B! and I went down to see my parents the other Saturday. Seeing the wretched state of my forearms, covered, as they were, in tiny red bumps, my mom gently steered me to the Minute Clinic at CVS. Together we waited there for about 40 minutes, observing the vast and varied pharmacy clientele, and were finally seen by a very nice Nurse Practitioner. After tallying off my boutique of psychoactive medications, she silently added “anxiety disorder” to my profile and then asked, in a very matter-of-fact way, if I was depressed.

“I think I might have mono,” I told the nurse.

The nurse produced a large binder from somewhere behind her computer, and flipped over to a page tabbed with “INFECTIOUS MONONUCLEOSIS”. It had more pictures than text. This did not instill confidence.

“We’ll do a test,” she said.

To me it seemed like spending a hundred dollars on nothing at all – there’s no cure for mono except just chilling out, and, realistically, I can’t afford to just chill out right now. But my mother persisted, and I gave in.

Carefully, with the air of a new hire navigating the supply closet, the nurse brought down a box labeled “MONO TEST” and began to read the printed directions. There was a needle, a vial, and three glass jars involved. She seemed a little confused.

“Um,” she said, squeezing dryly at the eyedropper bottle, and kind of trailed off. Turns out, they had run out of the solution that tests for mono, and so she couldn’t tell me anything at all.

Free advice: if you have a mysterious rash covering your entire body, are fairly sure you don’t have measles, and would like medical validation for why you’ve been sleeping 10 hours a day, don’t bother going to the Minute Clinic in my parents’ town. It’s totally not worth it.