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Med Mash and the GI Issue

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So sometime last week I guess I get the second round of results re: my gut problem. I go in and pee and they take more blood, and later I have to harvest a heap of my own stool and put it in little bottles and take it over to the lab. That was unpleasant.

But the results are good. My urine for example is described as clear and yellow in color. Exactly as I thought it should be and as I might have predicted. And the blood tests for possible imbalances are all negative, and my medical person writes in that the stools were fine. No parasites.

results3.gifall this is great except I still have a gut problem. I am not made happy by the fact that the more I mention my gut problem–which is not often–the more I realize lots of people have gut problems. One guy, much younger and fitter than I and also much more affluent, when I mentioned my gut problem said he had one so bad for several years that it drove him to contemplate suicide. Now this is a positive and upbeat guy, so it must have been an awful gut problem.

He had an expensive doctor, a GI guy, but he had to diagnose his problem himself. If one can believe, the doctor never even suggested that he might have a problem with gluten (the protein in plants). But the guy researched the web, went on a gluten free diet, and says it was a life changer.

I am pretty sure I don’t have a gluten problem. It usually develops earlier in life and is a lot nastier in its manifestations than what I have (though, who knows, what I have may get worse). I guess one advantage to getting older. There are a lot of diseases out there that one is supposed to get earlier in life, and if one has not gotten them by my age one is not likely to get them.

At my last visit, my medical person gave me a med. Something called Levsin-SLO, to be taken thrice daily or as needed. After a couple days taking it my stomach did seem to calm. The stuff is an antispasmodic and derived from belladonna. When I checked out the possible side effects I freaked:

diarrhea;
confusion, hallucinations;
unusual thoughts or behavior;
fast, pounding, or uneven heart rate;
rash or flushing; or
eye pain
dizziness, drowsiness, feeling nervous; blurred vision, headache;
nausea, vomiting, bloating, heartburn, or constipation;
changes in taste;
problems with urination;
decreased sweating;
dry mouth; or
impotence, loss of interest in sex, or trouble having an orgasm.

These are pretty damn common side effects. It’s crazy how the side-effects sometimes cause what they are supposed to cure. Check out the side-effects for antidepressants. They can cause depression and anxiety.  And, here, you will note, this med. can cause diarrhea, constipation, vomiting, as well as bloating.  All gut problems.

And oh….I forgot–not listed here as a side effect but in another place: psychosis.

That gave me pause. So I contacted a person in our condo complex, formerly a nurse, and she said doctors hand out that stuff like candy to old and young alike.

So, I thought A-OK. My gut is calmer, the flatulence less profound, and my stools nearly back to traditional.

Then–wham–I decide to cut back one pill to see how the gut is and I am hit by withdrawal (can you believe): a sudden, out of nowhere, wham in the gut bout of anxiety, plus fatigue. I have been taking the stuff 14 days and it is starting to get to my head. You put some chemical in your body and there is no way in hell it’s not going to end up in your head. I am taking other meds and I am afraid this belladonna derivative is starting to muck them all up.

So now what? I guess I will have to make the time and go through the agony of cutting back further to see if I can get rid of the emotional side effects and hope that the gut has recovered some.

On the bright side–always on the bright side–I do not yet appear psychotic.

Cell Phones Again

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Some students in my morning class showed me a bit from the student paper that I had my students in the afternoon class read. The author of the piece had decided to go without his cell phone for a day. He wrote, in part:

I walked upstairs and told my roommate about my ordeal [of not using the phone]. He responded, “How would you know if any girls wanted to come over?” I just laughed in agreement, but there is a real message behind his words. People like feeling validated, feeling popular, feeling needed. Receiving and sending unproductive messages which ultimately hold no value is part of how we as a generation feel a sense of comfort and perhaps confidence. If I didn’t’t receive any messages in a day I would feel somewhat offended. Why don’t people like me enough to want to meet up, or even just say g’day? Technology is what our generation has turned to as a means of feeling a sense of togetherness. Without Facebook and a cell phone I would feel extremely vulnerable.

My students have written things very much like this for the class blog, and the students in the afternoon class seemed to very much understand what the author of the piece was saying. It was nothing new to them. So I asked, as I do now every quarter, how frequently do you check your cell for messages. The answer was: constantly. In class too, I asked laughingly because I knew the answer. Oh yes, you bet, they said. Some phones I was told have a little light that blinks every time it gets at hit, so even without actually replying to the cell a person can sit there and track the flow.

In my next class I will have my students read a bit from Jeremy Rifkin’s The Age of Access (2000) and see what they have to say. He writes in part:

” In the new world of computers, hypertext, nodes, links, and networks, the nineteenth-century idea of the self as an island–an autonomous being, solid and boundaried like the printed books and physical­cal goods bought and sold in the industrial marketplace–succumbs to a new relational self. Philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard makes the point that in the electronic networks of cyberspace,” the self does not amount to much … no self is an island; each exists in a fabric of relations…. Young or old, man or woman, rich or poor, a person is always located at ‘nodal points’ of specific communication circuits.” Having access to multiple circuits–i.e., being connected–in” the new network economy is as important as being autonomous and propertied was in an earlier market economy.

Rifkin is writing here about the net, but the cell phone seems to jack up to another level the notion of “self” or the experience of having a self as somehow the result of inter-connectedness. When young people get a text message, they feel recognized.

I think, though, that, while of course, no self is an island, Rifkin may go too far in saying “the self does not amount to much…” The student felt vulnerable when disconnected from his phone. That feeling of vulnerability is an expression of the self. 

The Thrill is Gone

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The first day of classes for the new quarter was Monday. After–and it was dark already–I bumped into a colleague and said, “You know. The thrill is gone.” She said that it was still there for her, but she had previously had some horrible job for 20 years, so teaching still had a kick. I don’t know, I said, but I have been teaching writing as my primary source of income since 1976. Maybe I have just worn it out.

I felt crappy. I don’t like feeling the thrill is gone. But what I was feeling was a bit worse than that. I just didn’t know how much longer I could go on doing it. As in, would I be able to make it through the quarter even.

The next day I woke up feeling completely washed out. I have been wrestling with some intestinal complaint and figured maybe I had contracted a fatal case of IRS (irritable bowel syndrome). Or I had stumbled into some depression hole. All I wanted to do was sleep.

Carol came home and said she knew what was wrong. One of her colleagues had missed Monday and looked terrible on Tuesday suffering from some bug that caused fatigue, headache, aching muscles and PND (post nasal drip). Honestly, that could pretty well describe my “normal” daily condition, but the idea I had a bug did help to explain the increase in intensity.

Wednesday–what do you know. Sure the IRS or whatever it is was still there, but I had some energy. That’s what had not been there Monday, not so much the thrill, as no energy at all. Wednesday the classes felt better. I enjoyed myself a little, and I think it’s important that teachers enjoy themselves at least a little.

So, OK. Maybe the thrill is gone. But as long as I have the energy, it’s a job I can do and feel it worth doing. 

Louie Who?

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A student was giving an oral presentation on Louie Vuitton bags. This must be the third or fourth time a student has given such a presentation. I don’t know what the fascination is…with these things. I guess they cost a heap. This student included in her presentation a Utube video on how to make sure the bag you are buying is authentic Louis Vuitton.

I don’t know if I have ever seen one of those bags. I asked my students if they had ever seen one. O yea! They had. Almost every woman in the room, and maybe one or two guys knew how to spot them. Not that are that hard to spot. They are remarkably ugly and covered with the Louis Vuitton logo. I guess I just haven’t been looking.

In The Theory of the Leisure Class, Veblen wrote:

It is especially the rule of the conspicuous waste of goods that finds expression in dress, although the other, related principles of pecuniary repute are also exemplified in the same contrivances. Other methods of putting one’s pecuniary standing in evidence serve their end effectually, and other methods are in vogue always and everywhere; but expenditure on dress has this advantage over most other methods, that our apparel is always in evidence and affords an indication of our pecuniary standing to all observers at the first glance.

Things haven’t changed much, if any, since Veblen wrote his book in 1899. The only reason to buy one of those bags is to assert one’s pecuniary power. If you have one of those bags, you must have money, and money is power in the US of A.

I began to drift a little during the presentation and remembered a time clear back in high school when a group of us were driving back from a basketball game and Louie, Louie came on the radio.  That must have been 1963 or 4.

I am living too much in the past.

Always on the Sunny Side

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Damn. I have an upset stomach. I’ve had it for a couple of days. I won’t go into the grisly details. Maybe I have a bug, or maybe my stomach is reacting to the Advil I take at night for my aches and pains so I can get some of my half-assed sleep. If it’s that, who knows, maybe the Advil is eating a hole in my stomach and I will die of internal bleeding.

Or it could be that damn clock change a couple of weeks ago. I am very regular bowel-wise usually, but since the clock change I am not. I won’t go into the grisly details. It could be that because, as soon as the clocked changed, I took a nose dive into deeper depression, or whatever the hell my condition is. Just call it immense fatigue, plus exhaustion, massive ahedonia, and achy feet and limbs. Also my concentration nears zero. Each day is like a forced march across Siberia.

But I make myself work out every day, except the days I teach. If I work out on those days, I have no energy left for class. So yesterday, I went to the club, did 25 minutes on my machine, and went and took a steam bath. The steam bath looks god-awful these days (they are trying to repair it), but when there’s a lot of steam you really don’t notice.

So I sat down and I must have groaned because this guy hidden over there in the steam, asked how I was. I know him from around. Not so good I said, and he said, had a long day, and I said, no it’s a bit bigger than that. I am depressed and ever since the clock changed I am more depressed than usual. Usually, I wouldn’t say that, but yesterday I was too damned depressed to make anything up. He said the clock change bothered him too and after a brief pause indicated that he was taking something, some med, I forget the name of it. I took it once for a couple of days and it made me want to jump out of my skin. I hated it. But it seems to work for him. We are all different, he said. The guy has a philosophical streak.

After the steam, the guy kept talking. Turns out he hates Sunday. Me too. But, he continued, he used to hate Sunday because everything was closed, but now you know everything was open. Frankly I wasn’t following his reasoning. He was raised in Alaska, he said, where it was dark like all the time, but now he is in Santa Barbara where it is light all the time. Yeah, I said, that’s true, not grasping his point. Where are you from, he said; South Carolina, I said. Well, he said, Santa Barbara is better than South Carolina, isn’t it?

Whereupon, this guy who is disrobing to go swim, says, Hey, there’s nothing wrong with South Carolina. Turns out this guy is working in CA for a year and he lives in South Carolina. He has a place in Greenville no less, and knows where Laurens is, and Clinton, where Brother Steve lives. So we get to talking. He seemed like a nice guy, though I did not get his name.

I think the guy from the steam room was trying to say and trying himself to stay “Keep on the Sunny Side.”  But I am just no good at the power of positive thinking.

Is Multi-Tasking Bad for The Brain

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Used to be, if you wanted to indicate somebody was really, really stupid, you could say, “He can’t chew gum and talk at the same time.” Now, maybe not. If chewing gum and talking at the same time is an example of multi-tasking, studies show that mono-tasking might be better.

I am not sure what multi-tasking is though I guess I do it more than I used to. It would seem to mean listening to music while answering emails and interrupting the email to IM.

The authors of a Stanford Study say however that the brain really can do only one thing well at a time. That would seem to be a physiological fact.

So they ran some experiments.

Sure enough, the multi-taskers (I guess these were self-identified as such) performed considerably worse at some very simple tasks than did mono-taskers.

One of the authors of the study said of multi-taskers, “They’re suckers for irrelevancy….Everything distracts them.”

And another says, “When they’re in situations where there are multiple sources of information coming from the external world or emerging out of memory, they’re not able to filter out what’s not relevant to their current goal…That failure to filter means they’re slowed down by that irrelevant information.”

But there’s a bit of a chicken-egg problem here. The researchers were not able to determine if multi-tasking clogs up the brain or if people who can’t concentrate anyway are drawn to multi-tasking.

I was visiting the class of another teacher. I was sitting with the students, and the student right next to me very surreptitiously checked his text messages at least five times during the hour I was there. I wonder if he heard what the teacher was saying. And the problem here wasn’t just the time paying attention to another stream of information; clearly the student anticipated getting text messages, and how much did that constant sense of anticipation run counter to his ability to concentrate. I know when I am anticipating something, I am not as present as I might otherwise be.

When I brought up this issue with my students, one said, were it not for multi-tasking she would not be able to stay awake during the lectures. They were so boring. But another said, it was amazing how much time one could pass on the web, and text messaging, and end up doing nothing.