my new porn name is malassezia furfur

warning: skin flakes, blood, and People Magazine ahead

For a few years now, I've had some odd discolorations on my torso. One is centered on my navel, and looks like a map of Australia, if you were to tilt Australia on end. And of course if Australia had a deep depression on one side that was wrinkled and linty at the bottom. Two others run along both sides of my bikini line and are also vaguely coastal; a fourth under my left arm might be an inverted Wales, complete with Anglesey.

I haven't done anything about these splotches, for no good reason. I'd like to say I thought they were maps to buried treasure, or perhaps to the new secret homeland to which my people will flee after the Archons take over, but the truth is, nobody has made any concerted effort to kidnap and flay me. No pirates, no space aliens, no mirror-lensed government agents in gray suits. Nobody. Other than my gynecologist, my mother and one lover, nobody's even said anything about it, and a lot of people see me naked. So I guess if they're really maps, they're old ones. Obsolete. The treaure's been found and squandered on bad real estate deals, and the Archons have discovered the secret planet and turned it into an amusement park.

One real not-good reason I haven't dealt with this is that I am one of the forty million Americans without health insurance, and I am resisting the urge to rail about that right now, about what happens when the COBRA from your fancy job runs out and you start seeing what the so-called indigent have to face to get health care, how it feels the first time you see 'indigent' on a form you're filling out so that you can sit in a musty waiting room full of dead plants and a too-loud television for six hours to see a harried doctor who can't tell you why you've had a cold for five or six weeks, how it feels to take two busses out to a hospital that looks suspiciously like Arkham Asylum and waste an entire day that you could have been working for the chance to spend ten minutes getting a prescription for what's going to turn out to be Tylenol.

I'm not going there. While I'm voting for Kerry in part because I believe he, or more accurately Teresa Heinz Kerry, will go there, it's not the point of this post. Suffice it to say that when I have to, I bite the bullet and go to a private doctor and pay for my care myself. But I really, really have to feel like I have to. Something virtually has to be falling off.

The second not-good reason is so boneheaded I cringe writing it. Although not as much as I'm sure my mother is cringing right now, and very possibly my companion's mother (Marry that girl! So she has health insurance!), and everyone who generally believes I have my head on straight.

The second not-good reason is that I am afraid of cancer.

Say it along with me: do not start your research into health issues with the Internet. On the Web, everything is terminal, or will at least lead to something falling off. In a moment of perversity a few weeks ago, I downloaded a pdf Color Atlas of Skin Diseases onto AX's desktop, and pored over it with hypochondriac glee. I see it's still here, and still totally gross; it's got some pretty graphic photos of advanced cases of things with names like Molluscum Contagiosum and Granuloma Pyogenicum and Condyloma Acuminatum. With boils on her fingers and scales on her toes, she shall have ointments wherever she goes.

And I'm trying to talk about (or avoid, more like) how afraid I am that what got two grandparents and my dad, is going to get me. Probably not my lungs, since I don't smoke, and hopefully not my colon, which I don't abuse as much as my grandfather did (onions fried in chicken fat until black, anyone?) But possibly my skin? I know already that I'm at risk for some rather exotic cancers thanks to the fine folks at Lilly Pharmaceuticals (you didn't miss anything, I haven't had the guts to write that post yet), and I do what I have to do once a year with the speculum and the swab and the slide and all the rest of it. But the possibility of skin cancer is one I hadn't really absorbed, even if my mother's had some bits removed. I think my Nordstrom's experience of June 14 has sensitized me to the dangers of the sun; although I've never been the hardcore sun-worshipper that my mother was for a few years, I've had my share of the childhood sunburns they're now telling us can lead to problems later.

So you see what kind of suitcase I was carrying when I walked into Dr. Lucia Tuffanelli's office last week (the product placement's deliberate; I recommend her highly), checkbook in hand, braced to learn that I would never play the violin again. Skin cancer? Flesh-eating bacteria? The first sign of alien colonization that will eventually lead to my being controlled from a spaceship cunningly disguised as a phone-company satellite? I put on the paper thing (I refuse to call those gowns) in exactly the opposite way from what I was told (I didn't need to show the doctor my back, for heaven's sake) and waited, twitching, on the table. Withstood being scraped with a disposable scalpel (had to steal my own bandage). Waited some more while the doctor took the scrapings away to shine special lights on them. Prayed that the aliens wouldn't get upset at being disturbed and eat the doctor, flowers in her hair and all.

And the word is: tinea versicolor. Resulting from the action of m. furfur.

At home, furfur's a fungus. A yeast, to be exact, that lives on everyone's skin but really thrives only on special people like me. Perfectly harmless. I have drugs in hand (or intestine, now) and I have been instructed not to shower for 48 hours so the goop can express through my skin. Lovely.

I am duly embarrassed about having worried so much, and having waited so long. Now I just figure out how not to get within sniff distance of anyone I want to impress for another day and a half.