Category Archives: Health: Mental and Physical

pityriasis rosea

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I mentioned a while back having mistakenly brushed my teeth with a topical cream I had on hand to treat my off and on again out breaks of psoriasis.  At the time I had an unsightly scaling thing going on along the folds of my nose on both sides.  That has since cleared up, but I developed some sort of itchy rash in the last three weeks or so on my back and especially at first—it felt as if—down on the belt line.

I thought perhaps that too was a form of psoriasis, so because I couldn’t reach back there Carol applied the topical cream for me.

Then a week or so Carol developed the rash.  From that I concluded that what I had on my back wasn’t psoriasis since it is not supposed to be contagious.

Looking into the matter I have concluded that we may both have some variant of pityriasis rosea.  This several sources described as a “common skin complaint” that occurs frequently in the spring or fall.  So apparently changes in the weather have something to do with it.  Sometimes, the skin outbreak is preceded by an upper respiratory complaint, including sore throat (which, come to think of it, must be an upper respiratory complaint).

The problem with this diagnosis is that pityriasis rosea—though they don’t know the cause of it (perhaps a virus)—is not supposed to be contagious ALTHOUGH people living together in the same family have been known to develop the complaint at the same time.  I am not a scientist, but the fact that many people in a family may develop the same complaint at roughly the same time suggests to me that it is contagious.  I guess scientists must have a more exacting standard of contagion than the one I have.

This stuff is pretty itchy.  I am pretty sure I have had this itch before back in 1972.  I got these red spots in the fall all over the torso area and went to a dermatologist.  He told me I had pityriasis rosea.  He gave me treatments of UV light, some shots of some kind, and some topical cream and I gave him 300! 1972 dollars.  When the stuff finally went away, I thanked the doctor for his good work, and he said, oh he hadn’t done anything.  The stuff goes away of its own accord in a few weeks or a couple of months.

I wish he had told me that in the first place.  I would have lived with the itch since 300! 1972 dollars were hard to come by.

Engineered Chickens

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I tried to fry some chicken recently and couldn’t believe, as I watched it cook, how much water seemed to seep out of the chicken. Towards the end I felt I wasn’t frying it, but boiling it in its own water.
What happened to the scrawny but tasty chicken of my youth?
Well, I found out reading around in a book called the “End of Food” by Paul Roberts.
Today’s chicken is a genetic freak:
Breakthroughs in genetics let commercial breeders…manipulate most of the factors that govern a bird’s growth, from the tendency to distribute, or partition muscle mass into the break region… to the efficiency of the digestive tract (which lets the bird convert grain into muscle faster). The resulting broiler was a walking meat machine: twice as big as its 1975 predecessor, with breast portions weighting more than a half a pound each, and the ability to reach this sumolike stature with freakish speed. Whereas a 1970s-era broiler needed ten weeks to reach slaughter weigh, today’s model does it in forty day, which means an enterprising chicken farmer can raise two more crops each year and thus increase his annual output by 40 percent. (69)
Not only is today’s grocery store chicken “abstracted” from its origins by being all neatly packed up with separate parts available in multi-packs (where can one find a hint of the original shape in a multipack of chicken legs), the chicken from which these parts were abstracted have been further abstracted from their original “chicken-ness.” Today’s chicken is not grown; it’s engineered.
We have more chicken that ever. But once again more is less. The speed with which chickens are engineered to grow does not allow the cells of breast muscles to fully form. Further, breast muscle is “fast-twitch” muscle, and when a chicken is killed these fast twitch muscles twitch and produce, by doing so, lactic acid. The amount of lactic acid produced by today’s breast heavy chicken is enormous and damaging to the quality of the meat. Companies attempt to deal with this problem by pumping the chickens with salts and phosphates to make them retain….water.
This so called “water enhancement” helps with the problem of lactic acid and increases the meat’s weight from 10% to 30%.
I have a hard time looking at a chicken breast in the same way when I know that the speed with which they are produced sometimes does not allow for capillaries to bring blood to the breast with the result that “’an area of muscle tissue actually dies.’”
I believe that is called “necrosis.”

Not uncommon

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So now I have diverticulosis—or so said my primary care physician.  I wasn’t sure what it was when she left a message on the phone but was happy when she said it was minimal and appeared where it “not uncommonly” appears in an older person around the sigmoid colon (the narrowest part of the intestintial tract).  As one gets older, it appears, a whole host of things one has never heard of becomes “not uncommon.”

I went to an audiologist to have my ears tested for this tinnitus business.  I have lost some hearing in the very upper range of the left ear and just a tiny, itsy-bitsy in the right.  The audiologist informed me that this was “not uncommon” as one gets…..older and that there was nothing to panic about since I am far from needing a hearing aide.  Well, that was nice to hear, but I am hearing this phrase “not uncommon” too much lately, and it seems the doctor persons always hesitate or don’t know quite what to say, like it’s the plague or something, when it comes to saying that it’s “not uncommon” in your older or old or aging or elderly person or, you know, person like yourself….and this is coming from a guy maybe 2 years younger than yourself who clearly dyes his hair.

I guess being older makes older doctor persons also nervous.  Or perhaps aging is a kind of insult to the ego of doctor people since as far as I know there is no cure for aging, or getting older, or getting elderly.  Aging, like some forms of cancer, or death itself, appears incurable, and the mere thought of it throws the doctor into a sort of existential quandary or awareness of his or her ultimate impotence both as a professional and a human being.  In any case, the doctor persons who have spoken to me on these not uncommon issues seem to feel getting older is like a disease.  I am pretty sure it is not because aging is a simple and naturally occuring melt down of every damn cell in your body.

I am comforted, though, to know what while I have diverticulosis, I do not have diverticulitis (what a difference a few letters make!).  I have developed—if that’s the word—diverticula or small pouches on the outside of the colon.  Multiple diverticula means one has diverticulosis.  Diverticulitis is the infection of the diverticula.  So I have, unfortunately, the pre-condition for a real condition.  I asked my primary care person how I would know if I had diverticulitis and she said I would feel real sick, with a fever, and bad bowel, and most significantly, diagnostically, a pain in the lower left abdomen.  The “cure” for the condition, depending on its severity, ranges from anti-biotics, to resting the colon with a liquid diet, to cutting out portions of the infected colon.

The cause for this condition:  The usual suspects: genetics and possibly insufficient roughage or fibre.

I was also told that the gas producing CT scan revealed arthritis in the lower lumbar.  Also “not uncommon,” for people of a certain age. 

I now have scientifically confirmed artritis in my left knee, my right elbow, and my lower lumbar.

I am learning more about the inside of my body than I want to.

An Act of Will

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I went in to have a CT scan of my pelvic floor.  The scan was pretty easy.  I didn’t even have to take off any clothes, just slide down my pants under a privacy blanket, and then this table I was on slid me in and out of a huge donut like thing.  But the night before and then again an hour before I went in for the scan I had to drink some strange, sticky liquid with barium in it.

The scan was downtown and after I had an hour before I had to go to the dentist, also downtown, to get a new cap put on.  Driving out to Goleta and back didn’t make sense, so I had breakfast at this place on De la Vina where I used to go. It was a good breakfast. But as I was finishing up, sitting there talking to the owner about the lousy economy, I felt down there in the lower regions as if I were on the verge of ripping wide open.  So I asked the guy if they had a restroom and went back there, and well, exploded.  It was most awful—the whole process was attended by horribly loud flatulence.  Sort of like a bomb going off.  I swear the walls shook. I don’t remember having experienced the like.

I wasn’t alarmed particularly.  I figured it had to be the barium drink.

But damn that gas was bad.  Driving down to the dentist, I kept firing off enormous rounds of this stuff, that had no smell to speak of—but was nonetheless explosive.

Being at the dentist in this condition was hard.  I didn’t want to embarrass myself, you know.  But there I was flat on my back as the dentist pulled off the temporary cap, and then had to scrape glue off the live tooth and stick the other one on, and spray cold water over the whole thing several times.  I don’t know but the dentist doesn’t generally give me a pain killer when he is putting on a cap.  He said something like, if it hurts, let me know.  But by then he is always already up to his arms in my mouth digging around in there. It hurt.  But what the hell was I going to do.  I didn’t know how long I could sit there in that condition.  So he just went at it as I sweated.

Man that took a hell of a lot of concentration.  Trying at one end of my Gastrointestinal tract (the end where the teeth are located) not to scream at being poked and prodded as I tried not to lose concentration about the considerable act of will required to keep the other end of the Gastrointestinal tract completely clamped down.  I have excellent sphincter control—but was hard pressed. 

Finally that was over.  I raced out to the privacy of my car to fire off a few rounds.

I was ruined for the rest of the day.

Off the Wagon

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Maybe it’s the recent news or maybe this thing—whatever it is—that’s going on with my pelvic floor, or maybe the start of school—well—but to make excuses–I have fallen off the wagon lately cigarette wise.  Still I have not smoked a whole cigarette on any given day, but it’s been a while now since I have gone through a whole day without taking a few puffs.

So I have fallen off the wagon, but I feel as if I still have a good hold on the side of it or the tail gate. 

Maybe I am half on and half off the wagon.  I feel optimistic about an eventual positive outcome.  Oddly I feel optimistic because I have accepted the fact that breaking a 42 year old smoking habit is going to be hard, it is going to take a lot more time than I thought, and there will inevitably moments of backsliding. 

The trick with the backsliding is to take it seriously, to keep a real eye on it—mostly to register it and keep track of it, so you don’t slide unconsciously back into old habits (for example I am writing something but I don’t have a cigarette going and I don’t even have any coffee—damn!—but wait, that’s good) and not at the same time to start whipping yourself because you have failed and you are going to fail because you are a weak and terrible person with no character or spine to speak of and secretly or not so secretly you are self-destructive and have no will to live.

When I start thinking like that I want to throw in the towel.

Unfortunately I do start thinking like that.  How I developed this capacity to beat myself up I have no idea.  It’s almost as if I do it quite naturally; I lie in wait for myself in the bushes and then when I am not prepared I jump on myself from the bushes and beat myself up. 

I do not believe in original sin.  But I think I know what people mean by it or rather where the idea came from.  It came from people with an amazing ability to beat themselves to a pulp and still survive.   People who have committed no crime that they can remember (at least) and so conclude that just being alive or being who you are must be some sort of crime.

I don’t know how I got from falling off the wagon to original sin, but I did.  That’s how it goes these days.

The Weather Channel

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What do I have to be anxious about?

Those hurricanes for one thing—that one with the foreign sounding Name that was heading to New Orleans seemed at first a replay of Katrina—and I really had not liked that one at all.  Now something called Hanna is heading possibly up the coast and into the Carolinas where I have relatives.  I know they are in a drought and want rain, but I am not sure they want it in hurricane form.

To allay my anxiety in this area—information sometimes helps—I have been forced to tune into the weather channel.  I cannot stand those people.  One evening two of them were talking to each other about the hurricane with the foreign sounding name—Gustav!  That’s it—Gustav—and I could not make hide nor hair of what they were talking about….they two were saying stuff like it is a cat 1 but it may be a cat 2 and later become less than a cat; and the other person said, yes, that would appear to be the case depending on “sheer” in which case going in a counter clockwise direction it might become a cat 3 windwise but probably not a cat 4.

I sat there dazed thinking they were talking about cats until I figured out they were using “cat” as an abbreviation for “category.”  I found these people sickening in their use of hip weather forecaster slang when talking about a force of nature capable of drowning people and destroying homes.

And then they yack on—in the most bewildering ways—about how this particular cat so and so located off the coast of Africa appears under “favorable” conditions capable of becoming a cat 4 by Friday—and I want to ask “favorable”?  To the people who might be hit by this cat 4.  No, they are talking about conditions favorable to the hurricane becoming a really massive and destructive hurricane.  These people have completely screwed up values.  They identify with the hurricane—and in a world where we are all just spectators WANT to see a cat 5.  How else to explain it when having viewed a bit with a roof being ripped off a building as if it were Kleenex the weather person says, “Awesome.”

Now first the word “awesome” should be banned forever.  And on top of that it really seems the wrong word.  “Horribly destructive” would be better.  After all, somebody had the roof ripped off his or her house or place of business.

So while I was relieved at the information that Gustav had fallen to a cat 1; I came away feeling anxious that these forecasters seemed vaguely disappointed that the storm had not turned out as awesome as they had predicted.

Why but of course, you say.  Those people don’t care about the hurricane or the damage done by it; they care about their ratings and how many people see them talking about the hurricane—and that might mean more money or even turn them into an overnight celebrity like that Anderson Cooper guy who has his own TV show now because of the way he reported on Katrina.

38 days without a cigarette and I really, really WANT one.

A Headache in the Pelvis

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While I was happy to hear that my prostate and bladder were A-OK, I was still left with the question, well, then, why the hell am I feeling this discomfort.  I asked the urologist this question directly.  He answered that, well, he couldn’t say, only that it wasn’t the prostate or the bladder.  We are proceeding by a process of elimination, he indicated.

I said, maybe it’s all in my head.  And he seemed to indicate that it could be, and that just having him tell me it wasn’t my prostate or my bladder might make it go away.  Well, I said, I hoped it was the case.  He said also it might be some tumor in the colon pressing against the prostate region; but he just threw that one out off the cuff as a remote maybe perhaps because if that was the problem he would have noticed it earlier with his finger, given how far, it seemed to me at least, he voyaged up there.  And hell, I had a colonoscopy about 18 months ago. 

Then he said something about muscle spasms.  So after seeing the urologist, I started googling around about muscle spasms in the pelvic floor, and I came up with something called Chronic Prostatitis/Chronic Pelvic Pain Syndrome (CP/CPPS)  According to Wiki this accounts for 90%-95% of prostatitis diagnoses,[2]a  and is also known as chronic nonbacterial prostatitis. The annual prevalence in the population of chronic pelvic pain syndrome is 0.5%.[3] Men in this category have no known infection, but do have extensive pelvic pain lasting more than 3 months.[4] There are no standard diagnostic tests; diagnosis is by exclusion of other disease entities. Multimodal therapy is the most successful treatment option,[5] and includes α-blockers,[6] phytotherapy,[7][8] and protocols aimed at quieting the pelvic nerves through myofascial trigger point release with psychological re-training for anxiety control.[9][10] Antibiotics are not recommended.[11][12]

Other forms of chronic prostatitis involve infections, one very serious that would have presented in fevers and downright illness.  I have not had that. Could be some sort of infection is present, but I am inclined towards chronic nonbacterial not only because I have had no acute infection but also because chronic non-bacterial is related to something with which I am fully familiar:  chronic anxiety.  The co-authors of A Headache in the Pelvis write:

 Most of the symptoms of pelvic pain or discomfort, urinary frequency and urgency, and pain related to sitting or sexual activity in cases diagnosed as prostatitis are not related to infection but are caused by chronically tightened muscles in and around the pelvis. Our natural protective instincts can tighten the pelvic basin, causing pain and other perplexing and distressing symptoms. Stress is intimately involved in creating and continuing these symptoms. Once the condition starts, the symptoms tend to have a life of their own.

They use the word stress here—but in other places in their writing and in the writing of others ugly old anxiety (especially with reference to anxiety trigger points) comes up quite a bit.

A few days ago, I called my trusty psychiatrist.  He is a decent guy by the way and keeps up with his field.  He had heard of this Chronic Prostatitis; so I figure it is not some web only syndrome or condition made up by crackpots who want to sell herbal medicines.  He is sending me a magazine article about things I might do.  And I see him in a couple of weeks and will discuss the issue.

In the meantime, at the worst, I occasionally feel as if I am sitting on a marble right down there where there shouldn’t be anything to sit on. For now, I find the matter more psychologically distressing than physically painful.

37 days without a cigarette!  What with the rigors of quitting (I do not think I have yet quit) and this strange complaint—I am most days in a state of near complete torpor.

Mild Discomfort

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After three weeks of waiting, I finally got to see the urologist this last Thursday.  In addition to feeling, during those three weeks of waiting, wiped out by the cigarette cessation project, I felt strange and weird sensations in what is called the pelvic floor, the location of a number of vital body parts having to do with sexual reproduction and waste disposal.  I was experiencing down there in that primordial nether world what I called “discomfort” that ranged from mild, to moderate, to significant. 

Significant was the worst because I didn’t know what the significance was—aside from having to urinate a bit more frequently that usual; had my prostate enlarged?  If so, that might account for the difference in urination.  Or worse, did I have prostate cancer?  The discomfort had been with me a couple of months, relatively mildly, before I went to the doctor.  I finally felt I simply had to go to the doctor what with all the older guys at the club where I work out constantly talking in hushed voices about their experiences with prostate cancer—with procedures that led sometimes to complete sexual dysfunction and much worse actually incontinence…. So I was pretty much a mess those three weeks waiting to see the urologist and a miserable mess the week before thinking about prostate cancer….

So last Thursday was a long day.  First I went to get my teeth cleaned.  I had forgotten I had a cleaning appointment.  My hygienist was somewhat disappointed in my gums; they had infected pockets she said and too much tartar.  She went to work and ground the hell out of my gums for an hour.

Then I went to where the urologist was.  He was a short guy with salt and paper hair sort of moussed straight up and he had a soul patch too, and a really big index finger as I was soon to find out.  First, my PSA (the blood text for prostate cancer) was really normal and my urine he said was “crystal clear.”  But the guy had, as it were, to see for himself, and having requested that I bend over he stuck his finger about as far as he could “up there” till I felt almost that he was going to push it right out the front.  I mean the guy gave the old prostate a pretty complete work out as far as I am concerned.

Now from where I was standing all bent over I couldn’t see the guy’s face when he removed his finger from where he had stuck it, but Carol who was present said the guy had a look of relieved excitement.  And while I couldn’t see his face—as still bent over I wiped stuff from that area—I heard him say. “Normal. Completely normal. That’s a healthy prostate.  And it’s not even enlarged.”

Then he had me go pee in a plastic bottle.  “Empty, completely,” he said.  So I did and when I went back in the little room, a nurse person made me lie down and ran some machine over my abdomen that indicated I had indeed emptied my bladder.  Honestly I don’t know what that was about.

The doctor returned, again saying, healthy prostate and no signs either of bladder cancer.  My urine was “crystal clear” he said again. I can only assume urologists have other standards for “crystal clarity” than those of your normal lay person since it seemed pretty damn yellow to me.

36 days without a cigarette……

24 Days

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As of yesterday, Wednesday, August 20, at 8:30 PM I had gone 24 days without a cigarette.

I felt all day long at the end of my rope and fit to be tied (a rather confusing rope metaphor, since if I was the end of my rope I don’t know if there would be enough to tie me up).

But I woke all upset upon remembering that Carol and I had not been able the previous day to locate her father’s ashes.  We have had those ashes for some time now; we drove down to Escondido to get them when Carol’s mom remarried and felt it would not be appropriate to have the ashes of her former husband hanging around in the dwelling she shared with her new husband.  Sounds overly sensitive to me; but I don’t know the prevailing etiquette in such situations.

One might also ask—and I think the etiquette vague in this area too—why the hell were the ashes just hanging out and not in the ground or a mausoleum.  If they had been buried Carol and I would not have had to go through the agony of losing them.  But Carol’s mom wanted us to hold onto the ashes until she, herself, died; and then it would be Carol’s duty to bury them both in the same place.  

In a way, it’s all my fault.  Carol has not been sleeping well and I told her she was waking up at night because unconsciously she was troubled about not yet having buried her parents as the one last thing she needed to do to end her responsibilities as trustee for her mother’s estate.  And then when he couldn’t find the ashes, I thought it was my fault because I had hidden them in a closet (so Carol wouldn’t see them) and I had kept track of them for years; but last summer we cleaned up that closet and somehow they had been removed from that closet to lord knows where.

I did remember, thank goodness, where I had hidden Carol’s mother’s ashes (so she wouldn’t have to see them hanging around).  So Wednesday morning the first thing we did was start looking again for Carol’s father’s ashes.  We looked all over and then decided to look in the garage.  I felt upset that we might have stuck Jack’s (Carol’s father) ashes in the garage because—while the etiquette is vague here too I think—somehow sticking a person’s ashes out with the car did not seem appropriate.

But that’s where we found them—in the garage and Carol went off with her mother and father’s ashes to cemetery to look into buying a plot.

I did not go with her because by this time what with no cigarette and the missing ashes I was about to jump out of my skin and couldn’t stand the idea of looking at a plots.

22 Days

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If my numbers are correct (and they could well not be), I have gone 22 days now, as of 8:30 PM, Monday, August 18, without a cigarette or any form of nicotine.

I have not made it this far sans nicotine for a number of years.  Clear back in the late 80’s or early 90’s.

I would like to report that I feel better and more assured in my quest for zero nicotine no tolerance lifestyle.  Unfortunately, I still feel like crap, little or no energy, lethargic in the extreme, at moments positively torporous and not at all convinced of the final outcome.

I watch Olympic events and I lack concentration to figure out what the heck the people are doing.  I numbly ask myself how the hell did these events get in the Olympics and by what stretch of the imagination do the people doing these things qualify as athletes.  The Ancient Greeks would be appalled by the trash sports we have allowed into the competition.  I eagerly await the introduction of “x-treme” “sports” involving skate boards and alligator wrestling into this hopeless and idiotic affair.

The fellow who won all those swimming medals unfortunately seems to have a problem saying words; or at least I find myself losing concentration in the rather lengthy gaps between his words.

The American gymnasts seem joyless people who have sold their souls to the devil for who knows what.

I watch the Olympics when I get up as a way of irritating myself into semi-conscious.  I saw some people running around throwing a ball in what appeared to be an insane cross between basketball and ice hockey.  What the hell was that?  And who the hell are these equestrians and what sort of hang-up do they have with horses.  I imagine the ghetto Olympics featuring drive by shootings events with points deducted for killing the innocent.

Next week I will have the Democrats national convention to irritate me into consciousness.  But I will not watch that.  I will miss the Olympics.