My Special Talent

I have a special talent. (No, not like Steve Martin in "The Jerk") When someone close to me gets sick, or get some sort of medical condition, I get it too. No, I don't really get it, but I produce very real symptoms.

It started years ago when my mother got insomnia -- I stopped sleeping. Then, CR had her pap come back bad. Me too! But she wouldn't go back and get another pap, so mine kept coming back bad. I told my doctor, "Look, its just because I'm upset with my sister..." She said, "Yeah, ok. We're still gonna do this." I ended up having to have surgery with that one.

Over the years "close" has come to mean more of a proximity thing, rather than an emotional one. I say this because one year CR's second husband got hemorrhoids -- the painful kind. Poor thing, couldn't have happened to a nicer guy. [cough, cough] Now, I'd had those before, but they were never painful. UNTIL he had them. OMG, that was an awful week.

One year, a woman I worked with had several cysts develop in her breasts. She deliberately didn't tell me because she knew about my special talent. Guess who found a lump anyway? I was freaking out at work that day and I told her about it. She just hung her head and said, "Who told you?" Who told me what? "So nobody told you?" I felt like we were in an Abbott & Costello routine. Who told me what? "OMG. How do you do that?" I don't know which one of us was more surprised.

If only I could figure out how to make money with this "talent", ya know?

Anyway, my friend and office neighbor, JL, has been having problems with vertigo for a few weeks now. I had a stray thought around the time I started having that eye tick, "Thank goodness I didn't 'catch' vertigo..."

So today, JL was in my office and we were chatting. She mentioned that she wasn't able to get an appointment to go see the ENT for her vertigo for 2 weeks. Then she mentioned something about her eyes shaking.

My eye tick may have subsided... OMG, I just remembered something. I "caught" the eye tick from a woman I worked with years, and years ago. I'll have to email her. She'll probably get a kick out of that.

But I digress... I haven't had my crazy meds in over a week. Too busy with E. So when the eye shaking thing started, I figured it must be some sort of side effect from stopping that med so abruptly. (I finally managed to get them picked up last night, but then I forgot to take them this morning.)

So when JL said, "shaking eyes" I was like, "Are you friggin' kidding me? Is THAT what that is??!?" JL thought it was SOOO funny -- sympathetic vertigo. Woo-hoo. Can you imagine living in California with this? Is that an earthquake? No, it just looks like an earthquake. Fun times.