20 Diseases

One of my fondest memories of childhood is playing 20 diseases in the car with my dad. It’s this game he made up for when we were on road trips. You know those god-awful trips with the entire family in which you are forced to go to a rock quarry somewhere in the middle of Oregon to look for geodes. Anyway, we had one of those super cool station wagons with the wood panels, except ours were just the doors painted to look like wood panels. It would be my two brothers and I crammed in the backseat with my folks upfront and the dog in the way back.

So the game went something like this… My dad would say I am thinking of a disease and then we would ask questions just like the game 20 questions. The person who got to 20 diseases won. So our questions would range from, “is one of the symptoms a rash?” Or “does it give you diarrhea?” Or “is it fatal?” Now this might seem like an easy game if my dad would have thought of diseases such as influenza or the common cold. But my dad is kind of a rare disease expert. So our questions would also include, “is it a kind of hemorrhagic disease?” Or “what type of contact does it spread through?” Or “is it hereditary?” We learned about all kinds of diseases; Hantavirus, Ebola, Creutzfeldt - Jakob disease. And the best part of this game, as far as he was concerned, was that no one ever got to 20. I don’t even think my brothers and I would have even known where to look to learn about diseases. We were young kids.

Typically he’d give us a few easy ones like Elephantitis or Lyme disease. Then we would spend the next few hours on the more difficult ones. My brothers and I would begin all these trips determined to win and then inevitably hate the game after losing round after round; My Dad taking bizarre pleasure in keeping us engaged and frustrated at the same time. I actually became pretty decent at this game predicting his pattern of going from dermatological disorders to diseases of the gastro-intestinal variety.

As an adult, I find that very few of my friends are interested in playing the game 20 diseases. I don’t have to miss the game though, since the game has morphed into something else. It has taken on a new premise and is usually it’s based on conversations that begin with, “I had unprotected sex with him 2 weeks ago and now I have a strange itch.” Or “there was a hard bump with a white pustule on his scrotum, what do you think it was.” Unfortunately with the adult version the only thing you typically win is a trip to Planned Parenthood and a prescription for antibiotics.