More from the Physicals

     So another year I was at my gyn physical and the doctor said, “You will need to get a colonoscopy before you turn 50 next year.”

     “Next year I am going to be 49.”

     He wrote something on the front of my folder which I call his cheat sheet and said “Defensive.”

     “I am not being defensive!” I proclaimed most defensively, “It is important for me to let you know that it is wrong to imply any woman is older than she really is!”

     He scratched out the word defensive on the cheat sheet and said, as he wrote down something new, “Pre-menopausal.”

I stewed in silence.

     One year the doctor decided to pick on the nurse who was in the room instead of me. He pointed to the white splotches I have on my skin – areas where the pigment decided years ago to just disappear. “Do you know what that is?”

     The nurse looked it over and had no clue.

     He asked me, and I said, “Vitiligo – or Michael Jackson's disease.”

     “Vitiligo,” and the doctor, mostly addressing the nurse, gave what sounded like the textbook definition of vitiligo, going on for a while and actually causing me to relax, grateful that someone else was the target of his small talk that year.

     “It is probably caused, in this instance, by the hypothyroid condition that she has.” My thyroid had stopped functioning sometime after Sarah was born – probably brought on, it was surmised at the time, by the hormones of pregnancy and breastfeeding. When Sarah was six months old, the doctor saw I had a goiter – and since then I have taken pills that supply what the thyroid should be producing, and the goiter went down and I have been fine. I didn't know until that physical that there were any other side effects – like the aforesaid vitiligo which showed up one day and has slowly created more splotches over the years.

     “And the hypothyroidism also caused the premature gray hair that she has.”

     “Or,” I just had to rain on his parade of words, “the premature gray could be because my mother started to go gray when she was 17!”

     “Or,” the doctor continued without missing a beat, “her gray hair was determined by genes,” and the bedside chatter continued without me.

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