At Dermatology, the chief of the department carefully examined each crimson welt. Baffled, he called in his chief resident.

“What do you make of this, Chuck?”

As Chuck was doing an in-depth appraisal of the angry looking red area on my prize pumpkin-size midriff, the rash began to spread. Right there with two doctors looking on. So they called in a few backup doctors. Seven more arrived in total. Me, my belly and nine doctors all watched as the killer rash spread slime mold-like on the outside of each thigh, then on my ankles and up my shins.

“Dr. Elgin look at this.” Chuck pointed to my thigh as red blotches began to appear.

“Hey, it’s starting down here.” Another doctor pointed to my left ankle.

“I see it starting over here now.” A youngish one came over to my left calf.

“Wow.” They were very impressed. The incredibly large and unwieldy woman turns red and bumpy. A sci-fi thriller in plus sizes. It was a moment of medical mystery so deeply moving that one ran out and returned with a camera. He and two other doctors (by now I was immobile unless supported on both sides, like some giant apparatus that was about to topple over if it ran low on batteries) supported me by my arms so Dr. Shutter Finger could stand opposite my inflamed belly and get a real close-in shot.

I know he was a doctor and not a photographer because he was wearing a long sleeved white cotton coat that buttoned down the front. It’s the same sort of coat butchers wear, sans apron. I wonder if one company supplies these coats to either profession.

I still have this immortal picture. In fact so does NIH — that’s the National Institutes of Health in Washington, D.C., in case you’re ever asked for a snapshot of some really bizarre condition that they have no clue what it is but they absolutely must have it for their collection. Like a rare butterfly wing.

In came Dr. Chuck wielding a very sharp looking knife. A scalpel it turned out to be. Small but effective. They laid what had become much more than me down on the examining table and offered to slice off a chunk of rash for NIH to examine. Supposedly the experts over there could give us a positive I.D. of this peculiar skin lesion. For Free.

Of course I leaped at this unique opportunity. I’m always in favor of pure knowledge for its own sake.

Hey, but what about the itching?

“No problem,” Dr. Scalpel Wielding Chuck tells me. “We’ll just give you some prednisone and that’ll settle everything down nicely.”

As an afterthought he said, “Of course prednisone could induce labor. But we can’t tell when.” Slice. Slice.

Oh fine. I’ll go home now with my rash and my drug and wait to see what happens. I’ll just be over an hour away down the Interstate. In the beginning of January. The time of year when snowstorms usually hit Virginia.

Naturally that’s exactly what happened. The drug broke my water — at least one of them since there were technically two water sacs, but we didn’t know that then. See, with fraternal twins there are two sacs whereas with identical twins there is a shared sac.

The dam is bursting

The force with which the sac burst felt like the Grand Cooley Dam giving way. I felt sorry for the poor folks living downstream from me.

For months my husband, sleeping by my side as I waited and gained weight without ever eating anything, would sit bolt upright in bed whenever I sighed and shout: “Is it time?”

He became so agitated over the entire process that he took up horseback riding.

“Why?” you ask.

“Who knows?” I answer.

But the night after I took the first pills, when the water hit the fan in a manner of speaking, he never budged. I sat up to see him sleeping blissfully by my side. So I hauled off with my left arm and whacked him a good one across his sleeping chest and yelled out: “It’s ti-ime!”

Without a word, he bolted out of bed and went straight for the bathroom where he disappeared behind the closed door leaving me to haul my massive girth out of bed, shove a towel between my legs, gather my overnight bag with all the stuff they tell you it is essential to have if you ever want to get this thing done with stuff like a sponge to suck on, a pillow, a straw, a cup for ice chips — basic birthing equipment that women have relied on since time immemorial.