Playing Doctor

This will be short, since I'm heading directly to a family doctor's appointment this morning.

With the state of health care in Ontario, and the inability for most people to even find a family doctor, I'm incredibly fortunate to be under the care of some of the brightest physicians imaginable at Mount Sinai.

How bright?

Well, when I started with the Family Medicine Centre I had what had been a recurring skin condition for me. It was painful. Unsightly. Uncomfortable. It kind of looked like excema but didn't respond to any of the usual treatments.

It tended to flare up at inopportune times. I thought it might have been exacerbated by stress. The funny thing was that my Mom periodically suffered from the same thing, often during the hot summer months. She remembered her Dad being the same.

The rock stars down at Mount Sinai put me through a battery of tests before they discovered what it was.

Turns out I have a non contageous, genetic disease. The frequency in the population is one in a million. (See, I really am one in a million!) Because of frequency of presentation, doctors will rarely recognize it.

Discovering it was my doctor's best day ever on the job. With my permission, he trooped through every doctor in the department to take a gander at me when the tests came back from the lab.

While it's incurable, there are ways to control it if you catch it early enough. Interestingly, I haven't had a flare up since I was diagnosed several years ago.

So, if you're a member of my extended family and any of this sounds familiar to you, shoot me an email. I can help make your doctor's best day ever, too!