Well it was shit.  I just got out of the hospital. The pain did not go away on Sunday.

So much for my career as a health prognosticator.

(BTW – the pain is gone now but I caught a cold in the hospital. That last bit actually makes me giggle.)

I was just able to have a shower and wash my hair without pain (my hair is very long and washing it is no mean feat). And my body is making weird ass noises. I think this episode of pain is nearing its end. Just in time for work! Oh joy.

(Odd what pain does to a mind. I can’t believe I just wrote about my body’s funny noises. Bleh.)

Dr. B be warned. I am coming to your office tomorrow and I am not in a jovial mood.

This more or less constant illness is a pain in the ass.  Still, it seems to me that it has taught me something about limits.

I had agreed, several weeks ago, to man a telephone for a charity telethon today. So I got up and went.  I had to think about how best to negotiate the particular possibilities of this illness so I stopped at the grocery store first thing and got something to drink and some plain buns to 1)keep the hunger at bay and 2)not upset my system any more than it already is.  I took the car, because long rides on public transit are simply too risky at the moment. And it worked for the most part. The nasty pains were kept at bay and all I had was the occasional, and manageable, cramp.

This compromise seems to me to be the key. I cannot just ignore the limitations this thing has set upon my life but I cannot let it rule me either. So I push, I hope intelligently, against the boundaries it has set for me.  One hopes that once this thing is fixed that I retain the lesson. I suspect it will be useful if generally applied to my life.

So I after my largely sleepless night I went to work. Walking down the hill to the bus wasn’t bad, in fact it felt good to be out in the incredibly warm (for January) air. I could feel the tiredness buzzing in my head but I thought tea or coffee (or both) would help that. I vowed to take a pill if I had any problem sleeping that night.

I got through most of the day more or less without incident and if I’d stopped at the soup for lunch I would have probably been OK. But I didn’t. I ordered an egg salad sandwich as well, with lots of vegetables. I ate the soup and then half the sandwich and within minutes the abdominal pain started. Exhaustion proves to be some sort of vulnerability amplifier. The pain was mild, so I went back to work and threw away the other half of the sandwich. The pain grew a little as I worked, but I thought it might settle with nothing else added to my system.

Between the tiredness and the pain, I did not stay late. The minute my time was up I shuffled out to the train. The walk home was nothing like the walk down the hill in the morning. The weather was still lovely, a few spitting rain drops, the smell of damp earth — the world was fine, but every step increased the pain.

When I got home I went straight to bed and struggled with sleep, exhaustion, pain and nausea. By evening, with the aid of a sleeping pill and antinauseant, sleep managed to win the battle.

It’s 09:30 the next morning, and the pain is largely gone. Still, no food yet; I think I’ll try soup later, if the pain stays away. Definitely no sandwiches, nothing solid, nothing with fiber.

Exhaustion is such a powerful thing and sleep it’s only antidote, so if it doesn’t come, all is screwed.

So yesterday’s cartoons were partly correct. I did feel like a frazzled cat by the end of business, but the works below by Zhiwan Cheung are a bit more accurate. The first: how I felt by yesterday evening before sleep finally bore me down.

At the moment I feel more like this:

It’ll be interesting to see what happens by the end of the day. The thing about moving through extremes of delight and exhaustion is that life is certainly interesting.

The project is online.  I put in a few days as a bug-finder and then left that to the rest of the users.  The bug fixing is for the bug-fixers. At that point, I asked for, and was granted, several days off (5 in a row). I went home, went to bed and woke up sick. Normal for me after a period of over-work. I spent the first three days taking a few tottering steps outside and the rest in bed. Last night was the blow-out headache.

This morning I feel much better. So expect to hear more from me shortly.

In the last few weeks I have been rather ill and as a consequence I have been inside for much of that time. This morning, when I went outside just for the sake of being outside, I realized how much of a toll living in has on me.

You should understand that at various points in my life, starting when I was a teen, I have lived out.  I spent a couple of years on the road as a kid, just wandering around the country. Technically, I suppose I was homeless, although I could have gone to my mother’s house had she not been such a madwoman.  I have to tell you that it was not terrible. I was not suffering, in fact they were wondrous years full of discovery and learning.  As an adult I have lived in cars and vans (with children and pets) for long stretches of time. These were not terrible years either and both my children are better people for it too (even according to them). This is what I call living out.
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Fear is an interesting thing. Or at least how people respond to it is.

We all have fear. For me at this moment I am finding myself afraid to go back to work. It’s not the work of course. That’s easy and my bosses are mellow and understanding, even in difficult corporate and economic times. What I am afraid of is being so far from the comfort of my home.  Here if I feel bad I can go to my room and take a nap. There, if I need to leave I am still 30 or 40 minutes from home.

I can’t stay home until this is all over either. Can’t afford that on a number of levels. So I am going but I am going to compromise with my fear. I am taking the car to work. It’s expensive but at least with it there (and the blankets and pillows in the back seat) I can retreat to a personal environment should things go south today. I’ll get over it soon. Probably once today is over and it all goes OK. Still, while I feel it, fear is a hard one to negotiate with any grace and especially hard to negotiate with any degree of rationality.

Two things prompted this post. The first is a good article called the Pandemic of Fear by Michael Specter and the second is an old CBS video going around about Judy Roberts and her neurological damage following the swine flu vaccination she received in 1976.

Then I ran across this offensive bit of misinformation about the nature of vaccination. It says, for example, “it is absurd to give a disease to a healthy person in order to prevent the same disease. It is like giving a child a small rape in order to prepare her/him for a possibly bigger rape later.” I mean really! It really says that.

I mean if the author can’t tell the difference between a virus and a rapist he/she is in big trouble.  It also shows such incredible basic ignorance of how immunization works that apart from the possibility of a seriously low IQ, the only thing that really makes sense is that either the person knows better and is using our penchant for irrationality for some unknown personal reason or the person has been raised inside a cult/cave.

Here’s an example of this same kind of “thinking.” (Imagine a news anchor speaking in horrified tones) – “The vaccine in 1976 caused more deaths (4000 of the 46,000,000 million people vaccinated – that’s 0.008% of the population by the way) than the epidemic itself!”  Gee. That’s terrible. That means we didn’t need the vaccinations. Right?

What is left unsaid is that maybe the low death toll was because the vaccine worked just fine for the other 99.992 % of the population.

Here’s a question: if you had a 99.992% chance of winning the lottery would you buy the ticket? If there was an 0.008% chance that someone would break both your legs as a consequence would you still buy it? Probably is my guess.

Do vaccines bear risks? Sure. Do diseases bear far, far greater risks? For sure.

Am I going to be vaccinated? Yes.

Am I worried? About 0.008% of me is worried. (I am 66 inches tall. That means about half an inch of me is worried.) I’ll probably get over it pretty quick.

There. Done.

On the second night of my recent hospital stay I was in a double room with a curtain divider for privacy. My roommate was a man, soon to be discharged, that had come in with a shattered arm. He was leaving with the arm still in a sling, but it would be one that would be useable once the healing had completed.

The thing is the taxpayers paid for it all. He has nada. Never has either. He has, by the sound of his conversations, lived on the street, or on welfare his entire life.  On top of that, he’s an alcoholic and dependent on prescription drugs so rather than deal with withdrawals, the nursing staff had been instructed to give him four shots of whiskey a day, evenly spaced out.
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Five days in hell, that’s what a hospital stay is. And yet I cannot even imagine how terribly I would have done without the ability to just go.  I called a cab Sunday morning when the pain got close to unmanageable. I had been getting the waves of pain on and off since Friday and knew that it wasn’t going to diminish on its own.

So I got to the emergency entrance, the clerk took my name and the name of my doctor and that was it, I was whisked off to a room and many, many different helping hands. They made it so that I experienced the least amount of pain and nausea possible and gave me a favorable outcome — 2.5 days of agony, 3.5 days of retching followed by continued life as opposed to innumerable days of agony, retching and probably a heart attack followed by death.

I am so deeply glad I live where and when I do. You know when I checked out today, all the admissions clerk asked was “do you have extra insurance?” She recorded my answer, didn’t ask for proof, or money, and told me to get better – with a smile. And I won’t get a bill either. Oh the “horrors” of socialized medicine.