Katy Klein Has a Chat

A little while ago it occurred to me that it seemed like I had to trim my toe nails fairly frequently. But just how often was I trimming them?  Were my toe nails growing more profusely than others? Was I a contender for some Toe Nail Growing Competition?

To answer these important questions I decided I needed to do a bit of an every day scientific experiment. At 6 pm on Sunday I cut my toe nails. Then I forgot about it for two weeks. I was pleasantly surprised to find out that within this time my toe nails had grown an impressive 1 mm, or 0.5 mm/week. No wonder I felt like I was always trimming them, I am probably averaging a trim every 3-4 weeks.

So I did a bit of research (i.e. I checked at least four websites) to check on toe nail growth rates in case I needed to get onto a certain Book of Records. Turns out that fingernails grow about 3mm a month and take 3-6 months to grow out. Toe nails take a lot longer to grow out at 12-18 months. Growth rates are dependent on age, gender, season (summer being the season for toenail growth), exercise level, diet and hereditary factors.

So it doesn’t seem like I will be crowned Miss Toenail 2009 which is a little disappointing. I’ll just have to settle for being  impressed by my own toe nail growth rates in the off-season (winter). Apparently cutting your nails encourages growth so if I give up exercise and regular nail maintenance I should be able to at least slow down their enthusiasm.

So last week I got TB which came as a big surprise to me. I had gone for my new job medical which I hadn’t been at all worried about since I had one ten months ago. The staff health nurse had told me I wouldn’t need to come back for the results. So when I got a letter telling me to come back to the clinic I was fairly sure that it was a bad thing. 

Sure enough the next morning I was told I had TB. I was also told ‘not to worry’ which just wasn’t going to happen since I was freaking out. How had I been healthy ten months ago and then suddenly caught a case of the TB’s? Where does one even catch TB these days? Was I consumptive and should I feature in my own opera La BohemeKaty?

To make matters worse I had checked the test information which assured me that the test was very specific and very rarely wrong. Although the doctor said that he had seen three false positive results in three years so I had some hope.  So either my last test was wrong, this new test result was wrong or somehow I had caught TB walking past someone in the hallway. Usually you need to live with someone with the active disease but I was pulling the immaculate infection.

The doctor seemed quite bemused that I was so worried since I only had the latent form of the infection. Which has a 1% chance of becoming an active infection in your lifetime (he left out just how hard it is to treat once it’s activated). You can treat the latent infection but since I had just turned 35 there was a fair chance I would get liver damage from the drugs (after 40 the chance is so good they don’t treat you at all). Awesome, I had become Typhoid Mary. I couldn’t even talk to my friends in case they thought I had the cooties. Although I did manage to trump one mate who told me he had gout, that’s nothing I said I’ve got the TB’s!

Anyway the doctor said that we would test again in two months time since there was nothing I could really do about it. I said we would test again right now. He thought I was being pushy. I thought I was removing two months of extra worry from my life. It was bad enough for the one week I was TB positive since every time I coughed I thought ‘that’s it, it’s started’!

Turns out I was right to be pushy, my next test came back negative. I’m not sure if I was relieved or angry. What I do know is that the test possibly shouldn’t be marketed as very specific and very rarey wrong, it’s obviously pretty crap. The lesson to be learned here is to always demand a recount and only worry once its absolutely positively undeniably true.