Death By Vitamins

I.

My mother is a lovely woman, but she is crazy. I don’t mean in the straightjacket sense so I guess I shouldn’t call her crazy. She just has a philosophy about living that is different than most. My mother doesn’t believe in western medicine. Ever since doctors botched her father’s prostate cancer surgery, she has been determined to find alternative medicines that work and I have been her guinea pig.

Most normal families on Ferncliff road in Charlotte, NC enjoyed normal dinners in quaint settings. I ate tofu. Tofu is sold by the brick, and there is always a little liquid by-product in the bottom of each package. She would plop that crap out on a cutting board, season it with soy sauce, and bake it in the oven. Then she would serve it to her weary children usually accompanied by boiled kale or chic pea soup. Kale is so foul that I think you would be better off eating leaves picked off an oak tree. And chic peas are the queerest little bean looking thing that humans should have left alone in the woods. This style of cooking is called “macrobiotic” because it’s supposed to make you live for a long time, but you will be miserable. I used to beg my friends to let me stay for dinner so I wouldn’t have to go home and face this torture. When I was nine or ten, I took some chalk and drew a square inside a circle with a line through it on the driveway. It meant “no tofu.”

We wouldn’t this same combination every night for dinner, but each meal contained some form of soybean-manufactured product. You know how people say if you eat too many carrots then you can turn orange? Well, I thought I was going to turn into a soybean. The real crime was that she is actually an excellent cook, but she purposefully didn’t use her God given skills in order to keep us all alive.

My mother’s cooking has nothing to do with medicine, doc, as you know. I just thought it was necessary to introduce her food philosophy first. A woman who never served her children chicken because she thought it was deadly certainly wouldn’t allow them to take any Advil.

Her skepticism of modern medicine started with her father’s prostate cancer as I said earlier. At the end of his life he was so riddled with cancer that he wouldn’t have survived no mater what they cut off of him. But these unscrupulous doctors convinced my mother that if they could just take the family’s jewels, then it might slow the growth of the cancer in his prostate. They failed to tell her however, that there was cancer throughout his body and he was sure to die soon. Not knowing this, she Okayed the surgery and these doctors stole the man’s dignity in the last days of his life so they could get paid for the operation.

After that she really turned to the dark side. She would still take me to the doctor once a year because she knew that was the right thing to do. But we also went to nutty specialists that promised to cure your ills using non-invasive techniques. One of the weirdest was this office with a name I can’t remember where they talked about my “gates.” They would put a substance that I was allergic to in my hand like wheat. The substance was in a vile. Then they would “open my gates” with this hand held tool that vibrated. It had three metal bumps on the end and they would place this thing on certain spots around my hands and feet. Then I had to sit there for 15 minutes with the stuff in my hand without crossing my arms or legs. I guess if you did that then your gates would get crossed and you might explode. After the time was up they would do they same thing to you to close your gates and then you would be on your way, no longer allergic to the wheat.

This was all a bunch of bullshit. But my mother took me once a week for a few years when I was in high school. It stopped when I got old enough to tell her that I ain’t going. I know she did it because she cared for me and she wanted me to be healthy. I could just see right through these people and she couldn’t. Somehow she allowed herself to be duped by these snake oil salesmen like Aunt Bee on “Andy Griffith.”

She also loved supplements. Pills. Garlic pills, B-vitamin pills, fish oil, and olive leaf extract, throw in a bat and a crows foot and you got a potion brewing. All with the promise of making you healthier and fixing your ills and all they did was cause this ridiculous problem you found today, doctor. In my room right now is a package from her with about eight bottles of new pills in it. She is convinced I am having problems with my adrenal gland and this program will fix the problem. I’ve got Herbal Adrenal Formula, Super Adrenal Stress Formula, Adrenal Rebuilder, Adrenal C Formula and Magnesium Citrate. I tried taking them, but it takes ten minutes just to swallow all of these pills. I guess now I’ll stop since it looks like I’m going to die.

II.

The doctor’s office is cold. Every time I move, the paper on his table crumples like I’m a giant sub sandwich about to be eaten. Its like I’m on an episode of “House,” but I think my diagnosis is too incredible, even for TV.

“We have to do some studies on you to try and see how this could even be possible,” the doctor said.

I don’t think you are going to figure out how my kidneys have turned into giant pills, doc. I would get it if my liver had turned into a can of Natty Light, but this is unexplainable. I mean, how am I going to explain this to my friends? “Hey Charlie, I’m dying, my kidneys turned into Flintstones vitamins!” That’s going to be great.

“We aren’t even sure if you’re going to die. They seem to still be functioning as kidneys, they just don’t look like, well, organs at all.”

I’m sure you are pulling for me to die so you can put your stupid name on this disease. “Clinkman syndrome” doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue.

“It would be nice.”

What?

“Having a disease named after you.”

Can we get back to the fact that you have just found pills where my kidneys should be? Or are you like that douche in the Lipitor commercial that invented the artificial heart, but doesn’t want you to need it, so take Lipitor?

“Robert Jarvik is a friend of mine.”

I don’t give a damn if he’s the Pope, what about my kidneys?

“First, I think we should start you on dialysis…”

No, no more pills. I’m not taking another freaking pill.

“It’s not a pill, it’s a machine that cleans your blood.”

Oh great, so they can turn into machines. I don’t think so.

“Well, we need to do something for you. I know they seem to be working functionally, but you just never know with something like this.”

How could you know with something like this, Clinkman? It has never happened before in the history of man. You need to find me some new kidneys. I know that waiting list is long, but I think this should bump me to the top of the list. Somebody call Larry King.

“Have you been doing or taking anything different in the weeks leading up to your problem?”

I had the swine flu about a month before the pains started, but that has been turning people into swine, not pills.

“Maybe they are connected. If a virus can turn people into swine, then maybe it got into your kidneys along with some of the pills you have been taking. It could be that this epidemic is worse than just turning people into pigs.”

I did wonder why I didn’t turn into a pig. I just thought I was lucky. Now you’re thinking with your fat brain, Clinkman. Damn, I’m glad I didn’t smoke while I was sick. My lungs could’ve turned into a Marlboro.

“Let’s get you started on the dialysis today. I have to warn people about this because I’m sure you aren’t the only it has affected.”

III.

I have turned into a Fox News Alert. My story is everywhere and it’s not going away anytime soon. Apparently I got the second strain of the swine flu, which morphs you into anything it connects with. The first turned you into a pig, but it has obviously gotten worse. All I can do is sit in my house and watch the madness I have started.

“This is a Fox News Alert: Eleven children who wore Bernie Madoff masks on Halloween now look like the infamous swindler. The Clinkman Syndrome caused by the second strain of the H1N1 virus continues to cause pandemonium,” the anchor says on my television.

Even when a real disaster happens they have to report stupid crap like this. I heard the other day that Elton John had turned into a penis. Thank God the new Harry Potter movie didn’t open this weekend or we would have millions of little wizards running around.

No one knows how to stop this virus. The government is doing their usual bang up job by appointing a morph czar. They only good news we have gotten in a long while was that Nancy Pelosi turned into a Botox syringe. Sick people are standing in their rooms completely naked for days at a time to avoid the virus’s wrath. Larry King did interview me though. That was nice:

Larry: So when you had heard that your kidneys had turned into pills, how did you feel?

Me: Probably how you did when you interviewed Liza Minnelli’s last husband: confused.

Larry: Dr. Clinkman, is he a competent doctor?

Me: You should know Larry, he’s the one who gave you that clean bill of health after your first heart attack.

Larry: How?

Me: You can’t follow up that answer with “how.”

Larry: We’ll be right back with the man whose kidneys are now… ah forget it.

He quit the job after that interview, so maybe I have contributed to the betterment of American culture.

This is a weird story, man. I haven’t had any other problems with my pill kidneys because they just look like pills but are still functional kidneys. Elton is still singing. I don’t know how this story ends because it hasn’t yet. But the world has changed, that’s for sure. Maybe the Mayans were right and this is the beginning of the end?

I think people will learn to adapt to their new forms. Think about how long it will take to fill out the census if they make it politically correct and include Madoff-look-alike-Americans. That might drive people completely mad. It’s a new beginning for the human race certainly. And it is hard to tell what will come of the Clinkman syndrome. Until next time…