A Representative Sampling

I like to write, particularly humorous items. I post here an anecdote from my past, for the entertainment of the millions reading this blog (yeah, I looked at how many have visited! Heh...self aggrandisement, anyway!)Enjoy...or not.

HALLOWEEN, MIGRAINES AND YO

So….August in Ohio. Dry grass, hot wind rustling the corn, and autumn just around the corner. It’s the time of year that I always think about migraines, Halloween and Yo.

OK, they would appear at a glance to be completely unrelated items, but bear with me.

Yo was my first technician. I hired her on the very day I bought my practice from my mentor, a 1957-vintage DVM with the delightfully appropriate first name of Merlin. Merlin was one of many old-school veterinarians who had trained his wife to multitask as receptionist, office manager and animal caregiver (in her spare time she raised three children). Apart from those tasks he performed the work of veterinary technician – anesthesia, surgical prep, treatments and so on – himself. He was therefore somewhat dubious about the need to hire, and actually pay, a bona fide tech.

I, on the other hand, graduated in an era in which the university techs not only made themselves indispensable but also wisely shouldered the thankless task of beating that indispensability – is that a word? It should be… - into our thick student heads, thereby perpetuating their own job security (they terrified us not a little in the process). No way was I going to run a practice without a tech, and as luck would have it, Yo had recently wandered in looking for a position closer to her home. It didn’t take long for her to make a believer out of Merlin. Although she had “grandfathered” into her technician’s license rather than going through a college program, she was extremely skilled, compassionate – and hilarious. On the downside…she had migraines.

Now, I have a high degree of sympathy for migraine sufferers, having been one myself until fairly recently. Imitrex injections and hormonal changes – a whole ‘nother essay entirely – have made them a thing of the past for me, but although gone they are not forgotten. I would feel one coming on: it would crawl insidiously up the back of my neck during a particularly trying day at the clinic, then slither around my temple to perch just above one eyebrow where for the next forty eight hours or so it would attempt to drill its way into my brain. During these episodes I generally tried to avoid mirrors for fear I would be faced with the image of Lon Chaney’s 1923 depiction of Quasimodo – one eye bulging, one shoulder hunched, and drooling. You get the picture.

I might add that, as if the brain-pains themselves aren’t enough, there is often some degree of nausea attached to this particular affliction. All in all, not exactly a walk in the park.

While new and better treatments for migraines are constantly being developed, experts generally agree that identification and avoidance of migraine “triggers” is the best defense. Stress was obviously an important trigger in Yo’s situation, and certain stressors – such as employers, perhaps – are admittedly difficult to avoid. But for Yo, the biggest stressor in her entire impressive pantheon of stressors was Halloween.

Oddly enough, and as luck would have it, Yo loved Halloween. She had a whole room devoted to the manufacture and storage of costumes and related paraphernalia, probably enough to last 15 years or so if rotated strategically (not unlike, for example, horse dewormers), but each year around the end of August Yo would become obsessed with the task of coming up with a new costume to wear for the “Oregon District Halloween,” Dayton Ohio’s annual outdoor holiday bacchanalia.

Complicating the entire endeavor was Yo’s man, Otto Otto was – how shall we say it? – large in a number of directions, so coming up with a working costume required roughly the ingenuity of World War II magician Jasper Maskelyne’s attempt to conceal the city of Alexandria from General Rommel’s encroaching Luftwaffe. A similarly staggering quantity of material was also needed.

The conception, gestation and birth of this annual brainchild generally caused Yo no small amount of stress, which in turn would beget – wait for it – a migraine. Without fail. Each and every year.

One year Yo decided to dress as the Statue of Liberty, complete with a crown and torch that actually lit up (history does not record Otto’s costume that year but it may have been the island of Manhattan. Yo, you must understand, did not do these things halfway).

Came the week before the Big Day. The costumes were finished. Yo of course had a migraine of epic proportions by this time, but she was determined to stay the course and make it to Dayton that weekend. The staff and I trod softly, closed up shop that Friday afternoon and watched anxiously as she staggered out the door, giving us a shaky thumbs-up when she reached her white pickup truck. The fate of the evening looked grim but our erstwhile monument to freedom was ready to go, light-up crown and all.

Some time later that evening my receptionist Crystal – a fellow township resident – happened to glance out her living room window toward the road. A glimmer caught her eye and she went out to investigate. Sure enough, Lady Liberty lay sprawled in the ditch, torch and crown still feebly alight, throwing up her socks. The Oregon district did without her that year.

It was a good thing, we all agreed later, that Yo had chosen the yard of a friend and coworker in which to toss her cookies. It saved her the embarrassment of having to explain the fiasco to strangers.

On a number of occasions in the past I have considered writing such episodes as The Great Statue of Liberty Halloween Disaster as a TV comedy script, then dismissed the idea. TV producers, I figured, would probably have passed on the concept with remarks that it was too crazy to be believable. But with the current popularity of reality TV shows, maybe I’d better reconsider.