3679 12/12/12

Wednesday, December 12, 2012

My weight is perfect for my height -- which varies.

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I had to keep the heat high downstairs in the house because the slab is so cold.  My feet and lower legs freeze.  I don't want to wear fur-lined boots all the time in the house!  I have a small fan set high up on the cabinets to circulate the air back down to foot-level, but it doesn't help much.  I spend a lot of time at the laptop on the desk in the kitchen, so I thought about buying a space heater to tuck under the desk - but they can be noisy. 

Last week I found a rubber pad you can put on the floor, and it keeps your feet warm.  It's 20" x 14", and with an optional plug has a high and low setting.  So far it's working fine. 

Yesterday Jasper discovered it.  Now my poor feet have to fight for space on it.

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Someone was wondering about jokes and stuff that kids today might not understand.  Like we still "dial" a phone number, but when's the last time you saw a phone with a dial?  And we use a crank motion to ask someone to open a car window, but when's the last time you cranked a car window?

Sunday I was watching "Sunday Morning" and thinking about how the show has changed from the Kuralt days, when they'd go to small towns and report on special people or interesting things in the town.  Not any more.  I guess young folks today won't get the old joke, "My home town is so small Charles Kuralt has been there twice."

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Whenever you're diagnosed with certain diseases, the doctors ask a set lifestyle questions particular to current research on that disease.  (If this is an effort to gather data that may point to a cause, I do hope the answers are accumulated somewhere.)  When Jay was diagnosed with brain cancer, every doctor we met asked about heavy cell phone use.  (Jay had never used a cell phone.)  No one asked how much time he spent in front of a CRT, and I thought that might be significant.  I mentioned it a few times, but it was waved away.

When someone is diagnosed with schizophrenia or other bi-polar conditions, does anyone ask if the person had lived with a cat?  Or if the mother had a cat during pregnancy? Or if the person had been diagnosed with any other parasitic infections?  Do they look for parasites?

When someone is diagnosed with breast cancer, does anyone ask about the person's reactions to various viral infections?  Do they have a history of warts, for example? It is (finally!) acknowledged that certain viruses are involved in breast cancer, but so far the test results are far from conclusive.  I think maybe the researchers forget that it's not just the virus, but the body's reaction to the virus that matters.

The verdict is still out on hidradenitis suppererativa, in fact, the Mayo Clinic writeup still refers to it as a form of acne, which is no longer considered valid. Some researchers say they find staph, some say there is no infectious agent, that it appears to be an autoimmune disorder (mine has been cultured, and they found only white blood cells - in my opinion the difference is in whether the contents of the 'bump' is cultured before or after it opens.  I believe the staph is secondary).  Does anyone ask (I was not asked) whether or not the sufferer'd had a bad case of boils or carbuncles at sometime in the past?  In about 1957, a severe case of contagious boils swept through my family.  My father had them on the back of his neck.  I had one on my breast and one in an underarm.  I remember my little sister having a bandage tied under her chin and around the top of her head - she had them all along her jawline.  The other kids had them hither and yon.  I wonder if that had "sensitized" my immune system, which now overreacts to the least thing irritating the skin glands (like the elastic around my panty legs).

The questions asked seem to be driven by existing theories, and only the theories with general agreement.  "Left field" questions aren't asked - but I understand why.  The left field is awfully big.

I believe that we all have had cancerous cells crop up here and there many times in our lives, but that the body detects it at the one-cell stage and kills it.  It's only when for some reason it goes undetected that it gets out of control.  Back when Jay's tumor was no more than a bright pinhole on the MRI, the doctors mentioned that there was an old lesion in that area of the brain, a spot of scar tissue or something.  They didn't go into detail, but later I wondered if the lesion "hid" the bad cell from the blood's detection.

When Jay was about three years old he fell off a ping-pong table onto a cement floor, and was unconcsious for a period of time.  I wonder if that's the source of the lesion.

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Ever notice that there are some people who always look exactly the same in photographs?  Same tilt of the head, same angle, same smile, same foot and leg placement, always?  It's like they practiced for hours in front of a mirror until they found the perfect pose, and then practiced for hours to make sure they can "hit the mark" on a split second's notice.

I don't like those people. 
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