SUBURBIA Seeing Spots

family down with anything less than the perfectly marinated steak that my husband would overcook on the grill.

My husband scratched at his red spots and insisted that I take another look.

“I think it’s something other than mosquito bites,” he declared. “I only had a few yesterday and now I have more today. They’re multiplying!”

“Well, you grilled last night, and you grilled the night before that. The mosquitoes had two opportunities to bite you.” I waved him away, but I knew what was coming next.

“I disagree,” he said. “I think I might have come into contact with a poisonous plant, or gotten bit by something worse, or maybe I’m having an allergic reaction to something and it’s starting as hives but is going to become systemic and make me really sick.”

He paused. I knew he wasn’t done.

“I’m going to go look it up on the Web doctor.”

Boom.

Now, I’d been down this Web doctor road before. Every time my husband got a Man Cold, he would insist that he’d actually come down with some exotic plague or disease based on the diagnosis by the Web doctor. In every instance, it would turn out that my husband did not, in fact, have Arctic Seal Poisoning or Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever but did just have a cold, although a Man Cold was certainly severe enough to kill him, or at least me for having to put up with him.

This being the case, I was pretty sure when he compared his red spots with those on the Web doctor, he would discover that he had not been bitten by some aggressive suburban mosquitoes but rather had somehow come into contact with the poison of an Amazonian dart frog or was showing the first signs of leprosy.

Of course, we had neither been to the Amazon nor had we fraternized with anyone with leprosy, so it was highly unlikely that he was suffering from either of those and more likely that he’d just been dinner for a couple of hungry mosquitoes.

Still, I thought as his wife I should validate his concerns and not be too quick to dismiss a medical system based on an algorithm designed by computer nerds rather than real doctors.

“Hey, honey, before you check the Web doctor, would you light the grill? The steaks are almost ready to go on.”

“Sure,” he replied.

“And also put some of this on before you go outside,” I said handing him the bug spray. “It protects against mosquitoes and poison dart frogs.”

Tracy Beckerman is the author of the Amazon Bestseller, “Barking at the Moon: A Story of Life, Love, and Kibble,” available on Amazon and Barnes and Noble online! You can visit her at www. tracybeckerman.com.

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