Arachnids I Have Known, By Cracky

When we last convened, Mrs. Hillbilly Mom was giving the stinkeye to some rabble-rousing whippersnappers who invaded the sanctity of the medical clinic, where she had gone to consult with her gynecologist about her missing thyroid.

So helpful were the 'downstairs girls' at the gyno's reception desk, they made Mrs. HM an appointment for a mammogram. Being so very helpful, they made the appointment for two days later, when Mrs. HM had an appointment with her regular doctor for a routine 6-month blood pressure check-up. This, you see, would save her from making an extra trip on a different day. So what if she would have to kill two hours in between appointments? Let the games begin!

I arrived at 9:30 for my 9:45 appointment. This doc is never on time, so I whiled away several minutes avoiding eye contact with the old dude who drives the shuttle bus through the parking lot. Dude waits for patient pick-ups like a turkey buzzard following his soon-to-be carrion, then slams on the brakes in front of your car the minute you step your pinky-toe onto the pavement. I'm always having to wave him on. "No thanks. I'll walk. NO. I insist!" You'd think Dude had a tip jar mounted on the dash, or was paid per patient. I ditched Dude and scurried into the lobby to wait in line for one of the two elevators.

A mother/daughter team abandoned me when the elevator reached the 2nd floor, leaving me to ride alone to the 4th with a shaved-headed man. AWKWARD! I made small talk with him about the heat, and rushed to sign in ahead of him in case we were seeing the same doctor. Au contraire. As the receptionist was asking me all kinds of personal information like address and phone number and employer, I saw S-HMan stroll in behind her. Apparently, he was some kind of worker there in the building. Since he was wearing a uniform of the kind old gas station attendants used to wear, I figured he probably had no need to be privy to my personal stats. He can just use Google Maps like any other stalker.

I was called in at 10:00, which is some kind of record in Doc's office. I got the nurse who reminds me of a squirrel on crack. She never shuts up, jabber jabber jabber all the live-long day. First stop was the scale, no friend of mine since my buddy the thyroid packed his bags and left me, and my medication has not yet been adjusted. Of course, the scale was off by 20 pounds, due to Cracky not having that giant weight on the first bar at the ZERO mark. Having been weighed on a different scale just two days prior in Gyno's office, I knew the true number. Did I tell her? Laws, no! M-O-O-N. That spells, "Hillbilly Mom ain't no fool." I was quite pleased to lose 20 pounds in two days.

From there, we proceeded to an exam room where Cracky told me all about her fear of spiders, and how she had been washing the side of her house, which is a basement house, and because it is half underground it gets mold growing on it, and she gets a lot of spiders inside which come through the crack under the door, and when she turned that hose on, a line of spiders marched up the moldy side of the house from the dirt to get a drink from the hose, which she dropped and started screaming for her son. He's another problem, what with actually LIKING spiders, and just laughed at her, reminding her of the time she found a spider in the house, and screamed for him, and he made her get one of her good drinking glasses, and caught that spider, "It's just a wolf spider, Mom, " and then let it go outside, so it could just crawl back in under the door. (I'd love to share more with you, but I want to get this blog done before midnight). Keep in mind that all the while Cracky was regaling me with arachnid tales, she was pumping up my blood pressure cuff tighter than present-day Kirstie Alley in her Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan uniform. Good thing I don't have a fear of spiders. My blood pressure was 118/72, a perfectly acceptable level for moi.

I settled in with a book for the long summer's morn, and around 10:30 Doc showed up. He said all my labs were good, but that they were not the true values, because that thyroid situation affects all systems, and once the meds are fine-tuned, the results will be a bit different. He asked how I liked my thyroid surgeon, and I sang the praises of his well-manicured fingernails and tiny hands, because after all, isn't that what everyone is looking for in a surgeon? Doc balled his fingers into fists, and said, "Well, I'm a farmer," but I told him that I didn't hold it against him, because I didn't expect him to be pawing around in my innards. He tried to foist a colonoscopy on me, but I kindly turned him down, suggesting a time frame of next summer. This thyroid was enough to deal with on my vacation.

But we are still not to the end of Close Encounters Of The Medical Kind, because Mrs. Hillbilly Mom is a magnet for the strange and wacky. We'll finish up tomorrow.