I Am Truly Disgusting. Laugh It Up, People. Laugh It Up.

It appears I am falling apart. Not only do I have some sort of a low grade sickness that irritatingly has not manifested in a fever (for which I could take to my bed, like some 19th Century maiden who has received bad news), but just hangs around, dripping out of my nose and tickling my chest... I also have something disgusting on my tongue.

I was eating my dinner the other night and felt something hard and abnormal in my mouth. It wasn't a tooth (teeth are hard, but quite normal), and it wasn't a piece of food (I had swallowed all of those, though there is always room for dessert). It was stuck to my tongue, like a ganglion, or a cyst.

I assumed it was a pimple, because what else would one have on one's tongue if not a zit? I get zits in all sorts of places - or at least, I used to, when I was 13. And I still do, occasionally, at 45, though really not on my tongue. Quite frankly, I have no idea what I was thinking.

When I looked in the mirror I saw that I had a very strange sort of white rash on my tongue. Which clearly meant that I had tongue cancer, and was going to die soon, probably by the next morning. I was sad, but resigned. If anyone was going to die an ignominious death from tongue cancer, it would totally be me, because of absolutely no reason at all.

But when I went to the chemist (because they know more than doctors, and are free, even if they don't really know more than doctors), he told me solemnly that I had tongue thrush. I was horrified. Who the hell gets tongue thrush? I immediately assumed it was passed on to me by a sexual partner, but was informed that a) it was not transmissable, and b) I did not have a sexual partner. (Okay, so the chemist didn't know b), but I figured that one out for myself.)

So now I have to put pink drops on my tongue four times a day, in between wiping my snotty nose and surviving coughing fits and rocking in the corner in deep shame for having tongue thrush in the first place.

And in other news, the pink drops are delicious. So this hideous illness has an upside after all. Life is, indeed, fulfilling to the extreme.