Your mother may not be the first caretaker you meet on the way out of the womb, but you probably like her bedside manner much more than the doc who yanked you out, held you up by your ankles and then slapped your butt for good measure. That's one of the myriad reasons why so many of us return home to seek the counsel of Dr. Mom about our own health. We do this even though, if they are like my 68-year-old mother, they learn of most modern surgical breakthroughs only if someone performs them on a Hollywood starlet then blabs about it to The National Enquirer. Why? Because we figured that if our moms survived this long despite going through the majority of their lives without using seat belts, hand sanitizer or water that's been purified through reverse osmosis by minimum-wage pixies in organic cotton gloves, then they must be on to something.
Therefore, in honor of Mother's Day, let's reflect on some of the medical wit and wisdom that my own Mom, and probably yours, has passed on throughout the years that has yet to kill us.
"Don't go outside with wet hair in this freezing weather! You'll catch a cold!"
In recent years, science (or at least people with white coats and clipboards paid for by the over-the-counter cough syrup industry) has discredited this long preached mom-ism linking the human rhinovirus to wet hair and chilly temperatures. Besides, what moms really should have been warning us about are the icicles that form in your follicles under these conditions. They can snap off and eventually hasten the development of the hairline condition called "isolated widow's peak" or, more commonly, "the David Letterman floating isle of hair." Coming soon -- a study on this phenomenon underwritten by the makers of Rogaine!
"Don't forget your rubbers!"
Oh, Mom! We naively thought you were protecting my good Hush Puppies from the mud and puddles! You were really protecting my boy parts from the clap! And protecting yourself from being called "Grandma" too soon.
"Sometimes you have to be your own doctor."
My mom is especially fond of this one. Not for me, but for herself. She uses it as justification for occasionally skipping a few handfuls of the 73 medications she's on for high blood pressure, a condition caused, obviously, by raising me. "If I take all these pills all the time, I'm running to pee every six-and-half minutes!" she tells me. Which raises the question: What's more disturbing – the image of my mom going to the bathroom or the image of my mom breaking out the stopwatch, calculator and spreadsheet to determine the exact length of time between her going to the bathroom?
"Just put some Mercurochrome on it."
This one shows my age because Mercurochrome has been banned for sale in the United States since around the time Monica Lewinsky was giving then-President Clinton sporty looking neckties. For you youngsters, Mercurochrome was the antiseptic of choice for my family and millions like us throughout most of the 20th century. It didn't burn like Bactine or hydrogen peroxide and it turned your skin an orangey brown red color that made any minor scrap look like you had just tried to settle a slap fight between Freddy Krueger and Edward Scissorhands. It. Was. AWE-SOME! Then some genius at the FDA, obviously not a mother, figured out that dabbing a toxic metal (yep, the "Mercur" is the name stands for "mercury") on an open wound might not be as good an idea as originally thought. Moms around the nation wept openly.
"Here -- let me kiss it and make it feel better."
No comment. I don't make fun of what still works.
Stamford native Kevin McKeever, a married father of two, is a freelance writer and editor. He also writes the humor blog, Always Home and Uncool, and is a contributor to DadCentric.com. He spent 10 years as a reporter and editor for local newspapers, another nine creating and running the employee communications program for a Fortune 200 company, and then he wised up.
His humorous view of health and wellness, "Rubbing It In," is featured regularly in issues of Aetherial Living.
No comments:
Post a Comment