Recently in Health: Mental and Physical Category

As I sit here, my stomach is growling or more precisely gurgling. The GI issue remains. I am drinking ginger tea. It does not taste good, but so far it has proven to settle and sooth my distempered gut. Also I am taking some thing called Jarro-Dophilus designed to help the good bacteria make a come back in the colon. The box says, "Five Billion Organisms Per Capsule." Frankly, that freaks me out a bit--how small are these organisms that one can get 5 billion of them in a capsule. Are they dead organisms or free-dried? I suppose I could do some research. Instead I just take them.
Last week some time I was eating and felt with the tip of my tongue--as one does--out of nowhere a rough patch on one of the teeth in the upper left jaw. I probed a bit further and found--Jesus Christ!--a huge hole in one of the teeth. Whatever had been there--tooth or filling--was gone, and hanging out I assumed somewhere in my troubled gut.

Next day, the dentist said they could only take me in for an exam real late in the day, but then just as I was getting in my car to go to the grocery store, the cell rang and they said, "Hey, come on down."

So I spend the next three hours in a dentist chair. I had not planned on that, but the dentist really didn't give me a choice. First he looks in there and says, Jesus Christ! and even as he is speaking he is pumping in pain killer. Something about this dental accident seems to energize him. I was like a dental adventure. Immediately he is diagnosing the situation, and calculating what needs to be done, and how to do it so he can save the tooth by putting a cap on it--and all this while working me in between his other clients. I am also a logistical challenge.

I never did get clear on what happened exactly except that a chunk of tooth fell off, and it did not crack down below the gum line and there was no abscess and thus no need for a root canal.

I guess I was lucky, though the dentist enjoyed himself a lot more than I did.

I hope this tooth incident proves isolated. 

Went to my medical person again because this stomach thing--vague nausea, loss of appetite, profound flatulence, incessant stomach gurgling (loud enough to hear across the room), non-traditional stool plus fatigue--just wouldn't remit.

I was happy to see she had on hand the results from my blood work up that is part of the yearly physical. I figured those might indicate something or better yet nothing relative to this gastrointestinal issue. And thank goodness, the results of the blood work throughout and on every item were "Normal."

That word perplexed me because it is not one I would ever think to apply to myself, not having felt normal, for at least 40 years and probably longer.

But according to the tests I fall into the norm in every area.

I have been normed but do not feel normal. You can see the word "normal" written on the test results.
But being normal did not afford a diagnostic avenue for this stomach thing.

I paid attention though when the medical person's assistant said, as she was walking me to the office, "A stomach thing, huh? I don't know what is worse. A back problem or a stomach problem." This was heartening in a way since it suggested that my stomach problem would probably prove no more fatal than the ubiquitous back problem, but not so heartening since it suggested the stomach thing could be chronic and something of a mystery--in the way back problems sometimes can be. Just one of those things--for which there is no cure precisely except to learn to live with it.

Possibly my stomach or more precisely my colon is just showing the wear and tear of age. According to the results of my colon exam a couple years back I have a good deal of diviriticula in that same colon. These can become irritated from eating the wrong sorts of food. While I may be headed in that direction I do not have full blown diverticulosis. This can be accompanied by very sharp pain and blood in the stool.

So for now--more tests most especially to check for a bladder infection, since that too could produce odd sensations in those regions--and next week I must harvest materials for a stool study to determine if I have become a habitation for a parasite.

About I can do in a personally way is to eat very bland and non-irritating foods for a couple weeks and see if that makes a difference.

Great!

So I am alive but, without Mexican food, can I call it living?

Went in for my yearly physical this morning. Don't know how many yearly physicals that makes. But it's been quite a few. The package of materials on me has reached small phone book size.

According to my PCP (primary care person) I am--and I quote--"doing great." My weight is even further down from last year to around 160. The PCP thinks I shouldn't let it go lower than that and a few more pounds wouldn't really hurt. The heart seems good, and the lungs sounded good. Also all the stuff in the lower parts is, well, hanging in there.

Still have to do the blood tests though and don't know what that will show. Brother Dave went in recently for a routine physical, and it turned out not routine at all with all sorts of follow up tests before they finally concluded that all was fine.

I think I mentioned feeling as if I were suffering a fatal attack of IBS (irritable bowel syndrome). Turns out, according to the PCP, I had an intestinal bug making the rounds, a low grade infection, down in the bowel, hard to get rid of, that makes a person feel bloated (that's what I felt) and that upsets the bowel (I had that too) and pretty much screws the appetite. I had that too. I mean I knew I was hungry but I just didn't feel like eating. At one point I started drinking a lot of water. Turns out that was the thing to do. The bug is still there a bit. But I continue drinking water and herb tea.

So things could be worse. For me, that's optimism.

On the way home from the physical, I stopped off at a Walgreens to get the H1N1 shot. Man, was that a pain. All sorts of paper work and then the person giving the shots disappeared for a half hour. So there I was mingling with a bunch of other old folks in a Walgreens waiting for a damn shot. A lady who was seated...and seemed clearly older than I...kept asking if I wanted to sit, because she would get up, if I wanted, and shouldn't feel ashamed or anything. And I kept saying no thank you and wondering how the hell old do I look or miserable that she should keep offering me her seat.

And then when the person giving the shots finally showed up, the old folks there insisted I go first (the line wasn't quite clearly defined), so I took the seat, displacing a mentally ill person who had failed to do the paper work. And the shot person kept trying to poke me through my nicotine patch, so I took it off finally. So I got up and thanked the others for their courtesy, and they said, Don't smoke. Because they had heard me talking about my nicotine patch.

And I left wondering how the hell decrepit do I look.

This getting older stuff is the pits.

For me, that's optimism.

I am 63, going on 64. I had thought I would retire at about 65.5. But who knows.

I received a email with the subject heading: Post-Employment Benefits Local Forum.

Just the phrasing scares me. What the hell are Post-Employment Benefits? Is that some attempt to change the definition of "retirement." Because that's what they will be talking about "retirement" benefits.

Apparently the UC Pension plan is in significant trouble; and I am of course concerned that these troubles may affect me significantly. That I may have to work longer than anticipated, and that even if I do, I may received reduced benefits, in terms of money and medical.

But something is afoot and it is hard to know what to think, or plan or feel.

This language appeared in the email:

The University's long-term liability for retiree health benefits for current and future retirees is also projected to increase, from $13 billion today to nearly $26 billion by 2018. In other words, the liability is increasing at a rate of more than $1.5 billion per year. Governmental accounting regulations now require UC and other employers to include this liability in their financial statements. Such a significant liability could affect UC's credit rating when borrowing money for campus buildings, hospitals and other projects.

If in fact the liability associated with the pension fund might inhibit the University's power to build buildings, support hospitals, as well as unnamed other projects, whatever those might be, then they may do something drastic. One does not have to look far to get some sense of how businesses treat their employees these days, and more it more it appears the University is a business.

I am flummoxed.

How did 207 people, over an 18 month period, receive, at Cedar-Sinai hospital, a CT brain perfusion scan, at 8 times the correct dose of radiation?

Apparently, there is a readout, each time a scan is done, that indicates the level of radiation. Maybe, I thought, the information panel for the CT scan is really complicated, and maybe the information on the dose is hidden in a corner. That would be stupid, but still possible. But no; one person said, "It's right there in front of your face."

So how did the technicians miss it; and how did the doctors who read the scans miss the level of radiation dosage printed on each scan.

Expert opinion proves not very helpful. One such expert says, "It's pretty mystifying to me."

Well, you bet, it's mystifying and even a bit terrifying.

I could understand once or twice perhaps....maybe...but this happened 207 times over an 18 month period.

During this time, patients called to tell their doctors that, after the scan, their hair fell out.

Finally, somebody put two and two together--the scan and the hair falling out--and the flaw in the machine was finally noted and fixed.

One person tried to find a silver lining to the whole thing, saying that the people who received this scan were mostly old and in bad shape anyway and would probably die of something else before they died of a brain tumor produced by the excess radiation, since these are generally slow growing. I find this odd and slightly offensive reasoning. I would, were I one of the persons scanned, take small comfort in knowing I would die of something else before I died of brain tumor resulting from gross incompetence.

Jeez!

Is this another case of dependence on the machine? I don't know and don't want to be flip. I think this episode is worthy of some serious sociological research, and some soul searching on the part of the medical profession. 

I have just depressed myself looking for the symptoms of swine flu on the web. Amazingly some of the sites have not been updated since April. What good is that.

But I have a cold or I think it is a cold or perhaps I have swine flu. Part of me would like to believe I have swine flu because I think I will survive this and then I shouldn't have to worry about it when it hits this fall. But probably I don't have swine flu which means I just have a nasty cold that is making me feel paranoid about having the swine flu.

I should never have bought a thermometer. I keep checking my temperature.

So far I have not had a temperature, but I find that the while fever is a symptom of swine flu, one does not always get a fever with the swine flu. And another source listed as the top two symptoms: fever and sudden cough. The latter is what I had and still have: a sudden cough, though I must say it is no longer sudden, since I have had it a week. Now I would call it persistent. It's a horrible sounding cough, deep in the chest.

I got this cough from Hawaii, I am pretty certain. I say this because it sounds exactly like the cough our neighbors had a week or two ago. They went to Hawaii and came back with a cough, and in their case, also fevers.

Fatigue comes with the swine flu. I have certainly had that in spades. One site even lists "depression" as one of the symptoms. I had that already--I mean even before I caught this cough....

What got me started on this swine flu scare was an article in the LA Times saying one might prepare for the more serious complications of the swine flu by getting the pneumonia vaccine (that protects against bacterial forms), and the last couple of times I have been in my medical person mentioned I should get the pneumonia vaccine because I had pneumonia recently and well--you know--I smoke. So Carol called our medical person to see if I could get a the pneumonia vaccine, and she said sure, but was upset to hear that I had not gotten my vaccine for shingles, which she approved my last visit.

I had completely forgotten the shingles.

God this getting old is complicated. My memory is going, so the shingles completely slipped my mind. Jonathan Swift had the shingles; maybe that's why he was so irritable.

So now I have prescriptions for a shingles and a pneumonia shot. But I don't think I should go get them while I still have this cough--whatever it is.

I mean what if I got these shots and what with my immune system weakened I got pneumonia and the shingles at the same time!

I would be fit to be tied.

In a phone conversation, Sister-in-Law Teresa noted she had found online an article suggesting redheads are more sensitive to pain. I quote in part:

People with red hair are more sensitive to pain and consequently need more anesthetic during operations than other patients, according to new research.

"Red hair is the first visible human trait, or phenotype, that is linked to anesthetic requirement," says anesthesiologist Edwin Liem, who conducted the research at the Outcomes Research Institute of the University of Louisville, US.

And further:

In people with red hair, the cells that produce skin and hair pigment have a dysfunctional melanocortin 1 receptor. Liem says this dysfunction triggers the release of more of the hormone that stimulates these cells, but this hormone also stimulates a brain receptor related to pain sensitivity.

I didn't know red hair was related to a "dysfunctional melanocortin 1 receptor." I don't know what that means, but it doesn't sound good. Red heads are known also to be susceptible to skin cancer. Although what skin has to do with hair or why the two should be related, I don't. On the up side, red hair appears evolutionarily adaptive in that this dysfunctional receptor is related to a redheads' ability to synthesize vitamin D with relatively low sunlight exposures. So as one site puts it redheads tend to appear in dark parts of the world, or the fringes of Western Europe.

I bring this up only because once upon a time I was a redhead. Now you wouldn't know it but back in '73 I looked like this:

I have been proud of few things in my life, but I was proud of that damn hair. And now it's all gone, though I still have that dysfunctional receptor.

I suppose one of the problems with getting more white tops on TV is that who the hell would want to watch, for example, a sit-com featuring the daily affairs of white tops. Plus, there's the general problem of making something funny out of daily affairs of white tops.

I suppose there might be something funny in losing one's hair and developing arthritis in one's joints or not being able to stand without one's knees making cracking noises audible clear across the room. And of course one could work for humor I suppose all the various bowel and evacuation problems that go along with aging, like developing lactose intolerance or finding that one has to pee every other second. And oh yes, the absolutely hysterical issues surrounding the prostate, its enlargement and possible cancer treatments.

And the imagination runs rampant at the possibility for humor in all those doctors visits, with insane doctors, and false positives, and getting the wrong results, and various humiliating procedures, and diverse operations to extend the quality of life like knee and hip replacements.

And then of course the laugh-out-loud funny problems involved in paying for all those doctor visits while on a fixed budget in the middle of an inflationary cycle.

And what about that thigh slapping experience of one day having your driver's license taken away because your macular degeneration has narrowed your vision to a dark tunnel.

What a crack up! I mean staggering around in the dark and falling down the stairs because of vertigo and lying there helplessly on the floor until somebody happens to find you.

Comedy I was once told was like the bouncing ball. In comedy, you bounce. You fall on that banana but you get up, brush yourself off and go on arrogantly believing that you are invulnerable. And, well, that is pretty funny--that necessarily denial of our fleshly being with our fleshly end keeps us ongoing.

But when one gets a white top the bounce starts to go.

Still a white top comedy might be possible in some niche market.

Last quarter a student gave an oral report on something called "The L-Word." I had no idea what she was talking about since I don't get Showtime. Turns out, in the student's words, that it's a TV show a lot like "Sex in the City" except with (L)esbians. I never watched "Sex in the City" either, though what the show was about seems implied in the title.

My student when she gave her oral report began to understand (that's one reason I have them do oral reports) that most of us had no idea what "The L-Word" was since mostly it appeared we were not lesbians, so in her research paper, she provided background (most of which I did know) about how for years lesbians had not appeared on any TV shows, and she quoted in her paper an author who wrote about how most people probably don't know how odd and bad it feels to watch hour after hour of TV and never see people like yourself represented. The media, TV especially, appears so powerful that if you don't appear on it, you and people like yourself don't exist.

So "The L-Word" in its frank and candid depiction of lesbian life, especially sexual life, was a pretty big deal, though my student admitted that as lesbians go the lesbians on the "L-Word" were not entirely representative being wonderfully beautiful and also very affluent. And as she noted in her paper, it felt sort of funny to understand that while lesbian life was more frankly depicted in the "L-Word" mostly only lesbians watched it, so while the media did seem to affirm the existence of very beautiful and affluent lesbians it was doing so mostly for lesbians and not the non-lesbian viewing audience.

But that's how things go with the niche market. Things get a little solipsistic.

This has something to do with what Wallace means when he wrote that we try to see ourselves in TV characters and, as part of this ID-relation, them in ourselves. This is about narcissism, about wanting to find images or something "out-there," that embodies, gives form to, and affirms our existence.

Maybe it's not really the same. I wouldn't know since I am not a lesbian. But I think I have felt a little of that non-being lately, a little of that sense of not being able to locate myself in the public terrain or the world of the media (even in a niche market). I just don't see that many white guys with thinning white hair on TV shows. Sure there are plenty of older guys in commercials but they are all having problems with heart attacks or the operation of their penises or having to pee all the time. I mean where are the TV shows with white topped older guys and women doing whatever older (and therefore unattractive) people do.

Honestly, I feel a little negated--as if I were drifting off into a sort of TV land irrelevance. Where in general are the white topped guys. I look around and I don't see as many white topped guys as I would expect. Then it dawned on me. Do a lot of guys my age dye their hair? No doubt about it, you dye your hair and you do look younger....and one TV commercial says that will increase your confidence too and sense of self worth.

But that's too late for me. If I tried to dye my hair now I would end up mostly dying my scalp. So I would have dyed hair and a sort of undercoat. That might look strange and not really a self-confidence booster.

By virtue of my birthday, December 14, 1945, I am on the very cutting edge of the so-called baby boomers, and by virtue of that fact, I have been frequently just slightly ahead of the curve when it comes to fads. For example I was drinking Perrier (anybody remember that) well before Time magazine did a cover story on it. The same was true for the coffee craze and later high class ice cream. Also, sadly, I have been on the cutting edge of physical complaints. I had gingivitis long before Time ran a cover story on that. And now I find a lengthy article in the New Yorker on tinnitus--written clearly in partial response to boomers. The article reports that as of now 12% of men and 14% of women over the age of 65 have some form of ringing in the ear.

And when all those baby boomers hit 65 the number of people walking around with some noise in their ears will be enormous. A whole new industry may be developed around trying to figure out what it is and how to get rid of it.

First they really don't know what it is? Well, they know that--it's a noise in the ear. But wait. That's the problem. They don't know where it is. One person for example had his or her whole ear removed because of cancer and still had tinnitus in that ear even though the ear was gone. So you can't say it's noise in the ear. One has to say, it's a noise. But that would fail to indicate that it's tinnitus.

No longer will people be able to say dismissively, "Oh, it's all in your head." Sure, one can say back, that may be the case but that doesn't mean it isn't there.

How the hell I am able to hear something in my ear that isn't in my ear is a mystery to me. It's there all right, though. In my left ear and not my right or any other place. Something neurologically is going on.

Thankfully my tinnitus is apparently very mild. One poor fellow has it so bad that his life has been disrupted. He hears it all the time at high volume. One day he went outside during a thunder storm and stood by a flag pole hoping lightening would strike and carry him off. That's one of the more bizarre attempts at suicide I have heard of.

Also I appear to have stumbled on a cure. I don't know why I thought of it, but I bought a really cheap white noise machine about the size of a pancake. It sits next to my bed and makes white noises, like the sound of surf or the sound of rain. Unfortunately, the soothing surf sounds are punctuated by the squeaks of sea gulls and the sound of rain sounds more like static on a television. I settled for the water fall sound, which doesn't sound like a water fall but is nonetheless soothing.

I find that, if the tinnitus really starts to aggravate me, all I have to do is move my hearing from the tinnitus to the white noise and bingo the tinnitus goes away. How I switch my hearing like that, I don't know. But then I don't know how I move my eyeballs either.

But that is one of the "cures" now being promoted. White noise. Also they have developed hearing aides that pick up more background sounds, like the sound of a refrigerator, and for some that too works to "block" the tinnitus.

I don't know why they feature nature sounds on those white noise machines. I think they should make an urban sounds white noise machine that includes, for example, the sound of a refrigerator. I also find the sound of the dishwasher mildly soothing as long as something is not banging about in it.