Another Incident in a Hotel Doctor's Glamorous Life

Younger, cooler, more expensive doctors own the franchise on Los Angeles film shoots, but I go now and then.

A European director staying at the Langham in Pasadena asked for my services and then went off to work.

After driving miles through suburbs I encountered the usual cluster of trailers, street barriers, and police. It was a hot summer day in Los Angeles, but Pasadena is always ten degrees hotter.

Workers hurried about, but I was the only one wearing a suit, so I stood only a few minutes baking in the sun before an assistant approached. Like every aide I’ve met on film sets, she was young and beautiful. I hate to imagine the hiring procedures of production companies. 

She led me into a trailer, thankfully air-conditioned, where I waited fifteen minutes until the director made time. He showed me a rash and worried about bed bugs.

Many foreigners believe Americans fall below civilized standards of cleanliness. We think of personal hygiene in terms of body odor, but they notice that we allow dogs free run of our houses, and we don’t take off our shoes when we come inside. That the Langham is very expensive does not rule out bedbugs, but I diagnosed hives, an allergic reaction.

I’m not sure my reassurance convinced him, but he was a workaholic like so many of my patients. He hurried back to the set with the box of pills I handed out, and I considered it likely that he put it out of his mind.

Insect Bites

A caller was suffering an itchy rash, present for a week. Three companions were also affected. That sounded good. When more than one person has a medical problem, it’s the same problem and not serious.

In the room, all four gathered to show me their skin which revealed the scattered, small pink pustules left by ectoparasites. I use that term to be accurate because not every bug that bites is an “insect.” Spiders, ticks, mites, scorpions, and centipedes aren’t.

Bedbugs (an insect) have become fashionable, but these travelers had been moving frequently from place to place. Where hygiene is reasonable, lice (an insect) limit themselves to hairy areas; I didn’t see any. My diagnosis was scabies, a mite (not an insect) that burrows under the skin. Scabies is hard to catch from clothes or bedding; mostly it requires rubbing against someone else with scabies, and it looked like these young people did a lot of that.