did you know that i recently got my online medical degree? i did and it's a marvelously rewarding career. you can work from home and you get paid in ice cream makers! read on to find out how you too can be diagnosing your friends' ailments by the end of the weekend!
so, my best friend for a 100 years, lisa, had been sick for a while with a host of maladies running the gamet from chest pains to not being able to breathe to vomiting to general illness. and the doctors were no help - in fact, they were worse than that as they'd suggest all sorts of horrible scenerios (lupus, cancer) in addition to suggesting that there was nothing wrong with her. lisa lives in syracuse and with me being in nc i couldn't run right over to her house and nurse her back to health so i did the next best thing - i hit the internet determined to find out what was wrong with her. partly i was pissed because the doctors sounded like they got their degrees from a cracker jack box but mostly i wanted my friend to not be dying from a rare disease. so i searched and searched and searched and i found nothing. so i stopped searching.
then, one day i was on defective yeti and he happened to mention a journal that he liked called gluten-free girl (it was this post here)and so what the hell, i had 15 minutes before ella got up from her nap and i headed over to gluten-free land, not knowing what the hell it even meant. but i liked what i read. it was about food, which, hello, i love me some food and even though it still mentioned an awful lot about gluten-free cooking, i found it interesting. so i went to the first post she ever wrote and read about what the deal was with her being gluten-free. then i read it again. then i read it for a third time and copied it into an email to lisa with a note that said "doesn't this all sound really familiar to you?" and if you read her post you will find out everything that lisa was going through and the answer to all of this was celiac's disease. celiac's disease, which is an allergy to gluten, is diagnosable with a blood test, so i told lisa that at this point you should just request it because the doctor's are willing to test for everything else (plus, through some research we found that it tends to be genetic and lisa had some cousins with the disease but never in a million years made the connection). so lisa made an appointment and i got my honorary web medical degree because she does have celiac's disease and it was confirmed not only with a blood test but with a small intestine biopsy and basically, she's been on the road to mending every since. it's not a fun disease, it's not a glamorous disease but at least it treatable through watching what you eat like a hawk and it's not lupus and it's not cancer. as i say to lisa - "i'm sorry you have celiac's but i'm glad that's all you have". so in payment for my hard work and all those long hours of studying biology books, lisa sent me the cuisinart ice cream maker from my amazon wishlist which is sad because if you add up all the money on drugs and tests that she spent over the course of 6 months we probably could've gone on a nice, relaxing cruise and celebrated gluten-free style. but with an ice cream maker i can make cinnamon ice cream and peach sorbet, both of which i have a hard time finding in the store.
and that is the story of how i became a web doctor and how i should be addressed as dr. terwilliger from here on out. up next - the exciting and bloody tale of how i got my online surgeon's degree.
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