Category Archives: Health: Mental and Physical

I’ve got a cold.  Goddamn it.  Hit me full force like a ton of brinks yesterday.  Sneezing, weakness, slight fever, post nasal drip, and one of those nasty coughs that just plain hurts.  Damn it.  I was looking forward to the t-break to catch up on stuff; now I will lie around sneezing and feeling miserable.  And, damn it, I am in the middle of grading a batch of student papers.  Tired like this, my patience runs thin really, really fast.  Trying paying real attention to a five page paper of utter gobble-de-gok with your eyes dripping and your head aching…It’s almost a form of torture.

Damn it.

Also I am not good at being sick.  In fact, I am lousy at it.  Of course, I am not too good at being well.  I feel like crap even when I am well; but at least it’s healthy crap.  Being sick is like the same thing but sickly. 

I put the blame for my problems being sick directly where it belongs.  Yes, I blame my mother!  Damn it.  Joan didn’t have a nuturing bone in her body; she tried but it was like she was breaking all those bones in her body with the effort required even to try.

I was a sickly runt.  With strep through over and over again.  At one point I stopped growing and was truly runt like.  You would have thought that was my fault somehow and not the result of germs or freaking poor nutrition.  No, when I got sick, it was like:

What’s wrong with you?  Why do perversely keep getting sick?  I have done nothing wrong.  Why do you punish me?  What did I ever do to deserve this? What have I ever done to you but be a super excellent mother, that you should keep getting sick like this.  Are you trying to make me feel like a failure?  You devious, sickly, selfish, self-centered little runt. I told you!  I told you to wear your jacket and eat your peas. You despicable disobedient little runt.  I order you to stop being sick!

Do I exaggerate?  I know I exaggerate.  No, this is pretty accurate and captures pretty much Joan’s nurturing technique which was to make me feel that I was killing her by getting sick.  Hell, I know she had other things on her mind.  She made that abundantly obvious.  And being son number 1, well, this infant getting sick business and what to do about it was all new territory.  She had no so-called “role models” in this nurturing business.  So what?  That wasn’t my fault, but I paid for it.

So are the sins of the mother visited upon the son.  Damn it.  When I get sick, my rational mind says you have a cold asshole, but my unconscious is saying you deserve to die, asshole, for getting a cold.  And you will die a painful death because of the horrors you so selfishly inflicted upon your loving mother.

So as I said I am not good at getting sick.  In fact, I am really, really bad for getting sick.  I don’t know if it’s possible to have less than zero self-esteem.  But when I am sick I manage it.

But I didn’t have a doctor to write me a prescription for one of those new super autocpaps.  I used to have a doctor; he was a pulmonary specialist.  He was the guy who ordered the original sleep study and prescribed the original cpap (so that my insurance paid for it).  But he was dead.  He died just a week or two before the last time I was to visit him.  I was told then by somebody that I should get another pulmonary guy to monitor my sleep apnea, as well as my newly discovered asthma and my potential lung cancer.  But I was also told they didn’t have many pulmonary guys and when you did get a guy it might take a couple of months before you could get an appointment.

I had other things on my mind and slacked off I guess.  So there I was, having had 4.5 hours sleep, burping and farting up a storm, at like 540 in the morning, with the sun not even up yet, and feeling damn frustrated because I didn’t have a doctor to write a prescription for one of those new super-duper autocpap jobs.  But I think it was later than that because Carol was up and suddenly I heard her shout, “You have lost 30 pounds!”  I was about to shout back, so, the fuck what?  When I realized she was suggesting that maybe my having lost 30 pounds of ugly, unseemly, and possibly death producing trunk weight had something to do with the fact that now for no apparent reason that I could think of I was breathing in air all of a sudden.

I didn’t know if it made physiology sense or not, but she was right about something.  I couldn’t think of anything else that had changed that could have produced a change.  Of course, I had not lost 30 pounds in six weeks (about the length of time I have been breathing in air).  I would probably have dropped dead doing that, but maybe like when I got down to 170 which happened pretty recently and which was the lowest I had been in over 15 years something had happened to provoke the wind problem.  Maybe when a person has 20 pounds of gut sticking out they tend to sleep in a different position or something.  I have no idea honestly. 

But it made some sort of sense.  I had indeed lost 30 pounds.  In fact, yesterday I weighed 164.5 on my insane digital scale.  I say insane because it’s damn erratic.  Still I think the 164.5 was corrected since I doubled checked it with the scale at the club, one of the old fashioned non-digital kind. So assuming both are accurate, as of yesterday, I weighed less than I have in 25 plus years.  I haven’t weight less that 165 since the very early 80’s which is a damn scary thought.  But then in the spring of 2006 after I got back from SC where we had buried WB in the Ora Cemetery, I weighed 202—the most I had ever weighed.  I had to buy fat pants at Costco.

So anyhow I had lost weight over a year and a half period which should have made me feel better but didn’t because the will power required not to eat was draining me of all my energy, and irony of irony, I was getting less sleep than ever because of the air problem.

So I yelled to Carol that I just had to get a pulmonary doctor or something, and what was the number.  But she called for me since she knows I get really, really irritated being put on hold.  But what do you know, she got right through, and they had an opening that very morning at 10 because they had a cancellation and wanted to know, did I want the slot.

I have had “sleep issues” for years.  I can’t remember the last time I got 8 hours.  And maybe years ago when there was a time that I did, I would still wake up tired because I was depressed, and sometime in there was the three or four years I drank myself to sleep…what I called my “situational” alcoholism.  And then three or four years ago, I became aware of the sleep apnea stuff.  I snored like crazy and would trash about at night very restlessly.

The sleep apnea machine did help.  I wasn’t sleeping very long it seemed, but the sleep I did get was more restful because I wasn’t waking myself up multiple times at night at an unconscious level because I was sufficating myself with my own uvula.  But that’s what happens in sleep apnea.  If you are a back sleeper and snorer, the uvula, and the fleshy tissues in its general area, will flap back and cover the air hole, the one that lets air get into your lungs.  So you start suffocating and your body becomes aware of this and wakes you up.

Some people have 40 episodes of this in an hour of sleep.  This can really screw up REM sleep which seems important to resting the brain, and the medical people have concluded this stuff, because it strains the heart, can shorten life.  So I got the sleep apnea machine, as I said, and have suffered with it four two or three years now.  I say suffered because the damn machine and the mask you have to wear to get air pressure is a real pain in the butt.  The seal will break and all of a sudden it sounds like a helicopter is taking off in your ear.  That tends to wake a person up and of course there’s the cord that feeds the air to the mask.  I woke up once with the damn thing clear around my throat.  I don’t know how the hell I did that.

So I have had plenty of ups and downs with the sleep apnea mask.  Like it’s a paradox.  It helps you to get better quality sleep but it can also make getting to sleep a real pain.  And about a month ago something new started happening.  I started swallowing air.  That’s when the air that goes into the mask that is supposed to go into your lungs, decides to go down the stomach hole rather than the air hole.  I started waking up in the morning with pains in my tummy and really powerful flatulence because of the air buildup in the stomach.

Then I started having trouble getting to sleep because I was taking in so much air that I would start to burp.  So there I would be, falling off to sleep, and I would burp.  Burp.  Burp.  Burp!  Constant burping is not a good way to go to sleep.  So I tried sleeping on this side or that side and elevating my head.  But still burp, burp, burb, flatulate, flatulate, flatulate. 

So Tuesday, I guess it was, I dug out one of the old masks I have and spent an hour or so adjusting it and lying on the bed in an awake state experimenting to see if I could find the right position and seal for the mask.  And it did seem better.  But that night, well, it was worse than ever.

I got maybe a total of 4.5 hours of sleep that night and that has cast a pall over the whole damn week.

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Above an illustration of a cpap mask for sleep apnea and the horrible head gear you have to wear to keep the thing in place.  Some people refuse to get treatment for sleep apnea becaue the idea of wearing such a contraption to sleep seems very undignified, not to mention, down right appauling. 

Given I have been thinking about memory lately, I found it coincidental perhaps to open the New Yorker and find an article by Oliver Sacks—who has long written on brain injuries—on one Clive Barnes, a British musician and musicologist, who has perhaps the worst case of amnesia on record.  He had a form of herpes encephalitis that in 1985 I believe reduced his short term memory to next to nothing and wiped out also all his memories before the date of the disease.

According to Sacks, Barnes has but to blink his eyes and he forgets what he has just seen.  Once he was found standing in a room opening and reopening his hand; in it was a piece of chocolate.  Barnes would exclaim each time he opened his hand, look it’s different, or it’s new, and how do they do that—thinking each time that it was a different piece of chocolate since he could not remember having seen it.  Somewhere between the closing and opening of his hand he had forgotten that he had previously seen it.

Barnes tried to keep a diary too.  Pages and pages of the same thing.  215…I just woke up.  230…I just woke up for the first time today.  245…clearly awake.  The diary was an attempt to impart some sense of continuity to his day; but instead it records a mind with no continuity at all.  Each time he wrote he thought he was waking up for the first time because he could not remember having really opened his eyes for the first time that day.  Funny, though, that writing the journal entry made him feel as if he was waking up (for the first time that day).

 Obviously though he had not forgotten how to write.  Sacks refers to something called the semantic memory.  People with amnesia sometimes retain that.  One man after a stroke forgot all the events of his life but could remember much of the scholarly information he had learned over the years and could also speak several languages.  Barnes retained that memory too.  His wife—they love each other—and have remained married all these years noticed one day that Barnes too had retained this form of memory.  He could remember the words of a song and sing them; and has since his disease conducted orchestras.  He knows what was sung and what is coming up.

Oddly too Barnes remembers his wife.  If asked he could not tell you what she looks like; if he walked by her in a crowd he would not recognize her; he cannot remember when she last visited him.  But when he is told that she is coming, when she enters the door, and he hears her voice, he runs to her, embraces her, and sometimes weeps.  When she returns home she finds messages from him asking her to visit him because it seems like ages since he has last seen her.  This ability to remember his wife, in some fundamental, way Sacks sees as evidence of something called “emotional memory,” perhaps the least understood and known of all forms of remembering.

This is a very interesting article and well worth reading should you happen to have a copy the September 24, 2007, New Yorker.

With all that’s been going on with Carol’s mother and the deaths over this last year, I have not thought consciously at least that much of Brother Dan’s stroke.  I have managed to see him nearly every week—not as frequently lately as school and getting ready for it approaches, but the other day he sent me some aphasia poetry. Because that’s what he has—though it is getting better—aphasia.  Anyway that made me remember; and realize too that I have not really forgotten about it.

I have had lately memory problems; the result I expect of no more than aging.  But I spoke with a colleague the other day whose mother, only in her mid seventies, is showing signs of Alzheimer.  He went to where she lives—for a while during the summer—to spell his father who was becoming worn out from tending his mother.  Amazing, to think, I think: of the memory just going.  Not just forgetting but not even knowing that one has forgotten.

I can’t imagine what that might be like: like drifting up in the clouds perhaps, unattached, with a bottomless pit right below.  Especially when the short term goes; you might wash your face over and over, forgetting as you blink your eyes, each time that you had forgotten. 

 I think this just incomprehensible: to lose your mind in this way; and not even know that you have lost it because the mind is just the brain in situ.  One might know, by means of the brain that one has lost one’s arm or one’s sight or that one is losing one’s strength.  But when the mind itself is being lost there is nothing to know the loss.

I get cold with fear thinking about it.  And wondering if that loss waits around the corner for me.

But this is what Brother Dan, in a different form, has been struggling with for eight months now.  Does he have problems with memory?  Maybe yes, maybe no. Certainly not of the short term kind, and if of the long term, I don’t know.  When he says something is 12,000 dollars and he meant 1200 dollars, did he forget that it was just 1200 or did his mind misspeak, mistaking 12000 for 1200.  I don’t know if he would know, or if I would know, for that matter, unless somebody had been there to say otherwise, because at times at least I don’t think he knows he has misspoken.

 They say the intelligence of the aphasiac is frequently unimpaired.  But how would one know.  How could you give a cat a test to see if it is going blind, since he cannot tell you want it sees. I think Dan’s intelligence is unimpaired.  But were he to take some sort of verbal comprehension test he would do poorly I think.

Here are a few lines of his aphasia poetry—that he titles “halo ended”–which he said was OK for me to put on the blog:

You can take it in your tung. Your effectiveness. Your dreams. I can hold it thus. Thus is mine. Mine. Do you want it to me yours? I will give it to you. My thoughts, my actions thus thus thusly for us. In my friend, my pozole, my poseque, my POS. We wait, we wait for a positive reaction to my heart. We wait for a plant operator selection system. We wait. Can we do it? Can my heart take it? My bubbles?

John came by yesterday morning without Juan to make some measurements in our big closet-someday-to-be-an-office space.  We were going to have a company called California Closets put in a couple of desktops, one at each end, and some shelving.  A woman from that company—Nicole, was her name—came by to draw up some plans; she emailed them to us and we didn’t like them because she had put a shelf right where we said there shouldn’t be a shelf, like she wasn’t  listening or something.

We had been pretty specific about where stuff should be since I got my chair.  I am actually embarrassed about this chair.  It cost a 1000 dollars.  I don’t feel morally that anybody should pay that much for a chair.  I grew up thinking chairs were supposed to be uncomfortable.  I always sat on hard wooden chairs and went to a church with pews that had been designed for insubstantial beings, like angels or something, but not for people.

So I had to go through all sorts of ethical, moral and self concept issues to buy this chair.  I had to face the fact also that my neck is in not such hot condition.  I could live with this OK but for the fact I sometimes spend hours in front of a computer and the effort to get my eyes focused properly through my trifocals (or whatever they are) causes me to do all sorts of odd things with my neck, and these odd things in turn cause my neck to ache and to spread an ache clear down my arms.

I know from having talked with people that neck stuff can be hard to fix.  You sure don’t want anybody operating on your neck (unless you know a disk has completely collapsed or something).  So I felt ethically the right thing to do was just to endure it.  But then I thought, “Sometimes I sort of enjoy whatever it is that I am doing at the computer and my enjoyment is lessened or ruined completely sometimes by the pain going down the neck.  So if I don’t do something about my neck the little enjoyment I am able to derive from working at the computer will be lessened.”

I hate to think it.  That I have become a hedonist in my old age, but that was the idea that swayed me.  Please note though I did say I got the chair to preserve a mild enjoyment (well, not even that, maybe more like minimal satisfaction) and not anything as radical as pleasure.  So if I was moved by hedonism it was pretty mild.

There’s even more to the emotional complications I went through to actually click the button on the computer that ordered that chair.  But I did it.  I admit.  And, well, if any chair is worth a 1000 dollars I guess this one is.  It’s called a Leap Chair and is made by a company called Steelcase that specializes in office furniture.  You can adjust it in like six different places maybe—up, down, backwards, forwards, the arms go up and go down and the back support can be adjusted in several ways.  This is one hell of a chair.

When John came to take the measurements he sat in it and wouldn’t get out of it.  But the thing is monstrous big.  It weighs 70 pounds.  I will probably hurt myself trying to move it around.  And once we actually saw it in the soon to be office space we realized we would have to make changes in our plans.

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Actually I got a Leap Stool, as depicted above, but in a much more sombre navy blue which will also help better to conceal the inevitable stains I will get on it. 

Americans are getting really, really fat. Over in Italy, when an American walks by they say, There goes another big butt.  In Italian of course.  But screw them.  What do they know?  Damn Europeans.

But even some Americans say we have the fattest Army on Earth.

If the American people are getting fat (and personally I think that is the case) the reason is clear.  We have a really, really lot of food to eat, and we have people who sit around, called advertisers and merchants, who do all they can to figure out how to get more food down our throats.

Say what you will about people being responsible for their own eating habits.  Like nobody put a gun to your head and forced you to eat a Big Mac.  True, but human beings are animals like any others; if there’s a lot of food around they will eat as much as they can of it.

And Americans have an awful lot of food around.  In fact, the food industry produces about twice as many calories a day a person as a person can eat.  So if you eat 2000 calories a day, there are still 2000 calories a day out there for you if you want them.  In other words, there’s a dramatic surplus of calories and the food industry has had to figure out ways to get us to eat it so they can make money.

Whether or not people get all bloated and sickly and have a hard time moving around is of complete indifference to these people because they just want to make money.

This is America.  We are consumers.  If we didn’t consume our economy would just die like that.  So it is patriotic to consume and eat yourself into a state of high and listless hog-hood.

We have people who are paid a lot to sit in rooms to figure out how to sell sugar to children.  Personally, I believe such people should be punished.  Severely.  They should have a gun held to their heads and be forced to eat many, many sugary treats.

So some wise guy—and there is actually a history to this—came up with the super sizing gimmick.  For a few cents more, hey man, you can get yourself about 25% more calories.  They can do this and make money because given that twice as many calories are produced as can be eaten, calories are damn cheap.  So to get business, they threw in more calories for a few pennies more and still they could make money on the deal.

The CDC has a really interesting slide show that shows the growth of fat in this country since 1985.  It’s amazing to click through these slides and see the different states in the union get fatter and fatter and fatter.  So now a whole heap of states have 20% of their populations overweight or obese.  I use this slide show when I teach a writing class with the consumer society as its theme.  It’s really convincing.  We really are a nation of consumers in the most elementary sense.

So go to this site.  And click in the upper right corner on the power point presentation.

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End of mini-lecture.  I must be gearing up to go back into the classroom. 

So I don’t know when it was, maybe six or seven years back.  Somewhere in there, I wake up at about 1 in the morning with like a totally urgent need to go, if you know what I mean; so I make for the facilities, seat myself, and when nothing is immediately forth coming I give an assist.  And man nothing happens, but it hurts. It’s like something is stuck just on the other side of the exit.  I mean I have been known to evacuate but nothing of this proportion.  So I give another assist and it hurts even more.  I swear it’s like that horrible creature in Alien has decided to take an alternative route.

So I go back to bed and lie on my side in a fetal position.  Like waiting, and eventually I break a little wind though hardly worth its salt, and eventually the pain subsides and I slip off into sleep, and that’s that.  The hell you say! And you would be right because—I don’t know when exactly—but sometime after the first time, the second time occurs.  I wake up; it’s about one in the morning and it feels like the Alien is trying to take that alternative route again.

So I mention it to Carol, and I say like, I don’t know what it is.  But man twice lately I’ve had, I don’t know, these “hard farts.”  They are like farts but they won’t come out.  And we discuss it a bit, and I have recently had a physical and my blood checked out OK, my PSA, I mean.  The thing they check the prostate with.  So it’s probably not that, though the hurt extends down into that region. And there was no blood in the stool.

Then the third time comes along and for some reason I decide to chew some of those Tums, I think they are called, though they are not Tums since we get the generic kind.  Anyway, I chew these and what do you know, but pretty quickly, like the pain goes away.  Now I have a treatment, at least, though not a cure, because I have no idea what there is to cure.

I go on like that waking up now and then, not every week, or not even every month, but every so often with this pain and plenty of generic Tums on hand.  When bingo! I start to exercise my inductive powers—I think they are called—as opposed to deductive, and I begin to put two and two together.  During the time I have suffered these hard farts, I have also frequently of an afternoon had really noxious gas.  Usually this gas occurs in my office when I am at work and it’s so overwhelming I have to keep my door closed and hope nobody knocks while I turn on my little fan and open the window.  

I have been wondering why I have this gas, and I figure out it must have to do with the damn lunch I eat.  I am trying to eat healthfully and a little more lightly.  And I have been eating granny smith apples and string cheese.  Not a bad combination really, but with horrific effects in my case.  Because I induce—if that is a word—that I must be lactose intolerant.  I have read about this, but I never thought it would happen to me!

So now I have an hypothesis.  No cheese, no hard farts.  So I stop eating cheese completely, which is pretty hard actually, and what do you know, but no more “hard farts.”  So, what do you know but I diagnosed my complaint through my own powers of induction.

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At one point yesterday, as the sun went down, the waves were a metallic green.  I don’t think I captured that in the pic. 

Last summer—let’s see that would be the summer of 2006—anyway last summer in June still just after we returned from burying WB back in SC I clocked in at 202 pounds.  That was the most I have ever weighed.  I guess it was all that Southern cuisine and all the emotional stuff surrounding WB’s death so I was just sort of eating a lot in general.  202 is not so bad for a guy who is six foot.  There are six footers in the NFL who weigh more than that.  But of course, they are all muscle.

But my additional weight was not muscle.  It was fat and fat in my case does not distribute itself evenly but collects right around my middle.  What they call trunk weight, because it’s on your trunk I guess.  Trunk weight is not good weight.  Men tend to get it; women can weigh more because it tends to be evenly distributed. But truck weight is apparently bad for the heart, not to mention the lower back. 

I didn’t like the look of it and before going to SC I had to buy some fat pant jeans at Costco for teaching.  For the first time since I don’t know when I couldn’t get into my traditional size 32 jeans.  Also since I cannot control my smoking, I do whatever else I can to increase my changes of surviving a few years.  That’s one reason I exercise daily, in addition to the exercise jump starting my brain.  So when I looked down at the scale and saw 202 I decided to do something.

I did not—and I emphasize that—go on a diet.  Diets are a crock.  You lose weight and then you gain it back, and usually more.  Though some diets seem to work.  I know people who have done very well with Weight Watchers.  I decided to change my diet and to do it gradually.  So I started cutting back on meat.

But I can say without shame or embarrassment that I love meat.  I mean, it’s true love.  In fact, when I ate meat—say a pork chop—first I would eat my salad because I always eat a salad since I can’t stand vegetables, and then I would eat a load of carbohydrates (mounds of rice) and I would save my piece of meat for last as a kind of desert.  In fact if I could order a pork chop for desert, I would.

I had noticed this tendency to save the piece of meat for desert so as part of changing my diet; I decided to integrate the eating of the meat right along with the eating of the other stuff.  Man, this was tough, and I still have trouble doing it.  But having a piece of meat for desert is not a good idea calorie-wise.  In addition to integrating the eating of meat into the eating of other stuff, I decided to cut back on the eating thereof as much as possible.  Which led to strange meat cravings. 

I am at the grocery store, and I suddenly have an urge to buy a package of chicken livers.  Man, I have not had chicken livers since I don’t know when.  And they are easy to cook.  You just roll them in flour with some salt and pepper and then fling the whole mess into a frying pan with hot oil, and bingo in a couple of minutes you have a mess of chicken livers.

For desert.  Damn, mouth-watering good.

I was deleting all that spam I get about enlarging my penis and came across, while doing so, a response to my description of my recent tooth cleaning.  It was from one MamaGums.  She has a site up that sells stuff.  And people selling stuff make me suspicious.  But the comment wasn’t spam and so I looked at the site (www.mamagums.com) and I can say that Ms. Gums is truly committed to gum care and that gums have a true defender in Ms. Gums.

She believes we should brush our teeth and gums with toothpaste high in baking soda and that we should use an irrigator rather than floss, and that we should brush our tongues as well as our gums and teeth.

This put me in mind of a time years back when, during one of my multiple attempts to stop smoking, I went to an acupuncturist.  Before I got to lie down on the acupuncturist bed thing, the acupuncturist would ask me how I was doing in general physically and as part of this abbreviated check up she would ask me to stick out my tongue.  Then she would take a long hard look at my tongue.  Sometimes it seemed like I had to stick that tongue out there a long time as she looked at it this way and that.

I don’t know what the heck she saw when looking at my tongue, but I started for a while there to look at my tongue myself.  And I must say I didn’t like what I saw.  Sometimes, the thing would be a sort of sodden white towards the back, and sometimes, the tongue had a greenish hue, and once it was even yellowish. I had a sort of a psychedelic tongue.  I stopped looking at my tongue because doing so only gave me more hypochondrical thoughts.

But who knows maybe right there in the middle of our mouth is a good index of the state of our general health, if one could only understand what one is seeing.  Certainly, the medical profession is not likely to tell us about this index, since we might start diagnosing ourselves by looking at our tongues.  Or maybe it’s all nonsense.

In any case, I recommend looking at your tongue once in a while just to see what you think of it.  It’s one of those body parts that don’t receive sufficient attention to my mind.  I have already written about and so won’t repeat my attempts to examine my own anus.  I mean after all it is the other main opening into the body.  But I don’t recommend trying it if you have a back problem.