Episode 40: On Invisible Disease, OR Breathless Sex and No Longer in a Good Way

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Episode 39: Big Clue for Mary Dell, MD (Medical Detective): Suffocating Again - or, Rather, Drowning

Air. Precious, sacred air.

My previous episode on this invisible but all-present substance in which we are all immersed, and upon which we all depend, is Episode 25: Down the Rabbit Hole and Suffocating.

Sadly, my body's lack of air continues, which is why I'm revisiting the topic. It's been a rough weekend.

I was so happy to have the artist's permission to include his image of Sacred Wind--nothing I've seen captures my current feelings about air quite so well:

Thanks so much to Douglas A. Sirois for permission to use this beautiful image, one that captures my feeling about the sacredness of air, especially given my increasing lack of the element in which we are immersed and dead without! The artist has many spiritual and fantasy illustrations I love!
www.dougsirois.com
douglas.sirois@verizon.net
http://dsiroisillustration.blogspot.com/
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm4223178/

Be prepared if you choose to stay with this Episode: There's a lot of yucky stuff here. That's what happens when one discusses his or her illness: there's lots of yucky stuff. But if we're going to be real, we have to be real, so on we go.

For over a year now I've suspected that my blood and, hence, my organs and tissues, have been under-oxygenated. This can be referred to as hypoxia (lack of oxygen in the body's tissues, usually due to hypoxemia, lack of oxygen in the blood), or oxygen desaturation.

Episode 38: Weeds and Wonder, OR Stalking Euell Gibbons

A wrong attitude about nature is almost an integral part of our culture, and all the crying we're doing about the environment is going to come to nothing as long as such an attitude persists.

                                                               --Euell Gibbons, 1972, qtd. in Smith

I'm channeling my Euell Gibbons tonight. Children of the sixties and seventies knew Euell as the craggy naturalist picking cranberries in the snow to add to his GrapeNuts breakfast cereal. We saw him on popular talk and variety shows. And we laughed at Tim Conway's impersonations of him on the Carol Burnett Show.

If you are a child of a different generation, here is a video of one of this iconic forager's commercials to get you up to speed; his cache in popular culture is not greatly diminished today, forty years after his death.

"Ever eat a pine tree?" Gibbons reportedly asks on one of his GrapeNuts commercials, but thus far I've found no video proving it. (A chapter in one of his books, though, is similarly titled.) I've watched the two commercials referred to above, and neither mentions pine. Another claim with this possible myth is that, later in that ad, Gibbons compares the taste of GrapeNuts to that of wild hickories. However, he does say that in the commercial posted above, and I doubt he'd make the same claim in a second commercial. I suspect the true speaker of that line may have been Tim Conway or some other impersonator spoofing Euell. Gibbons does, however, devote one chapter of Stalking the Healthful Herbs to white pine, which he states was a major food for Native Americans, though his experiments with it, he stated, never eradicated its turpentine-like flavor.

N.B. I was recently scolded by a math professor in my writing group when I insisted that Wikipedia is not a reliable scholarly source. He cited a new academic journal article in which researchers compared the information on the popular free, open-source encyclopedia to more authoritarian sources and claimed Wikipedia is just as accurate as they are. I don't believe it, though I'll often go to the site first to gather information, then verify it with the references given in the text or through my own research. In fact, the pine tree commercial Wikipedia cites is linked to its "source," the video posted above in which cattails are the wild food highlighted. In neither that nor the cranberry commercial is a pine tree mentioned. Ever the librarian and, hopefully, scholar, I maintain that quoting from Wikipedia does not enhance one's credibility whatsoever. That doesn't mean the site is useless; it just doesn't belong in a scholarly bibliography. 

See the end of this article for a list of my sources; those providing unique information are also cited within the text of this "episode."

Episode 37: Down the Rabbit Hole Yet Again: On Electronic Health Records and the Digital Patient

First, a disclaimer:  My purpose in sharing my experiences in the illogical, upside-down world of today's U.S. health care system is NOT to denigrate the many fine individuals working as health care professionals--physicians, nurses, technicians, and all the other good folks who support the care of an endless stream of patients, many of them seriously ill.

I've been most fortunate in having access to some of the best specialists in their fields at Johns Hopkins Medical Center and the National Institutes of Health. I salute all who truly care about their patients. No doubt, they are as frustrated as I in finding themselves in this dark maze populated by wacky characters with nonsensical expectations. I know they also despair about the care, or rather lack thereof, this nation gives to its sickest patient of all--its health care system.

Today, the fun show reached another high, given how low it was. That's how it is down the rabbit hole--what's up is down and what's big is small and what's wrong is as wrong as wrong can be.

Don't fall in, Alice! It's scary as hell down there.

Episode 36: Slaughter, Again. Again. Please Tell Me, Not Again

My Aunt Ruth and Uncle Freeman met on a shooting range in the 1940s. He, a tall, handsome, intelligent man and she, a drop-dead beauty of Norwegian descent. Damn those puns! They crop up everywhere, like shooters in malls and schoolyards. Violence even runs through our language--drop-dead gorgeous was my Aunt Ruth, and not only that:

Ruth (as I called her) was a dead-eye shot.

NRA members both, Freeman and Ruth married, settled down a few blocks from my parents' home, and got to work producing three handsome, strapping boys. The boys grew up as mini-sharpshooters, accompanying the folks to gun ranges and competitions, and taking part themselves.

Ruth, a crackshot, outshot all the women and quite a few of the men, often Freeman himself. In fact, she was so damned good she was Captain of the U.S. Women's Rifle Team. I will dig up a copy of her  photo in the Washington Post, and you'll see what I'm talking about.

But Freeman and Ruth didn't just shoot guns. They loved to round dance--a sort of square dance--and Ruth's wide-skirted shimmering dresses and layers of petticoats billowed and swirled as my uncle twirled his Norwegian Annie Oakley around the room with others who shared their love for the dance. After she died, Ruth's son Don spoke at Arlington Cemetery where she was to be entombed, the space beside her reserved for her husband, who would receive his own ___-gun salute after his funeral in the little stone chapel in the midst of those green hills and endless white slabs of marble not too many years later. "My mother grew up in northern Michigan, the child of first-generation Norwegian Americans, and she loved to figure skate. As a boy, I'd watch her on the ice--" Don's voice cracked--"and I thought I'd never seen anyone so beautiful in my life."

Freeman had survived a stroke many years before, and they'd moved to Leisure World to make things easier for him. Ruth took care of him while he continued his passion since retiring from the United States General Accounting Office--genealogy. He'd traced my mother's line back to the 9th Century in some lines. The two of them traveled to Europe and Norway to scour court records and cemeteries for blood links to the past, and they learned that Ruth derived from early Norwegian nobility. Freeman typed complicated lines of family history on a manual typewriter with the two fingers still functional enough after the stroke to do so.

They traveled, they danced, they researched, they visited and entertained their family, they went on Caribbean cruises with my parents during which the fine dining and dancing never stopped--they were, in short, very well-rounded (not to pun their form of dancing) human beings who happened to enjoy guns but didn't make them the end-all and be-all of their existence.

Episode 35: Weed or Wonder? Early Spring Greens in Appalachia

Weed or Wonder? is a column I wrote for the Appalachian Independent for a couple of years. The online newsletter was developed by a group of concerned citizens--concerned about the journalistic integrity of the local newspaper and wishing for fresh voices and more divergent views via a "Dialogue of Democracy."

My true passion is our natural world, from turtles and newts to tigers and owls. And plants. Particularly beautiful flowers. Particularly wildflowers. Particularly edible and/or culinary plants. Particularly gardening. Particularly foraging. Particularly fungi.

But fungi will have to wait for another episode--especially since my hours of scouring the forest floor today led to the discovery of not one single morel. Still too early, for one thing, and for another: I've never found a morel in my woods. Yet my woods should  produce morels. My woods have a northeastern exposure. My woods are hardwoods, particularly oaks and maples. My woods are moist and filled with secret little woodland plants known to grow where morels do. Morels, where art thou? Have you merely hid beneath the leaf litter each spring, camouflaged from my inexperienced eyes?

This year, if a morel exists on my property, I will find it. Now that I no longer can work, I can certainly spend an hour or two in the woods, even if my butt is glued to a boulder because I don't have enough energy to risk my ankles to the deep spring-and-boulder field on the mountain rising behind my "cottage." And now that fungi have stolen two entire paragraphs--they have a way of sneaking up on us, don't they?--I'll list below the plants I've found thus far this spring, and they are few and far between at the moment--we had snow yesterday, for heaven's sake.

Morels - Fungus Par Excellence

Episode 34: Something Other than Health Problems: Muskrats! Field Voles in the Cottage!

Never did I intend this blog to be so consumed with health issues--BO-RING! But those have consumed me of late, mostly because of not having a definitive diagnosis to explain all my increasingly debilitating symptoms. At last, we seem to be on the right track vis-a-vis both of those things. I'm still convinced it's mytonoic dystrophy or something very similar, and I'm waiting for a date for my consultation at the Johns Hopkins Muscular Dystrophy Clinic, which wonderful Dr. A is referring me to. Alas, I thought a DNA blood test would be cheaper than a spinal tap, but he told me they run something like 2 grand, and he wanted an expert to evaluate me and test me.

More about that in a future episode.

So, WHAT ABOUT MUSKRATS, the title of this episode? You know me. Digression is my middle name.