COVID Coping

I feel like girls who drink whiskey have good stories. -Atticus

Recently I told my son that during this never ending pandemic, my choices for TV watching had hit new lows. “Mom,” Will said, “I don’t think this is the time to feel bad about how any of us are getting through this. We’re all making bad choices.” I heartily agreed and the floodgates of my choices suddenly had a signed permission slip from a responsible adult.

I am not much of a Netflix person or binge watcher as that requires commitment and attention, neither of which I currently have. Instead I scroll through regular cable and stop when I reach the bizarre. By accident I found Dr. Pimple Popper which is a misnomer because the people making the trek to see her have something far bigger than pimples. The show does a back story on each patient and how their physical conditions hinder their lives and then cuts to them walking in to see Dr. Pimple Popper. She perkily walks into the exam room and asks, “So what brings you in today?” I’m not sure how it’s possible that she can miss the basketball-sized growth on their forearm and even has to ask why they are there, but she always does. She examines them while they nervously bounce their feet and then the nurses come in with the big gun extracting blades. It is often gross and there is something wrong that this is even entertainment and that I get stopped in my tracks to take a look see. After watching several shows I can tell the difference between a lipoma and a sebaceous cyst, that scar tissue from piercings can do some crazy shit, that some things can be reduced but not eliminated, that crying at the end of the show is a given as these people are so happy once their disfiguring growths are gone.

Botched is a show about plastic surgery gone wrong . That one doesn’t make me cry due to the overwhelming vanity and stupidity of most of the patients. Brazilian butt lifts and Dominican Republic breast implants are an all-around bad idea, inflated lips the size of swollen inner tubes are still a thing, too much surgery on your nose will make your nostrils collapse, there really are women who have dozens of surgeries so they can resemble a Barbie doll. I’ve stumbled on My 600# Life which is incredibly sad to me, especially since the doctor treating these patients is an overweight, cranky loon with a bad toupe. Smothered is about mothers and daughters who are so unhealthily attached to each other that they dress alike and the husband/father is nothing more than a bystander to the bizarre.

By far the most fascinating bad TV hole for me to fall into is Hoarding: Buried Alive. This has been on for years and MADE MARK CRAZY. If he walked in the bedroom when it was on he’d shake his head in disgust and I was never sure if it was directed at me or the hoarders. The kids felt the same way and if I wanted to talk about an episode they’d go running from the room. Almost all of these hoarders have had some kind of trauma that makes them buy and save everything until they are climbing mountains of stuff to get to the fridge which has moldy and rancid food. They have very strained relationships with family members and are in danger of having their homes condemned by the city if they don’t clean things up. A psychologist and professional organizer are brought in to help them first uncover why they can’t get rid of anything and then to help them sort through their stuff to decide what stays and what goes. The psychology part is really interesting to me, the organizing part is a shit show. Once the hoarder agrees to help, a team of people come in and things move really fast, the point being to not have the hoarder agonize over every single thing. It goes well at first and then the hoarder gets overwhelmed and starts screaming, “MY STUFFED BEARS!! YOU CAN’T THROW AWAY ALL THE STUFFED BEARS!!” The psychologist and organizer have to do an intervention and the relatives shake their heads and say, “I told you she was going to be like that.” Then the hoarder screams a bunch of ef bombs at everyone and storms off to chain smoke. In the end, though, things usually get cleaned up, the kids come back to visit, and the hoarder vows to not bring any more crap home.

If you ever talk about a Hoarders show with people, they fall into two camps. The ones who can recite whole episodes, “Did you see the one where they found the dead dog behind the t.v. and they had to stop filming because the woman was so distraught? She totally thought Rusty had run away and turns out he was deader than a doorknob.” Or there are the Marks of the world who recoil in horror when you start talking about a show where people save garbage and look at you and say, “How can you watch something like that?” And I have no idea but he could watch the History Channel for hours until I’d whisper in his ear, “We defeated the Nazis. I thought you knew.”

I was recently talking to someone in the latter camp whose face gave away her thoughts on being buried alive by plastic bags of VHS tapes, but then she told me a story that catapulted Hoarders to a whole new level. She is a nurse that treats patients for wound care which is a special level of grossness. She and her coworker were called into a patient’s room who had irritation and itching under her breasts that would not go away. It also smelled bad so clearly something was getting infected that needed treatment. The patient was overweight and trying to get her to a position to where they could get her comfortable to even look at the problem took an enormous effort on both their part. When they finally did and one of them was holding her breasts up, the other said she thought she saw fur. “What??!!!,” I shrieked. “Wait,” Wound Care Nurse said, “I haven’t gotten to the best part.” So she looked at her teammate and was motioning ixnay on the furay in front of the patient and they kept working in tandem until finally they could get a good enough look to see what was causing this irritation.

A dead cat. There was a dead cat under this women’s ta-tas.

I had so many questions. How did she not know there was a dead cat under her breasts? How did the cat…….? Where did the cat….? How in the world? She had no answers as their job was to find and treat the infection, a social worker would deal with the obvious problem that animals dying under a laden bosom needed to be addressed.

Once I heard that story, ranked in the top five of best stories, I felt that if there is ever an end to this pandemic and we can start eating out with friends again, that we should raise a glass of whiskey and tell our outrageous tales from 2020. Any other year nobody would ever believe them, but in the Year of the Covid it all seems plausible. In the meantime, barely-coping-pandemic people, watch your shitty shows, eat badly, order useless crap from the internet, apologize to no one for your awful choices, and by all means check under your breasts. There might be story gold under them there hills.