My mom, bless her heart, is the queen of worst-case scenarios.  Growing up, she made me forever worried that some small ailment or malady was about to cause my imminent death.

“If you do not get some iodine on that hangnail RIGHT NOW, it’s going to get infected, turn gangrenous, which will then spread to your entire arm and will eventually have to be amputated because of sepsis,” Mom once told me.

At the time, I believed her.

It wasn’t until about age 11 or 12 that I began to doubt her all-knowing medical insight.  I found it odd that 1) I hadn’t died several times over because of mosquito bites and 2) none of my friends had perished alongside me.  I soon realized she was exaggerating my non-symptomatic symptoms.

Ingrown hair = death.  Pink eye = immediate death.  And the list went on and on.

“That blister on your foot looks mean!  Let’s get some hydrogen peroxide on that right away,” she once admonished me.  “You’d better keep that clean or you’ll get impetigo (add dramatic pause here) … and then you’ll DIE.”  Most of my childhood was spent in a panic worrying about catching the dreaded impetigo, which is a common childhood skin infection.  And, yes, while it’s very contagious, my mother made it sound like a pandemic was rapidly spreading across the east side of Des Moines.

She also made it sound like it was tantamount to leprosy.

“You do NOT want to get impetigo,” my mom once told me in a tone that rivaled Joan Crawford.  “I know for a fact those boys down the street have it because I saw them riding their bikes and they had huge open lesions on their legs.”  It was that sort of gloom and doom diagnosis that made me shun half of my street.  I was only allowed to play with certain kids. Come to think of it, I did play with a lot of girls growing up.  Apparently, the female species was impervious to many of the looming contagions out there.

Mother Teresa, my mom was not.  She would not allow sweaty children in to her house and she often treated them like the unwashed masses.  “Yes, here’s some popsicles for all of you,” my mom said as she doled out the frozen treats to my friends.  “I need you to go eat them over there, by the mailbox.  But do NOT go near the street lest the mailman not see you and run over your foot … which will inevitably cause internal bleeding and all of your inner organs will shut down one by one … and then you’ll die.  And I do NOT want that on my conscious!”

When I had my stroke about a year ago, I didn’t call my folks until the doctor told me I was not, repeat NOT, going to die.  I wasn’t about to give her the satisfaction of letting her know that she was right.  All those years of bleaching my hair had finally seeped in to my brain causing a near fatal aneurysm.  Talk about a lucky break, huh?