Doctor Day

Posted on June 9, 2005 in Glands OCD

Today I made a round of my doctors: somehow I manage to get myself scheduled so that I go from one to the next. The ENT surgeon checked my neck. There’s still a long ridge (called an endema) running from the bottom of my ear to the place on my neck where he found the piece of meat to stick in the hole. It only hurts in the areas which have become freshly unnumb and then only when you press them.

I learned that I will be seeing him on and off for the next two years. Though it was a benign growth, he wants to be sure that it doesn’t come back. (Which is not a good sign.) It makes it sound like cancer, doesn’t it except I get to skip the vomiting, the hair loss, and the headaches of chemotherapy.

Also visited my shrink. I reported a habit of mine that seems to have disappeared: I used to repeat myself a lot. I used to repeat myself a lot. (OK, lousy joke.) It was not unlike the depiction of Howard Hughes except I spoke in paragraphs and separated my repetitions by a matter of minutes. I also had this habit of jumping from tile to tile or brick to brick when I found myself faced with such masonry. I also jumped cracks like Jack Nicholson’s character in As Good As It Gets. (That scene at the end when he faces the brick sidewalk made me laugh and laugh.) Compulsions take many forms. I never got paranoid about cleanliness, though I felt bad if I didn’t perform the rituals in church right and wouldn’t eat on a surface if it smelled of ketchup.

Most of the friends who know me in real life now don’t have any idea that I suffered from this. Prozac and Effexor are both used by clinicians to suppress OCD compulsions. In my case, they just receded from my consciousness like a cup of water thrown to the waves. Recently, I have read a great deal about OCD and watched the special features of The Aviator DVD. The other day, I turned to Lynn. “Didn’t I used to do that a lot?” “Yes. But you don’t do it anymore.”