Chicken Scratching Away
Funny how I can’t seem to get chickens off my mind. As I continue my quest for a healthier diet, healthier as in baked potato chips as opposed to the regular kind, I appreciate that chicken is a good source of protein.
(Only for us meat eaters though; you vegetarians are stuck with tofu and quinoa.)
The problem is, I can’t cook chicken. No matter how I do it, it turns out tough and dry and yuck. But I’m working on it.
The real reason I’m thinking about chickens though is that the medical universe messed up somehow. Physicians are supposed to be the ones with illegible handwriting, not the patients. It’s actually a requirement in med school that you must have atrocious handwriting in order to graduate.
It’s true. You can even specialize in this. It’s called Medical Transcription.
Bad handwriting in the medical field is often referred to as chicken scratch. I think that’s because in the old days, when doctors came to your house, people would sometimes think they were the chickens circling the yard; they kind of looked alike so it could be confusing.
I’m not a doctor but lately, on my most fatigued days, I find that my handwriting is so bad, I can’t even read it.
Is this an MS thing?
Is this just me being lazy, which is due to fatigue, which is back to this being an MS thing?
However MS is involved, this is quite disturbing.
One of my life’s proudest moments was when I received a perfect penmanship award in the fourth grade. My friend Glen also won the award and that miffed me a bit but still.
We got called up to the stage during an assembly and were given fancy certificates and nice pens. I might have been shy, and clumsy, and couldn’t understand math AT ALL, but who cared, I had perfect penmanship!
It’s an honor I cherish to this day.
Or at least I did.
Now all I can think of is how disappointed Mrs. Eastman, my fourth grade schoolteacher, and all my classmates would be.
I was a handwriting fraud. I’d let my once perfect cursive (for you young uns, cursive is a handwriting style before computers gave us the word font,) fall down the bad writing, chicken scratch tubes.
Some days, I’m impressed with my lovely signature.
Other times it’s so bad I don’t even know who I am.
Just this morning I was at my local bank and filled out a withdrawal slip.
(For you young uns, filling out a withdrawal slip means you walk into a building called a bank, write stuff out on a piece of paper and talk to somebody who hands you money. This is how a few people still get cash from their accounts. Also for you young uns, cash is paper money that you can hold in your hand. Some people use cash instead a chip on a card or a QR code that magically lets you buy things.)
Anyway, my writing was so awful the teller (person who works at a bank,) had to ask me to state my account number as she had no idea what it was.
I looked at the paper I filled out and understood her confusion. The numbers looked like lines all squiggled together. Except for three of the numbers where, in the number boxes where 8’s should be, I had drawn little ants!
I hate ants. Why on earth would I draw them on a bank slip? Is it because I had just found one despite having three visits from an exterminator?
Then the teller asked for my ID as she couldn’t make out my signature either.
“But Patty, “ I exclaimed, “you’ve known me since fourth grade! Remember when I won the perfect penmanship award?”
Her dirty look told me she did remember and that she was disappointed in how I’d let myself go. I showed her my license and got the money I was requesting but not before I bemoaned that my handwriting was now not handwriting at all but plain old chicken scratch- Bock! Bock! Bock, bock bock!
As if that wasn’t bad enough, not only was my writing the stuff of chickens, it had now become the stuff of bugs too. Ants for 8’s. What’s next? Beetles for O’s? Spider’s for 5’s?
It was all so depressing.
Or it would have been if I wasn’t so busy scratching away. You see, for days I’d been itchy everywhere. Somehow I’d developed a huge rash that resembled chicken pox.
I wasn’t supposed to scratch. Just like when I actually had the chicken pox, likely around fourth grade. Ahh… now I see a connection.
But fourth grade was fourth grade and I’m an adult now. It’s my body and I’ll scratch if I want to.
The doctors weren’t sure what this rash was but thought it might be stress induced. What could be more stressful than chickens and bugs? And the medicine they gave me wasn’t working.
A thoroughly reliable two minute Google search said that hives can be a symptom of MS and they can cause extreme itching. It also said that MS hives don’t come with a rash, which I had, but you can get a rash from scratching.
So what came first, the hives or the rash? The chicken or the egg?
Either way, it just seems to me that both my newly acquired horrible handwriting and my newly acquired horrible hives both must have something to do with multiple sclerosis.
Until my doctors and I figure this out there doesn’t seem to be much I can do. Guess I’ll just keep on scratching and keep on writing out bugs to pay my doctor bills.
I’m sure this too will pass. But for now it’s dinner time.
And if you don’t mind me, I’ll take the fish, NOT the chicken.
