I'm a doper

Among the souvenirs Mags and I brought
home from our backpacking trip through Wet Beaver Canyon was a mild case of swimmer's itch.

Well, I thought it was swimmers itch,
but it didn’t appear immediately like it’s supposed to. It didn’t itch irresistibly
either. Then when Mags’s rash subsided
after a week and mine persisted and got maybe a little worse, I decided to see a
doctor.

At first blush the doctor thought I
had scabies, but he ruled it out. Next
he suspected poison oak, but ruled that out too. He examined it under a microscope and saw
some filamentous ‘things’ but he couldn’t make a confident diagnosis.

So he did what any other doctor would
do. He prescribed medicine to treat the
symptom. You know how it is, a pill for
every disease, a disease for every pill.

In my case the pill of choice was
prednisone, an immunosuppressant used to treat various kinds of dermatitis like
mine. It’s also a glucocorticosteroid. Baseball fans might recall that prednisone is one of the steroids that
Barry Bonds has admitted to using. He’ll
‘fess up to that one because its use is not prohibited by Major League Baseball,
only anabolic steroids are. Barry uses prednisone
to alleviate pain in his legs, which is caused mainly by the tremendous weight of
his excessively large head, which is due, of course, to his prolonged use of
steroids of the anabolic (banned) variety.

When I picked up my steroids I asked
the pharmacist if they were going to help me hit home runs. “Nope” she said. “What about climbing Little Cottonwood Canyon
in the big chain ring, will they help me do that?” “Sorry.” She said. “What kind of steroids
are these?”  I wondered.

At home I popped a couple of the
innocuous little pills and looked them up. Turns out, the use of glucocorticosteroids by athletes is in fact banned
by the World Anti Doping Agency. According
to the WADA website, glucocorticosteroids can produce a ‘feeling of euphoria,
potentially giving athletes an unfair advantage,’ In other words, athletes
respond to glucocorticosteroids such as prednisone like children respond to red
Kool-Aid.

So if the next time you see me on my
bike and I’m laughing uncontrollably, you’ll know it’s not the fruity red punch
in my water bottle that’s doing it.