Ten medical facts about Isobel Wren:

1)I suffer from often debilitating chronic heartburn that doctors are at a loss to treat but enjoy running up bills looking at.

2)I can roll my tongue, taste that one chemical that only people of European decent can taste, and can also taste and smell a chemical that very few people can detect at all when it is injected into them. I am a genetic freak.

3)I got chicken pox as a child and loved every second of it. For some reason I totally got into the itching and the disgusting scabs. My mom was so grossed out. Since I was the first kid in the neighborhood to get it, all the other moms brought their kids over so that they'd get it too. I was thrilled to be a disease vector. I became totally megalomaniacal about it (which also freaked my mom out).

4)Also as a kid I contracted a strange, antiquated disease that no doctor in the Washington DC area had ever seen before (they thought they cured it like, 10 years before I was born). It slowly paralyzed me and would have killed me had my mom not finally found a doctor who knew what it was.

5)I have excema, but only in my scalp, eyebrows and immediately under my nose, the latter only when I'm stressed out. I was once totally unable to convince a potential lover that the excema under my nose wasn't proof of genital herpes.

6)I have been hospitalized for mental illness once. Overnight. At the time it wasn't cool, but now it's kind of funny.

7)I have a "hairy nevus" that's a big honking mole that hair grows out of (which I promptly shave). I should have it removed, but so far I haven't.

8)It is so hard to puncture my veins with a needle to draw blood that the nurse at my student health services would cry when she saw me coming. I am not making that up.

9)I have never broken a bone, but I've chipped my right ankle and splintered a portion of my lower left jaw in a bike accident. You can see the scar on my jaw if I smile really big or squinch up my lips. It's a little line/pucker under my chin.

10)After having "too many" teeth my entire life I was told that my wisdom teeth did not need to be removed. Three erupted successfully on their own (but for a bitch of a headache on the first one, no wonder babies cry about that shit!) but the fourth dropped its roots into the nerve on my jaw. One morning I found myself in intense pain, unable to open my mouth. I was glad to learn that I hadn't gotten lock jaw, but the tooth did get infected and required several rounds of drugs before it could be removed. Between the infection and the subsequent surgeries it was nearly two months before I could open my mouth.

And one more just for good measure; I had braces for 5 years. My orthodontist told my parents that my mouth was just too small to straighten all my teeth and that, "If I make her lower teeth totally straight, the gums will recede so much that her lower front teeth will just fall right out of her head". This terrified me and I immediately took off my retainer in refusal to let my teeth "fall right out" of my head. Turns out that this would not have happened, and now I must save up money to foot a second set of braces to fix what terrifying visuals ruined.