Gross, Point Blank

Here's hoping Husband does as I ask and never, ever reads this.

I have spent the last month being, well, quite nasty.

I don't mean I've been nasty in a Ms. Jackson sort of way. I've been nasty nasty. I've been hideous. Gross. Repulsive. Foul.

I'll begin with the UTI, which I think I contracted in Maine but I stoically ignored until I was more intimate with my bathroom than I was with my husband.

Have you ever had a UTI? They're evil. They make you believe that if you don't go RIGHT NOW you will go IN YOUR PANTS. So you try to GO but the only thing that happens is that you drip like a gutter after a rain storm. You feel like an imbecile, being duped by your own body.

Five minutes later, when your lower abdomen feels like a water balloon getting squeezed by an overzealous child, you stubbornly refuse to GO, to be tricked again. You burn and ache, cross your legs and bounce in your seat. Another five minutes pass. You probably have some kind of internal injury, your viscera irreparably damaged. So you succumb, and GO, but nothing happens - nothing of any import anyway - and you again feel denigrated. You can practically hear the UTI laughing at you.

 I started on an antibiotic just before leaving for the Outer Banks.

Perhaps I should be the one in diapers?

I don't like to disclose to Husband when I have nether region germ issues. I even tried to keep him out of the delivery room. I like him to believe that my nether regions have one purpose. That one purpose does not include bodily functions. Or the expulsion of humans.

Am I wrong to maintain this policy? Well, I'm happily married, so draw your own conclusions.

So I secretly packed my antibiotic, and secretly took it four times a day, for half of my vacation. By midweek, I was done with the medication, and blissfully free of any UTI symptoms. I was ready to enjoy my vacation, and so were my nether regions.

Except the next day, I woke up with a cold sore on my lip.

Let's talk about cold sores. Cold sores are caused by the herpes virus. The majority of the population has been exposed to this virus, whether they have suffered an outbreak or not. Cold sores are simply a fact of life.

I never had a cold sore, until about a year ago. Having suffered from chronic acne in my youth, cold sores, for me, are about as welcome as that atrocious UTI. Moreover, my mild OCD becomes debilitating OCD when I have a cold sore. Fear of autoinoculation, or transmitting the dreaded virus to my family, follows me like a shadow for the duration of the infernal blister. No kisses, no sharing, no nothing while I'm infected. I am my own private quarantine ward.

I have spent the last month being
almost as attractive as I was
in 1986.

Being a Type A, overachieving, overly intense Aries, I refuse to lie back and allow the cold sore to have its way with me. I take ibuprofen and an antiviral. I make a poultice of secret ingredients that I apply to the lesion every few hours. I don't look pretty, but I knock out that cold sore in rapid order.

When I felt the little bump and tingle in the Outer Banks - and not the good kind of bump and tingle - I headed straight for my bottle of antiviral. I whipped up my secret poultice. I ate peanut butter, strawberries, and Naked Juice Green Machine - each food harboring nutrients that promote healing.

By the end of that week, I thought I was in the clear. I was infection free. No cold sore. No UTI. I ordered Mexican for a celebratory takeout dinner.

Three days later, I began to suffer from painful, aggressive abdominal cramps. They would seize my belly on each side, like parentheses, nearly knocking the wind from me, twisting my intestines like a wet towel.

F***ing celebratory Mexican takeout dinner.

Food poisoning, I thought. But the next day, I had such violent chills I donned jeans and a sweater, despite the August heat. My back muscles screamed. My head pounded.

Husband bundled me off to bed, again, not in a nasty way, in a nasty way, and I think you may know what happened next.

Yes, I rekindled my intimate relationship with my bathroom. This time, my problem quite decidedly was not the nefarious UTI.

How do I put this delicately? Can we say I was spewing flowers?

Not those kind of flowers.

Now, my flower delivery was not at the front door.

No.

My flowers were delivered at the back door. The flower deliveries were urgent, frequent, and often from Havana.

I took to bed that day, until the following morning. I thought I'd wake feeling oh so much better. But for the next eleven days, I was continually seized by the wretched abdominal cramps. My back and stomach ached. My appetite was limited to bread products - something I largely eschew from my regular diet. And every other day, I would spend the morning receiving flowers at my back door.

Jeans became a prison. My belly swelled and distended. Was it a response to the normally verboten carbs, or had some ghastly parasite taken hold of me?

In keeping with my philosophy of Husband and the germ free nether region, I kept my flower delivery a secret from him, although he of course knew that I was ill. The universe, however, does not support my marriage philosophy. I was keeping my flowers a secret, but I could not hide the resurgence of my cold sore. It sat on my lip, a dastardly disruptor of the illusion that no microbes coursed through my body.

By Day 8, I could take no more. I went to my doctor, who felt my only recourse was to have a definitive diagnosis. To do so, I would need to submit a sample of my flowers.

Let's say that again. I needed to provide a sample of the flowers repeatedly being delivered at my back door.

My doctor suggested that I deliver my flowers directly into a Cool Whip container. I could then transfer the flowers to a specimen bottle. The specimen bottle, in turn, would have to be hand delivered to a lab.

Well, I don't eat Cool Whip. I use whipped cream, and I was pretty sure I couldn't deliver my flowers directly into the whipped cream canister.

Nope.

Instead, I pulled a Tupperware from the kitchen cabinet. I designated my powder room as the Flower  Specimen Collection Center. And at 5:30 the next morning, in the middle of my workout, the flowers were ready to be delivered.

I'll just take a minute here to set the stage. First, I was exercising because I decided to try to sweat out the tapeworm or amoeba or whatever it was that was tearing my gut apart. Second, when I work out, I wear wrist and ankle weights. Only at the moment, I can't wear my right wrist weight because I have tennis elbow. Not from tennis. From carrying a water bottle.

So there I was, the sole person awake in my house, huddled in my powder room in three weights, a tank top, my black-framed nerd glasses, and my cold sore poultice.

I delivered the flowers to the Tupperware, then studied the directions for getting my flowers into the specimen vials.

The vials themselves are the size of a tall shot glass. When unscrewed, the lid boasts an attached spoon, the size of a pinkie nail. The instructions directed me to use this teeny spoon to scoop enough flowers into the shot glasses to fill them. Fill them. Then, I had to freeze one of the vials.

Um, what?

I had to collect a vial of human flowers - probably riddled with parasites or Salomonella or scabies - and put it in my FREEZER?!

If only it were winter...

I crouched on the powder room floor, hunched over the very fragrant flower-filled Tupperware, and quite impatiently scooped miniscule spoonful after spoonful of flowers into the vials. It takes a long time to fill a shot glass with flowers when all you have is a spoon no bigger than the tip of your finger. I began to fear I would be discovered. Nothing signals the end of the honeymoon faster than a sweaty, bespectacled, tri-weighted wife with a huge white glob pasted to her upper lip, a carb/tapeworm pregnancy spilling over her waistband, and a Tupperware of - let's face it -poop in her lap.

Growing desperate, I decided to pour my specimen into the vials. A word of advice. Never pour your specimen into the vial. Unless you like flowers all over your powder room floor. Then by all means, pour away.

The whole collection experience was traumatizing, but once I had my specimens, I froze one - don't ask, you don't want to know - and stashed the other. Later that morning, I smuggled my quarry out of the house and to the lab, quite relieved the experience was over.

Until the lab tech coolly informed me that the doctor's office had given me the wrong specimen vials. I'd have to do it again.

In the meantime, she'd try to work with what I had provided. But was the one specimen, in fact, frozen?

I assured her it was.

"Did you put it in the fridge?" she asked.

Well no, because as far as I know fridges don't freeze flowers. I put it in the freezer.

"The freezer?" she asked. Then, "Are you sure?"

Yes, I was sure. I was sure that my back door flower delivery had spent the morning nestled on top of the Breyer's vanilla that was now melting in my trash can. I was sure that I had a massive disinfection to carry out when I got home. I was sure that what I had done that morning was akin to waking up with a coyote ugly.

I was also sure that I was getting better, and that I could not produce the desired second flower delivery.

So now I sit, like the rhyme, largely broken hearted. Cold sore is nearly gone, as is the stomach bug. I am no closer to knowing what infected me than I was before I sacrificed my Tupperware. My flowers refused to reveal to the lab which agent, exactly, had infected me.

And just as I began to wonder what would strike me next, my kitchen ceiling began to rain. Water dribbled from my ceiling fan, just like my nether region had dribbled a month ago.

This catastrophe, like the cold sore, cannot be hidden from Husband.

Fortunately, this one has nothing to do with my nether regions.