Ange Udall

So you know the movie As Good As It Gets? Jack Nicholson stars as Melvin Udall who is an extremely eccentric obsessive-compulsive germ-a-phobe who drives everyone around him crazy, but in the end is really endearing. Well I'm dating the local, female version of Melvin Udall. Ange is a germ-a-phobe in a major way. Of course, the irony of it all is that she not only works in the healthcare industry, but she works in a hospital. A HOSPITAL DRIPPING IN GERMS.

Right after we first started dating Ange got the nastiest ickiest flu (which she later passed on to me). She was sick in bed for days feeling like crap and this is where I first got to see the loveliness that is my hypochondriac spazzo girlfriend. As I was trying to feed her Jell-o and soup, she started her moaning on about how horrible she felt when all of a sudden she decided that she might be suffering from sepsis from the screws she had in her foot (that she broke a few months before). Now, she didn't get the screws put in her foot by the local handyman or anything, she got it done in a hospital by an orthopedic surgeon. But still, she thought she had sepsis and should probably go to the ER. Luckily I was able to talk her out of it. I should have known then what was in store for me!

Ok, so now that she works at the hospital she has gotten an ever more heightened paranoia about germs. Everyday she comes home from work and immediately gets in the shower and scalds the skin off of her body with boiling hot water. She loves to tell me about how the hospital is teeming with MRSA and can't stop thinking about how it's invading every pore of her body. She is also worried about TB, Lice, Scabies, and any other germ she is exposed to during her 8 hour shifts.

But...she is mostly obsessed with MRSA. I probably hear the word "MRSA" at least 5 times a day. So the other night we were laying in bed and I realized that we hadn't set the alarm for the morning. Her phone is the only approved method of alarm clock. She hates the sound of her actual alarm and my phone has to be plugged in waaaaaaaaaay across the room, so her's is the only choice. So I casually say "Honey, can you set the alarm on your phone for 7:15?" Her response is "ARE YOU KIDDING? THERE IS MRSA IS ALL OVER MY PHONE!!!" Seriously? So we banter back and forth about our various options (none of which satisfied my lovely germ queen) and then she reaches over plucks out some tissues from the box next to the bed and PICKS UP THE PHONE with them. I was cracking up at this point and she's all like "WHAT???" And I told her she was just like Melvin Udall.

Even funnier, in her exaggerated protest to that comment and the phone slips out of her kleenexed hands and hits her right in her nude chest. Of course she freaks out in a sputter of MRSA! MRSA! which just makes me laugh more and more.

SO if you ever feel the need to freak Ange out, just think of something germ-y to do to her and you're golden.