Dickensian

So yesterday I took my two girls to the doctor's office.
Actually, I wasn't planning on going anywhere yesterday, so my darling husband didn't dig my car out from under our latest 8 or so inches of snow. Oh, and the snow plow, which actually came to my neighborhood in a timely fashion, piled up a mini-mountain at the end of the driveway, effectively trapping me in my home.
Sort of.
You see, I don't do snow.
Oh, I enjoy how pretty it is, love snow days, really love wearing my warm woolen sweaters and sipping hot chocolate in front of the fire.
But I don't shovel.
Snow-blow?
No-go.
I have many excuses reasons for avoiding this particular winter toil, all of them excellent in my opinion.
Bad back?
Check.
Lack of strength?
Check.
Prone to exhaustion from extreme physical exercise?
Double check. (I like to blame this one on fibromyalgia and hypothyroidism issues. Works for me.)
Unlike a very dear friend of mine who delights in showing off her shoveling prowess - she regularly shovels her crazy-long driveway faster than her neighbors can snow-blow theirs - I leave the hard physical work to others.
Which usually translates into "husband."
So when I became alarmed at Sarah's week-long stomach distress and pain - visions of appendicitis dancing in my head - I made a doctor's appointment.
And, despite the sage advice my mother gave me when the children were little, "You can't expect Michael to stay home from work when you're sick. Sometimes you just have to hang your head over the toilet and suffer," I called my taxi service darling husband and asked if he could take us.
Boy, doesn't that sound right out of the 1950s? And to think I used to subscribe to Ms.
Now, to be clear, I have spent my fair share of days with my head hung over the toilet, caring for four little ones, four medium-sized ones, and, to be honest, four large ones. Oh, the stories I could tell....
Suffice it to say, asking my husband to miss work is not something I regularly do, nor am I comfortable with.
Sweet man that he is, he readily agreed to zoom home to help me out. It probably doesn't hurt that he's scheduled to go to Hawaii next week, followed shortly thereafter by a trip to Chile.
Guilt can be a wonderful thing.
So, since we were taking Sarah anyway, I called back to see if they could see Melissa, too. Her toes have been bothering her for a month or more - they're sore, inflamed, red-ish purple and itchy. Nothing seems to help, so a two-fer was in order.
Now, just the day before, I got to thinking about Melissa's toes and pondered whether she could have chilblains. We looked it up on-line, and lo and behold, her symptoms fit. We joked around a bit about it and she finally agreed to wear socks.
So after Sarah's diagnosis - a likely side-effect from her migraine medicine - I told the doctor I thought Melissa had chilblains.
You'd have though I'd performed a miracle by her reaction. How in the world did I know about chilblains? In nearly 4 years of practice, she had never seen a case until just the week before, and now here was her likely second case.
Victorian novels.
What the Dickens?
Yes, I told her, it seems the gatekeeper or some other poor soul in Victorian novels always suffered from chilblains. Or gout. Or pleurisy. The flux. You name it, those Victorians seemed to have it.
As she walked out of the door, the doctor chuckled, "Harleqin Romances, huh?"
You could have knocked me over with a feather.
Harlequin Romances? Me? This accusation was almost as bad as the time I had to request a copy of a Louis L' Amour novel at the book store. It was a gift for my husband, something I made perfectly clear to the sales clerk, who could have cared less what I was buying. The embarrassment nearly killed me.
Apparently, my faced turned beet red as I fumbled to explain that I didn't know about chilblains from trashy novels but from the author of, um, David Copperfield, you know, what's his name?
Fortunately, Sarah's young and nimble brain recalled his name. Yes, I read the Victorian novels of Charles Dickens.
So much more respectable.
So much less embarrassing.
What followed was a trip to the lab for blood work to ensure the diagnosis. We should find out sometime today.
So while my life seems to have taken on a slightly Dickensian flavor, I prefer think of it as "grotesquely comic" rather than due to "squalid and poverty-stricken working conditions." (a la Collins dictionary)
Melissa, however, might not agree.
This week alone she's had to scoop the litter boxes, help fold laundry, gather the eggs, and bundle-up to bring in wood for the fire.
Unregulated, strenuous, often cruel child labor.
The little dickens.