Hypochondriac by Grey’s Anatomy

Liam and I somehow missed the Grey’s Anatomy train the first time around, so we’ve spent the last several weeks catching up on over 150 episodes on that amazing thing called Netflix. Yes, the Roku box is held in high regard in our household, just after beer and the cats…and the remote control. There’s some serious entertainment value in the crazy lives of these doctors, who, as the show says, are like high schoolers with scalpels. I mean, seriously. If I thought for one moment that doctors were really like that, I’d never again visit the hospital. Fortunately, my mother, who has been a nurse for…a really long time (I know better than to give the number of years—you’re welcome, Mom), set me straight on how a hospital really works.

The real entertainment value, as you might guess, comes in the form of my husband. Liam becomes convinced he’s got a new and life-threatening disease after almost every show. The only cases in Seattle Grace that Liam is sure he doesn’t have are the orthopedics, and that’s only because he just has to look down to see his leg isn’t broken. Everything else in the show is fair game. Heart attack? Liam’s having one. Stroke? Well, that one’s actually likely someday. Lupus? Oh, yeah. House told us it’s never lupus, so we’re good there. But seriously, everything else on that show, Liam is certain he’s got it.

By far, the funniest story is as follows: Liam has suffered some annoying, itchy bumps on his legs and arms. I started spraying him down with bug spray every time he even thought about opening the front door, and still he kept getting these itchy bumps. I didn’t have the same problem, so we just couldn’t figure out where he was getting them. Then, in one episode of Grey’s Anatomy, a character developed chicken pox. OMG! Liam finally had a diagnosis for his bumps! It had to be chicken pox. I just asked one question to verify it was indeed NOT chicken pox. Any guesses? Yeah. Liam had chicken pox when he was a little boy. It was a pretty bad case, too, so no, he did not have chicken pox.

Somewhere in the middle of all this, I ran out of dryer sheets and ran several loads without them. Amazingly, his bumps went away. Did he come to the conclusion that you all just came to? No. His conclusion was that the chicken pox went away. And when he found a towel that had been through the dryer with the softener sheets and the bumps came back, he was again convinced that something was wrong with him.

Let’s all tell him together, shall we? Liam, you’re allergic to Downy dryer sheets. That’s your diagnosis. Of course, we all know he won’t believe it until someone on Grey’s Anatomy is diagnosed with an allergy to dryer sheets, but I’ll keep working on it.