Dark Arts

Our family friend is in medical school. He let it slip that there's a med school course—two courses, in fact—in Non-Treatment 101 and 102. It's is a well kept secret, like Dark Arts classes at Hogwarts.

As you will guess, these classes are inhumanities electives. Very popular.

Non-Treatment 101 teaches doctors how to keep a patient coming back for follow-up appointments and, without actually doing any healing, charging patients and insurance companies for a wide variety of "healing services." A good Non-Treater can keep you coming back for years without helping you at all. The very best can also sell you a lot of drugs you don't need and for which there is no generic equivalent.

Non-Treatment 101 is a prerequisite for the more advanced Non-Treatment 102. This class is complicated to explain (med school courses are for the superior of brain and often difficult for us laypeople to understand), but it's basically this: How long can you keep the patient sitting in the waiting room, then the exam room, before you deign to sell them ten minutes of your distracted time for several hundred dollars?

Non-Treatment 102 is popular because it's purely recreational. It doesn't create income for the physician or for the drug companies, but med students and doctors report emotional rewards: in a stressful profession it's pure joy to peer out into the waiting room and watch all those unhealthy, unhappy people check their phones, stare at the ceiling and try to get comfortable in the office chairs as their pain and suffering intensify.

Want to get an A+? Don't provide magazines.

Ceci n'est pas une chienne sur un divan

A cold is like a mosquito. It's not the worst thing in the world but it's an annoyance, and it usually comes along with a lot of other mosquitos to bite your friends and family. If a normal mosquito bites you it raises an itchy bump. If a bad mosquito gets you, you've got malaria.

This is a roundabout way of saying it could have been worse and I'm glad I got a flu shot this year.

All week I've been shuffling back and forth to the kitchen for more cups of tea between longeurs in the armchair doing crosswords. I don't have energy for much else.

I've postponed all my appointments, even those with loved ones. I kept one appointment with Wilma the other day, accompanying her on her morning neighborhood hunt, and was laid out for the rest of the day. This annoyed Wilma; she does not have a cold and would have appreciated more hunting or at least chasing and biting things in the back yard.

But as you see, we've worked out a deal. When she can't have violence, she can have doggie bliss.

"This way lies madness," you say. But Wilma's smart. I think we've got her trained to believe she's allowed to lie on the towel, not the couch. So when the towel is not available, neither is the furniture. I'll let you know how that works.

No toys on the towel, though. We have to draw the line somewhere.

Dope

If you suffer from migraines, perhaps you take drugs not only to relieve the pain but to prevent the attacks as well, or at least diminish their frequency. And "suffer" is a relative term here. Everyone's migraine is different. Some people become nauseated and have to go to bed, some experience blind pain that drives them nearly to suicide.

I haven't had to endure a migraine's full wrath in quite a while because a medication called sumatriptan works for me. When I feel the thing begin its evil squeeze I take the pill and within an hour or two, I'm released.

I used to feel euphoric when the migraine lifted. Now I'm left with a kind of brainlessness. This is because I'm also taking a migraine preventer called a topiramate. It works. I was having 15 or 20 migraines a month and now I have about four. But topiramate has its drawbacks.

In some people, topiramate suppresses appetite. In some it causes paranoia or fainting, rapid breathing or blood clots. In me it causes sluggishness of body and mind. The worst thing is I have trouble remembering words. This would be no big deal if I were, say, a professional wrestler. Or maybe a neurologist.

I've told my neurologist how the topiramate makes me feel, how the word recall problem makes it hard to, um, you know, write words. He suggests I try different doses. He suggests I take it at different times of the day. He adamantly insists I quit drinking coffee. I tried that for an anguished six months, during which I was more sluggish than ever and had more migraines than ever. If I didn't drink coffee John would have to do all the laundry and grocery shopping and dog walking and that's not fair. I'd be a hazard on the roads. Hell, I'd be a hazard in my own house.

John suggested I get a second opinion. Duh! (If I wasn't taking this drug would I have thought of that myself?) He also suggested I research migraine preventers on my own. The first place I looked listed seven--SEVEN--alternatives to topiramate. I haven't had a chance to research them yet. Maybe they have side effects, like paranoia or blood clots or the urge to sleep with a moose.

But the doctor never bothered to mention these alternatives to me. Perhaps he doesn't know about them. He knows he wants me to stop drinking coffee. I begin to wonder if he went to college.

Obviously I don't have a migraine today or you'd be reading a shorter post. Anybody know a good neurologist?

Little Things

You may recall I tried running last May. I was gung-ho which, it turns out, is an anglicized pronunciation of a pair of Chinese words that mean "work together-work in harmony."

My body thought the opposite. (Ho gung?) My body thought "I am not working together in harmony with you on this project. Take THAT!"

I thought, "ouch!" and walked the rest of the way home. It never crossed my mind that I had caused myself injury, and THAT would not go away.

THAT, however, persists, so I saw a doctor and had some tests done. I now await the results and hope for the best, reflecting on how minor THAT is, really, and how with a little help I'll be back doing the little things--the laundry, the taking out of trash, the errands--which right now my body won't do.

Then there are the bigger things, the things I really miss. The walking. The hiking. The getting down on the floor to play with my dog. The writing at my desk.

THAT is a temporary reminder that I am no longer young enough to do just...whatever. My body is no longer eager to work together-work in harmony regardless of what I ask it to do. It's easier to hurt myself now. Recovery takes longer.

Everyone else comes to this pass. I never imagined I would, too.

We think we're infallible sometimes. We do.