Schrooms Make Us Smile......

Whether you know them as schrooms, toadstools, mushrooms or hongos, the image seems to bring a smile to our faces.  Maybe it's the cartoonical way they're depicted as cute, colorful plants with large shafts and rounded bulbs on top.  Or the fact that a mushroom is actually just a term that refers to a fungus, some of which are edible and some are not.

Last week if you remember, I had to find a "ginecólogo" or gynecologist for a pap smear, necessary as part of a physical to apply for health insurance.  I neglected to mention this part in that blog because I thought it was too personal. But since my dear husband has been teasing me about it ever since, I thought it might make a cute story. 

After the exam I returned to the first room where the doctor sat at his desk talking to Clyde.  The doctor looked at me and said he noticed a clear discharge during the exam.  Then he asked "do you know what hongos means in Spanish?"  I said yes "hongo means mushroom" and he then he said "what do you call that in English?"  Then I realized what he was getting at.  He was trying to tell me I had a fungal infection, better known as a yeast infection in English.  He went onto explain that since Panamá is hot and humid, fungal infections are quite common here.  I've had a few yeast infections in my lifetime, but they usually include symptoms like itching and burning which I have not experienced lately.  So the doctor pulled out what looked like a 5"x8" note pad with his letterhead on it, and wrote down what I needed to get from the farmacia (pharmacy).

So the joke around our house has been that I have hongos and I'm picturing a garden of brightly colored mushrooms growing inside me with little elves working nearby.  And since the soil is so furtile here in Panamá, and the climate is perfect, everything grows well here.  Thank goodness the good doctor caught it before it spread and formed a forest of internal, hidden hongos here... along the gringo trail.