I don’t trust doctors. There are a good half-dozen reasons why this is the case, ranging from the dermatologist who prescribed Accutane for my relatively mild acne and then never did any of the blood tests that are meant to accompany the prescription to the podiatrist who treated my ingrown toenail by killing off a quarter of the nail on my big toe, leaving me with a permanently misshapen Franken-foot.

The greatest reason I don’t go to doctors, though, is simply my belief that I don’t really need them. This all stems from an incident from my junior year of high school.

It was Halloween and I wanted to do something really memorable for my costume. My dad had a couple of old uniforms from his days in the Air Force and I thought Battle-Scarred Soldier sounded like a cool costume. I grabbed a book on stage make-up and found a way to make some scars on my face. I bloodied myself up. And for the piece de resistance, the book had a way to simulate a broken nose.

Basically, you take the rubber nipple from a baby bottle. You cut it off, then you cut the tip off of it, leaving you with a short rubber tube. You put this little tube up your nose, which displaces the nostril, making it look like your nose is broken, but allowing you to breathe freely. I tried it out and found it to be a smashing success. I looked like I’d had the crap beaten out of me.

I went to school. I got some good reactions. I was pleased. Third period, I was in the computer lab and my nose was starting to get uncomfortable. I’d already shown my cool costume off and figured that I could go ahead and disassemble it. I stuck my finger up my nose to pull out the rubber baby bottle nipple, but it was a little hard to get ahold of because it had been up my nose for a few hours and had gotten a touch snotty.

So I’m digging for it. I’m digging for it. I almost have it out. And then all of a sudden, I can’t feel it anymore. I think, “Hmm. Must have fallen out.” I look around on the floor, but I don’t see it. I get down on my hands and knees and look below the computer tables, but it’s not around. Being something of an optimist at the time, I figured that it must have tumbled away. It was, after all, very bouncy. I went on with my business.

As the months went by, I began to notice a very unpleasant odor. It followed me wherever I went. No one else ever seemed to smell it. Also, one of my nostrils had developed a tendency to run. A lot. I put two and two together and came to the conclusion that I had a rubber baby bottle nipple lodged in my sinus.

I went to a doctor. She couldn’t find anything. She shined a flashlight up my nose and stuck this pair of ribspreaders up there, all to no avail. She told me that she couldn’t do anything for it, but suggested that I go to the hospital for x-rays. Images of a surgeon cutting my face open floated in my head. I weighed that against a slightly runny nostril and a moderately unpleasant odor. I decided to skip the hospital.

Months later, spring of my senior year, I caught a cold. A nasty, raw-throat, scorched-lungs, nose-packed-with-concrete kind of cold. I had a research paper due, so I couldn’t just lie in bed and convalesce. I sat at my desk with a bag of Hall’s Mentholyptus and my notes spread out in front of me. I grabbed a can of Coke from the fridge to keep myself hydrated and I made a cup of strong, hot lemon tea to sooth my throat.

This was in the days before everybody and their toddler had their own pc, so I was using my trusty old Smith-Corona electric to type this puppy up. I’d finished probably three-quarters of my paper. I paused to take a gulp of tea. I started to swallow and the first bit of it went down the wrong pipe.

If you’ve never had hot lemon tea go down the wrong pipe, I should explain that it causes an immediate and violent reaction. I started to cough. I still had a mouthful of tea, so to allow myself to really cough would mean that the liquid would spew out, all over the research paper that I’d spent weeks completing.

Not willing to make that sacrifice, I kept my mouth shut and tried to ride it out. So my lungs are erupting wildly, trying to expel the liquid that had gotten into my trachea. My lips are clamped shut, holding back the flood of tea that might ruin my work. My cold-weakened body is shaking with the effort of it all. The pressure is building in my head. Something has to give. All of a sudden I feel something shift and something flies out of my nose. The pressure is relieved. The coughing fit subsides.

I got my breath back and recovered my senses. I looked around my desk to make sure that my research paper was unharmed. Then I saw it. There, perched atop my can of Coke, covered in a greenish slime and somewhat greyed with age, sat the rubber baby bottle nipple that I had put up my nose approximately a year and a half earlier.

I needed no x-rays. I required no surgery. My body had healed itself. With the help of a cup of tea.