“Why did your dad send me this?” Crankenstein asked as she made her entrance yesterday morning, tilting her phone to reveal a closeup of some sort of burn, rash or other flesh wound. Normally when they text each other it’s to exchange bear memes and headlines (bears as in Ursidae, not voluptuous gay men, which is more my beat than theirs) and this didn’t appear to involve one. I couldn’t tell if I was looking at a wrist or ankle, nor had I heard anything from my dad himself.
“I don’t know,” I shrugged, checking to make sure I hadn’t missed any calls or texts. “Whatever it is, Mom made him do it because she wants medical advice.”
“It looks like a brown recluse bite,” she mused, examining it while waiting for him to reply to her “WTF?” prompt for details.
He explained that it was new, its territory on his leg was expanding, and he’d woken up to pain radiating from it. An avid outdoorsman who is vigilant about checking himself for ticks, he’d recently spent a few days laboring on a cousin’s farm, camping in a primitive tiny house with a gravel floor and uninvited creepy-crawly guests.
She told him to go to urgent care right away, before it was overrun with grilling and fireworks injuries, and stressed that it was critical he address leg wounds promptly as a diabetic.* My dad’s the sort of stereotype who once vowed to die of tetanus rather than visit urgent care after nicking himself with a hedge trimmer, but a recent melanoma diagnosis reminded him of his mortality. Maybe that’s why he put up no fight this time and took her advice. Whoever treated him agreed with the recluse theory and sent him home with antibiotics and orders to follow up with his PCP.**
One of the first things I noticed when Crankenstein and I started dating was the urgency with which friends, relatives and virtual strangers cornered her for impromptu consultations. It didn’t matter how far removed an issue was from her specialty, or how inappropriate the setting might be: they were going to shoot their shot, like when Tom — hoping to avoid a trip to the doctor — dropped her pants in a nursing home parking lot for an opinion on a thigh rash.
Prim, reserved women in their sixties would rush up to her after church services, sometimes blurting out highly sensitive personal information without first suggesting I take a hike. On one occasion, a rector’s wife tearfully approached her, confused as to how she could’ve gotten pregnant while breastfeeding, and Crankenstein gently addressed popular misconceptions (no pun intended) about breastfeeding as birth control.
Twice in the span of a frightening week or two last year, she told my sister to rush one of her toddlers to the ER; on one of those occasions, they’d been dismissed by an urgent care NP who failed to recognize dire signs of respiratory distress or summon an ambulance. That Crankenstein was available to watch the videos Tom had alerted me to on each of those occasions was a fluke that makes me nauseous if I think too much about it; there was only a 25-minute window of time we were together on the worst of those days, which coincided with our nephew’s worst period of danger.
There’s a dark side to her knowledge sometimes, as when she understood much earlier than most the horrors the pandemic would bring. Or the terrible day a few years ago when we received photos of emergency room EEG spikes and squiggles, results she knew would bring devastating news to an infant relative’s parents. She’s also given honest opinions about the uselessness of medications and procedures that loved ones opted to pursue anyway and later regretted.
The church lady incidents had nothing on the time Crankenstein recognized before the rest of us that my maternal grandmother had a stroke and was dying. My parents listened to her suspicions and urged the family to gather and say goodbye that afternoon, but my mom’s siblings didn’t take it seriously at first because they were in denial and, anyway, Crankenstein wasn’t her doctor. They showed up that night, after mobile imaging was done at her bedside and the nursing home’s doctor rendered his opinion over the phone, and were with her when she died just a few hours later.^
What must it be like to know what Crankenstein knows? It’s made her health anxiety infinitely worse than it would’ve otherwise been, which isn’t uncommon among physicians (though hers is unusual in its severity and duration). Her choice of spouse hasn’t been too helpful, either. When she isn’t plotting her own funeral, how many times a week must she glance at me, with all my malfunctioning parts, and feel unbearable dread? Had ‘Niles’ been a bigger part of her life when we met, I never would’ve made it past the first round of auditions.
Still, there are limits to her expertise. My mom sent her a question last night that she wasn’t sure how to answer: Is there any chance my father might suddenly develop superpowers?
* My father-in-law is a diabetic, too, and prone to ignoring leg and foot wounds. He will ask veterinarians and dentists for advice about worsening foot problems before contacting Crankenstein, because he knows she’ll say “Call your doctor” or “Go to the ER,” and he’d rather risk amputation than do either of those things. (That sounds absurd enough that you might think I’m joking, but I’m not.)
** They also instructed him to take Tylenol, ibuprofen and Benadryl as necessary, and to ice his leg and keep it elevated.
^ My grandmother’s health had been in sharp decline for the previous 18 months, and she’d made it very clear in the weeks before her death that she was ready to go and didn’t want any life-saving measures.