Moo-stery solved.

Because inquiring minds want to know (ok, they don’t want to know, but they did ask in passing, which is almost the same as wanting to know) how I became Moogirl

You might think it’s because I hail from Oklahoma. Or perhaps because I love cows (which I do). And I guess the love of cows is indirectly the cause, but not the way you’d think.

When I met The Husband back on 2000, he’d had some long-standing illnesses that he’d been dealing with for years. I, on the other hand, was in more or less perfect health. By 2002, I too was extremely ill, and Clint was even worse than usual. We both have an aversion to mainstream doctors; Clint because he’d been through 6 or 7 operations to no avail, I because I just don’t trust them. But Clint’s family had a homeopathic doctor that they swore by.

In 2003, after sending Clint’s blood to Holland to be tested, it turned out he’d had Ecoli poisioning for an undetermined number of years, which had wrecked havoc on his body. And because Ecoli is sexually transmitted (bet you didn’t know that), I too had Ecoli poisoning for at least three years. I know this doesn’t sound too funny yet, but it gets better.

Ecoli poisoning attacks different parts of the body in different people. For me, it had settled in the bone marrow of my spine and the fluid surrounding my brain. This led to awesome backaches (which I still have).

As far as the brain fluid, that’s where things started to get funny. The Ecoli had rendered me completely dyslexic and I’d lost all short-term memory. When I say short-term, I mean really short-term, like walking into the kitchen and having no idea why I was there. Oh I know this happens to everybody, but every time you walk into a room? This got to be quite amusing for me. It was either be amused or get totally frustrated. I couldn’t remember conversations, movies I’d watched, when bills were due; I’d forget anything I didn’t make a monumental effort to remember. If you’ve ever seen the movie “Momento”, that was my life. Clint likes to say every day is a new day for me, blank slate, which is true.

I had a group of friends back then that I was in daily contact with on the net. One group was the people who helped me start It’s a Moo Point. The other group was, well, suffice it to say that it was a network of friends who like to, um, share movies back before it became so illegal. This second group of people were the ones who were really responsible for my moniker.

See, dealing with the second group of friends involved chatting in real time…with someone who was newly dyslexic, and totally forgetful. I would forget conversations. I would forget where people were from. I would forget people’s real names. So as not to appear rude, I had to explain myself a lot. They all knew I had Ecoli poisoning, but for the life of them, could not remember the name. Thus my ailment became Mad Cow Disease. THIS they could remember, and they went to town with it.

It became a regular greeting with them to moo at me when saying hello. This evolved into “ooming” at me so I could read it backwards. Over the weeks and months they just started referring to me as Moogirl. They were evil and completely snarky, but apparently having a conversation with me back then was highly entertaining for them. Thus, It’s a Moo Point and Moogirl were born. We still refer to it as Mad Cow Disease around here.

In case anyone is wondering, we treated the Ecoli with homeopathic drugs, but since we’d had it for years by then, it took several more years to inch our way back to semi-decent health. Clint still deals with issues on a regular basis, I just have residual problems.

I’m much better but still have a bit of the memory loss and dyslexia. Clint uses this to his full advantage by swearing that he tells me things that I know he didn’t. I think this is probably his favorite thing about me because it gets him out of all sorts of trouble. The dyslexia only rears it’s ugly head when I’m typing in real time, in which case, a course in reading Ebonics is necessary. The people who use the word confirmation thingy for their comments area have no idea how difficult this is for me and it can often take 2-4 tries for me to get it right. Anything that mixes numbers and letters, such as passwords, or account numbers are deadly. All I can say is thank God for Microsoft Word or I’d never be able to run this place. But this is also why HTML code makes me want to kill myself.

I still have to make a concerted effort to commit things to memory. Clint doesn’t get away with nearly as much as he used to, but if he sticks to his guns, I usually have to back down because chances are, I really am just having a moo-ment. So if I ever forget something you’ve said, or I ask you the same question 2 (or 3 or 4) times, don’t’ take it personally. Just moo at me and go on.

Or better yet, oom at me. That will tell me we’ve been down this road before…

PS. Our doctor told us that Ecoli is one of the most misdiagnosed diseases and that perhaps as much as 75% of Americans are walking around with some form of the disease. And remember, it can be sexually transmitted so wrap up, or you could end up with something much worse than a nasty case of pants-crickets!