“No,” I replied testily. “I’m pretty sure ‘digital’ is Latin for ‘fingeral,’ so finger cancer equals digital cancer. This is all basic anatomy, Dr. Roland.” Then Dr. Roland told me that he thought I was overreacting, and that “fingeral” wasn’t even a real word. Then I told him that I thought he was underreacting, probably because he’s embarrassed that he doesn’t know how Latin works. Then he claimed that “underreacting” isn’t a word either. The man has a terrible bedside manner.
Dr. Roland sort of harrumphed at me, and I pointed my enormous E.T. finger at him, demanding, “This doesn’t look cancerous to you?!” He assured me it wasn’t cancer and was simply a spider bite. A savage, noxious spider that injects the eggs of her young with her venomous bite so that they can fester and feed on the finger flesh of an unsuspecting young writer who probably also has one hell of a malpractice case on her (probably cancerous) hands. The doctor didn’t actually tell me any of that last part, but I could see it there in his eyes.
When I got home Victor asked what the doctor had said, and I explained, “He sent me home to die.”
“He did what?”
“I mean, he sent me home with ointment.” It was all very anticlimactic.
Turns out, though, that Dr. Roland was very wrong, and after a lot of blood work (and a new doctor), I discovered that I didn’t have finger cancer or finger spiders, and that instead I had arthritis.
Whenever I tell people I have arthritis they usually say, “But you seem so young,” which is sort of a backhanded compliment that I never get tired of hating. I will probably only hate the phrase even more when I get to the age when people stop saying it, and suddenly begin saying, “Oh, arthritis. Of course you have it.” Then I plan to run over them with my wheelchair. I always explain that it’s rheumatoid arthritis (a.k.a. RA), which can strike even children, and I’m not even sure why it’s labeled as arthritis at all, since it’s only vaguely related to the osteoarthritis that your great-grandmother complains about. I’ve considered lobbying the medical field to rename rheumatoid arthritis something sexier, younger, and more exotic. Something like “The Midnight Death,” or “Impending Vampirism.” Or perhaps to name it after someone famous. Like “Lou Gehrig’s disease, part two: THE RECKONING.” After all, rheumatoid arthritis is painful enough without the added embarrassment of sounding like something your nana had, so it seems only fair that we should be able to tell people that we had to miss their party because of an unexpected flare-up of “Impending Vampirism.”
My new RA doc was very kind, and reassured me that an RA diagnosis was not the death sentence it had once been, and then I found myself hyperventilating a bit because a doctor had just said “death sentence” to me, and he got his nurse to help me put my head between my knees and breathe deeply. Then he said that although there was no cure, there were a lot of experimental treatments that we could “try.” Then I passed out, but probably less from the news that I had an incurable disease and more because I tend to pass out whenever I see people in doctors’ coats. I have passed out on school field trips to clinics, at the optometrists’, during gynecological visits, and once even at the veterinarian’s, when I fainted unexpectedly and fell on my cat. (The last one was the most disconcerting, because I came to in the lobby with a lot of dogs and strangers leaning over me as I realized my shirt was completely unbuttoned as a team of paramedics checked my heart and my cat cowered under a chair while glaring at me accusingly.) When I came to in the RA office, my doctor had me lie down as he explained that it was nothing to panic about, and that although no one knew what caused the disease they suspected it was congenital. I’d been only half listening because I was too busy trying not to throw up, and so I looked at the doctor with wide eyes and said, “I’m sorry. Genital?”
“Uh . . . what?” the doctor asked.
“Did you say my arthritis is genital?”