TICK tock TICK tock

… we grossed out the doc!

Our doctor didn't really look like this. She was prettier.

Guess where I was this weekend, four peeps of love? The Air Force Base hospital with Duty. And what a fun adventure! Why? Let me ‘splain.

So yeah. Duty mentions to me that he made a doc appointment for Friday for this weird skin tag thing on his hip. Shows it to me. EWWW. It’s nasty and it looks more like a tick than a tag. Except it was gray. And the area around it? Bruised and gross. In a word – gag. I sez to Duty “Dude? I think that’s a tick and I don’t think you should wait for Friday to have someone take a look at it.”

Duty bows down to my infinite wisdom, as usual. (/fantasy life)

But before we visit the Urgent Care facility, we must haul ass to Northern VA to meet our friends Kim & Sal for dinner. Duty sez that instead of the Urgent Care, we can just bop by Andrews Air Force Base and visit the emergency room there. Yeah, that sounds like fun, sez I (who, admittedly, had one super-fine cosmo with dinner).

After dinner, we zoom by the emergency room. Waiting is fun. Duty can sleep anywhere. Isn’t that special? Yes.

About an hour goes by when we are escorted to a room that is also shared by another patient, separated by a curtain. That’s weird. Poor person. She had EIGHT teeth removed yesterday and was in immense pain that even the percoset couldn’t touch. They called an oral surgeon to take care of her. EIGHT TEETH. No. No one will be removing eight teeth outta my head. Uh uh.

Doc finally gets to us.

(As an aside, Duty, usually one who operates on a “need to know” basis with just about everyone, decides he’s going to share his medical history with the med techs, non-docs, whomever comes around to take blood pressure, etc. He gets hella chatty when faced with medical procedures.)

I digress. As usual.

Duty rolls down his jeans and underwear and shows the doc the inflamed, tick-ish area. Doctor (AIR FORCE DOCTOR, mind) sez “Oh sir. That’s just .. gross. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything that gross. Oh my. Oh sir.” and she escapes from the room.

I think Duty is rather proud of grossing out a doctor. As we wait for her to return to remove the tick, we decide that this must be blogged about and bandied back and forth about the title of it. Once we got the cadence right, we were happy.

Doc returns, remarks once more about the grossness of it (“Oh sir. I’m sorry. But that’s gross.” – this from someone that’s probably seen a dead body or two in her time, I suspect.) and gets really kind of squeamy about it.

Hell, I’m a wuss and while it squicked me out a bit, I would have just pulled that dude right off. (Tick was dead, thanks to the high chlorination of our pool when he went swimming last weekend.) We informed her that she would be blogged about and she looked … hmmm, non-plussed is a good term, I think.

They give Duty a prescription for some crap that will ward off lyme disease (a bad mo-fo if ever there was one) and …. after waiting another 70 or so hours, we were on our way, minus a tick and not much the worse for wear. Of course, whatever small buzz I had from the cosmo had long worn off and we didn’t get home until almost midnight.

But wait! There’s more on Bill and Lisa’s big adventure.

We pull up into the driveway only to see flashing police lights right behind us. Yes, folks. After all the ER trauma (okay, I exaggerate), we had to endure a cop following us into our driveway. The charge? The taillight in the car was out. No ticket. Just a lot of flashing lights at midnight in a quiet neighborhood for nothing.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Don’t you wish you lived in the fast lane like me? You know you do.