can figure out what this is,” she said with a tone that revealed both confidence and compassion, and she got up to reach for a book on a shelf. The book was a compendium of skin conditions, full of disturbingly vivid pictures of every conceivable way the sight of skin can make you want to vomit.
“Does it look like this one, you think?” she asked, pointing to a pussy abscess, trying to include me for reasons I’ll never know.
“No!”
“How about this one? Do you think it looks like this one?” A blistery patch of vegetable soup.
“Oh God, no!”
“What about this one?” she asked, pointing at what could only be leprosy, “Does this look like what’s on your knee?”
“Oh, shit, that’s disgusting. Mine aren’t as bad as that!”
She smiled reassuringly, and put the book away. “I’m going to run a test,” she said, “I’ll be right back.”
She left the room for a minute, and came back with a scalpel and a petri dish.
“I’m just going to take a sample,” she explained as she snapped on some latex gloves, “this won’t hurt at all.” She started scraping my blotches with the scalpel, tiny bits of skin falling into the petri dish like dandruff. This was the worst day of my life. She pressed a cap onto the dish and told me she’d be right back with test results. It wouldn’t take long.
When she left the room, I wanted to make a break for it. I was the smelly guy with a grotesque rash on his leg, and she’d just scraped pieces of it off into a dish. She must think I’m the grossest guy she’s ever seen. Any possibility of a date was now completely off the table.
I waited. And the longer I waited, the more I started to rationalize. So what if I smelled? Lots of guys probably come home smelling pretty rank after working out at the gym or playing basketball with their buddies. That’s not a deal-breaker, right? I mean, most guys probably don’t stink when you first meet them, so there’s a first-impression thing that might be a consideration, but if I could get past that, I might be in the clear. Oh, and my rash? She’s a doctor, for Christ’s sake. She sees this shit all the time, right? And, I once saw my mom dig out an infected zit on my dad’s back with a sewing needle. Now that’s love.
She came back into the room and sat down. She smiled at me with that halogen smile.
“It’s just as I thought,” she said, “It’s ringworm.”
“Ringworm?! Are you serious?!” I began to sputter. “How could it be ringworm? I haven’t been around any animals or dirty little kids or anything! Ohmygod, ringworm?!”
“Relax, it’s no big deal,” she reassured me, offering me her smile like an opiate. “Don’t waste your time trying to figure out how you got it. It’s everywhere. I see it all the time.” It occurred to me that if she sees it all the time, than it was pure sadism to make me look at that book of skin horrors. Fuck her, the wedding was off.
She explained to me that ringworm is just a fungal infection called Dermatophytosis, and fungi are ubiquitous. There were no worms involved; it’s just called that because of the circular shape with a common red ring around the edge. She said my infection wasn’t any more serious than athlete’s foot and that I should just relax. I was not about to relax. How did I get athlete’s foot on my knee; and if they were the same, why is one called something horrible like “ringworm” and the other assigned a name that just makes you sound tough? “Yeah, bro, between running ten miles every morning, playing racquetball with my colleagues in the afternoons and reffing for city-league youth basketball three times a week, I’ve got a serious case of athlete’s foot.” No, ringworm couldn’t be like athlete’s foot. Telling me I had ringworm felt just like telling me I had the AIDS.
“Normally, I’d just recommend an over-the-counter topical ointment that you can get at any drugstore or pharmacy,” she said, “but I’ll tell you what. If it’ll make you feel better, I’ll give you a prescription for pills you can take that’ll work on it from the inside, too.”
“Yes, give me the pills too,” I huffed. She wrote me the prescription, shook my hand while giving me that now-diabolical smile and wished me well. I jetted out of there like my life was now on a clock.
I swung through the pharmacy downstairs and picked up my prescription. Then I went straight to Rite-Aid and browsed the ointments for fungal infections, and bought the one that looked the most serious. I went home, popped a pill, and headed to the bathroom with my tube of LotriminAF. I read the instructions, but I was still nervous. I wanted to really rub it in, but I was afraid of spreading the fungi, so I just dabbed it on.
Before going to bed that night, I changed my sheets in case the fungi was lurking there. I wore pajama bottoms to prevent my infected skin from touching my fresh sheets. I gingerly climbed into bed, and then laid awake for hours imagining fungi crawling around my body. Finally, I slept.
When I woke up in the morning, I immediately checked to see if my spots were gone. Nope. Of course they weren’t. It’d only been twelve hours since my doctor’s appointment. But, when I undressed to take a shower, I noticed a new blotch on my right hip, and one right below the crease of my butt cheek. They were spreading, and they had moved closer to my holy zone!
In the shower, I didn’t know whether to scrub or blot. Would scrubbing the infected areas remove more of the infection, but then would newly liberated particles of fungus pitch camp on other parts of my skin? No way to tell, so I scrubbed and washed and washed and washed.
My prescription was for ten days. Every day, I religiously took the pills, applied ointment several times, changed my sheets, washed my clothes and pajamas with the hot setting and extra detergent, and avoided touching anything I didn’t absolutely have to. During that time, the spots became less disgusting, but they didn’t go away completely. The morning I took my last pill, I had one last freak-out.
I wanted it GONE. I wanted this invader off of my body, and I wanted it NOW. In a panic-induced delirium, I grabbed some steel wool from my utility closet, and took it into the shower with me. I scrubbed those spots until I had road-rash. It was really dumb, but somehow it worked. For the next week, I applied Neosporin to my new, self-inflicted abrasions, and once they healed, the ringworm was nowhere to be found.
I never figured out how I’d gotten the ringworm. Nor did I ever attempt to score a date with that gorgeous doctor. But, to this day, I’m religious about checking myself out for abnormalities, dreading the possibility of the appearance of a circular mark of Cain on my skin. I’ll never put a ring on it again.
