Nightmare Toe, or Why a Working Knowledge of Medical Terminology Can Be a Bad Thing

Something is Wrong with my big toe, Bad Wrong. I'm wasting no time with literary adornments or questions of relevancy because it hurts that bad. Internet, my toe is badly infected from a saga of injuries and various good-idea-at-the-time home remedies, and it has taken this-- nightmarish swelling, festive discoloration, and all-encompassing, whimper-inducing pain-- to erode my resistance to calling the doctor.

I am terrified of the doctor. It was not always this way. There was a time when I toyed with the idea of going to medical school, if not to become a practicing physician then to create sweeping, full-color, multilayered illustrations of the saddle joint or the free fall of neurotransmitters as they brave the synaptic gap. I love biology, I love anatomy, I love zoology. I love the epic stories of immune system battles and the mundane heroics of the excretory system. Algebra put an end to all that. X = a big fat fucking wall. So instead I write and I draw and I find gainful employment by other means.

Part of the reason I understood biology so well was that I could turn it into a story with characters and goals and birth and death and drama, and it all made sense. I was still interested in what goes on in the body and how problems are fixed, so I asked questions and read textbooks and pestered my doctors. BUT-- and this is one of those horrible over-arching themes I struggle with in almost every area of my life-- Imagination Must Have Limits.

For instance, Imagination is no longer helpful when it:

1) Renders one incapable of any degree of detachment when it comes to submitting to painful procedures (especially when Imagination insists that pain incurred under anesthesia is just pain delayed with nausea factored in as interest, and therefore, no procedure is ever "painless.")

2) Sparks a lurid fascination with any and all surgical procedures on television from breast implants to liposuction (which looks like someone fencing an unseen foe under the skin) to hip replacement (buzz saws, God help us) to removing a 2-inch-thick tree branch from a motorcyclist's neck.

3) Finds some sadistic pleasure in skipping straight to the worst case scenarios on self diagnostic tools like Web MD, and then constructing a detailed narrative around what life would be like as an amputee.

Just so my imagination doesn't take all the blame, I can also point to several significant instances of Bad Medical Care-- like the two eye doctors who have insisted on repeatedly testing my fainting reaction to a particular numbing drop. Or my shady auctioneer gyno. Or any of the surly rent-a-docs I saw at the Student Health Center in college.

And now I'm supposed to go and look up my third Primary Care Provider in two years, a person I will likely never see again, and show this stranger my horrific toe, knowing that the recommended treatment for infections at this stage involves knives and needles and, if I'm really lucky, LASER DEBRIDEMENT.

I've been working really hard to change my perception of this small town from barren, wind-swept outpost to quaint, opportunity-rich learning environment, but the prospect of offering up my throbbing nightmare toe to a stranger with a knife is really freaking me out.