Eminess is Back in Charge

 

"Jesus H. Christ!  All I'm trying to do it pick up a 100- foot, dry garden hose and put it into my Herbie Curbie."

Those were the words I murmured under my barely-there breath as I leaned against the dark green dumpster waiting for -- no, praying for -- a second wind. 

There are so many possible explanation for this decidedly new weakness of mine, it's hard to know where to begin.

I am in my late sixties.  My octogenarian mother reminds me of that each time she calls to discuss my health report of the day.  Just because I could have coiled that damned hose up, slung it into one shoulder and walked the distance to the dumpster with nary a droplet of sweat appearing on my forehead a year ago, doesn't mean I should be able to do it this much further into my dotage.

Then there is the upper-respiratory virus I'm still battling after nearly three weeks of coughing, wheezing, sneezing, strangling and daily unplanned naps.  That sure has taken any pep I might still have out of my step.  I still can't even blow my hair dry without taking two or three breaks.  My arms won't stay up! 

I'd much rather attribute my feebleness to those things than to that bitch, Eminess.  Oh yeah, we can't forget her now can we?

Eminess is the name I have given to my new constant companion, multiple sclerosis.  

She is feeling pretty smug these days because she has taken over again.  I had been extremely encouraged by the prognosis of shortened episodes and longer remissions offered by the drug Copaxone I was injecting daily.  The fact that I was soon covered in subcutaneous lumps under the injection sites that itched for three days each gave a whole new meaning to the term miserable.  

Copaxone is considered one of the safest of the three or four drug therapies used for MS, because it doesn't interact with any other drugs a patient might also need.  Since I first wrote about the $42,000 annual cost it would be to an uninsured patient, I have come to understand where all that cost is coming from.

This is not something one just gets a prescription for and has the local or mail-0rder pharmacy fill it.  This drug is handled directly by the manufacturer.  I should have gotten a clue when the doctor handed me the shrink-wrapped, multi-media informational packet and told me a nurse would be coming to my house to train me on the self-injections.

This nurse works for the manufacturer.  She came equipped with an auto-injection contraption, ice packs, alcohol wipes, a daily planner, a wall chart, a refrigerator magnet, a vacation kit, a rubber ball for practicing injections and a whole list of other collateral crap I could have free for the asking.  I have a background in sales and marketing.  I KNOW how much all this stuff adds to the cost of any product.

And the customer service?  Second to none.  I had my own nurse, Linda, who called me every week to see how I was doing.  When I complained of the injection site reactions, she lapsed into sympathetic oohs and aahs and swore it would get better with time.  As if the process of shooting myself up was something akin to rocket science, she quizzed me to make sure I was doing each step correctly.  I was.

The second week I was even more miserable because I had fourteen separate injection sites in varying degrees of rage.   Again Linda was most sympathetic, but this time I wasn't as receptive.  Again she ran through the procedure list.  Again she declared I was doing everything right.  Again she repeated it would get better...but maybe I should see a dermatologist.  I didn't even ask what that was supposed to mean.  

The third week I was frantic.  I called my neurologist, whose assistant assured me would call the next day.  He didn't.  He didn't call all that week.  I called back.  He was on hospital rounds, but a call to me was on his schedule.  Guess what?  He didn't call that day, but he did the following day.

"What's happening with your injection sites?"

I told him.

"Then stop taking the shots.  You are allergic to them!"

What!?!?!?!?!?  

Then I understood completely.  "Linda's" job is not to look after me so much as it is to make sure I keep injecting the drug.  All that investment of collateral materials, hands on nursing visits and weekly "sales" calls had to be recuperated. All the manufacturer's written materials listed the reactions I was having as "common" and "temporary."  My doctor says something entirely different.

Anyway....

I have stopped taking the shots.  I had a short withdrawal that wasn't pleasant, but I lived.  I am still itching, albeit not nearly as badly, and the lumps are slowly receding.  

And this week I must see my neurologist and discuss the next, less "safe" option.  So, Eminess is back in charge and it is very likely that she is responsible for the fatigue and weakness I am experiencing.  

Eminess: 1, L: 0.

Why is it that the treatments for serious illnesses often make us feel much worse than we ever did before the diagnosis? 

It’s Just a Cold

 

It started last Tuesday night.  I awoke in the wee hours coughing like a person with terminal pneumonia.  In the few hours since I had retired feeling quite normal, a painful, bronchial cough had seized my lungs.  I knew from the tickle that refused to leave my throat that I would have laryngitis the next day.

I wish I knew who the genius was who first said “it’s just a cold.”  Usually, that would precede something on the order of “I will soldier through it and drag myself to the office like the trouper I’m expected to be.”

I did that.  I practically crawled into the workplace with my tissues and cough drops, looking “pekid” and ugly, nose red and raw, thinking I was being a team player, a stand up employee.

The best part of this recent “common cold” I am battling is that I don’t have an office to go to.  And it’s a good thing, too, because this one has knocked me on my keister.  For the first time since it started last week, I was strong enough this morning to wash and blow dry my hair after a long, decongesting, hot shower.  Then I had to lie down!

A cold is probably among the most contagious diseases known to mankind, yet we have created a culture around it that minimizes  both its effects and its virulence. 

“Oh, it’s just a cold.  I feel okay except for the sneezing and the coughing and the need to breathe with my mouth open.”

There are two possible sources of this, my latest virus.  My next door neighbor and I worked together at a neighborhood after-school program.  Everybody knows that elementary school kids are walking Petrie dishes for all things contagious.  My neighbor got sick a week ahead of me, and she thinks she caught it from one of the office “saints” who came to work sick.  Either way, she missed an entire week of work, feeling guilty about it all the way.

People, we need to get a grip.  We understand how these “bugs that are going around” are distributed, so why do we cling to the notion that a cold is the one disease that doesn’t get a free pass from work?   

There is bound to be a reader of this post who will tell us the cold is contagious days before an individual feels the symptoms, so staying home after the symptoms materialize won’t keep the co-workers safe.  But that is not true.  Since the cold virus is passed from person to person either by sneeze-driven molecules in the air or by contact with a previously expelled molecule that landed on a door knob or the handle of a faucet, is stands to reason that the cold is most contagious at the peak of your symptoms.

Perfect attendance at work used to be a big deal.  Some people even received awards from their employers for never missing a day.  What they should have gotten is a reprimand if they were among the legions of troupers who went to work sick.  

Stay home.  Force liquids.  Catch up on movies, if you can hold your head up.  And just when you think you are all better…don’t.  It’s usually a brief respite, nothing more.  And there is no medicine that will make you get better faster.  Antibiotics don’t work on viruses.  Treat your symptoms with decongestants and antihistamines, lay back and take it easy.  Your co-workers will love you for it.  If they don’t, they should.

Decorum

 

 

Jodi Arias at the moment she heard the verdict

Jodi Arias is now officially a murderer.  She is the 32-year-old woman who savagely cut her boyfriend’s throat from ear to ear, nearly decapitating him.  As if that wasn’t enough, Jodi stabbed him 26 more times, some in his back and one right in the heart.  But before she did all that, she shot him in the face. 

After watching the Phoenix-based trial over the past several months during which the defendant testified on her own behalf for eighteen long days, it is easy to understand that as far as the court of public opinion is concerned, she should be flung into a dumpster full of rats, never to escape until the vile rodents devoured her sorry carcass.

Jodi Arias is a study in narcissistic personality disorder.  She lied so many times between the murder and the verdict, including on the witness stand during her trial, I wouldn’t have believed her if she told me her name.  She is smug and arrogant when talking to a television reporter, telling him that “no jury is going to convict me.” She was sarcastic and belligerent when cross-examined by Prosecutor Juan Martinez.

Jodi claimed to be highly intelligent with an IQ on a level with Albert Einstein.  Yeah, right.  Her IQ was revealed in the court proceedings: 119.  Einstein’s is estimated to have been 160. 

In other words, Jodi Arias is easy to hate, in spite of her alleged sex appeal. 

When the verdict was read in the courtroom there was only one anguished cry from one of victim Travis Alexander’s sisters.  Aside from that, there was a funereal silence.  Of course, we’ll never know how that gallery of onlookers might have behaved had the judge not forbidden any type of outbursts.

Outside the courtroom was an entirely different story.  Even before the verdict was read there were two women interviewed on camera sobbing uncontrollably, praying for justice for Travis Alexander.  They didn’t know Travis from Adam’s housecat, but they were almost inconsolable.  When word of the verdict reached the growing gathering of trial watchers, they erupted in cheers.  Cheers! 

I believed it was wrong to celebrate when our soldiers killed Osama bin Laden and I believe it is wrong in this case.  What on earth is there to cheer about?  Travis’s name was dragged through the mud by the defendant and her lawyers.  And he is still just as dead as he was on that fateful day in 2008, so the Alexanders certainly aren’t cheering. 

There is another family grieving a loss today as well.  Jodi’s mother and aunt, identical twins, sat in that courtroom each and every day as the prosecution ripped her and her lies apart.  Imagine how that must have felt.  They didn’t do anything wrong, at least nothing they were on trial for.  They listened to Jodi’s tawdry recordings of her phone sex with Travis.  They looked at pictures of Jodi posing nude, and lewdly.  They saw the disturbing pictures of Travis lying in a bloody heap on his shower floor.

We Americans have a very tacky side to us.  With all the electronic tools we have to play with, the media feeds the savage beast that is our morbid curiosity and whips us all into a frenzy – some might say a feeding frenzy – until a tragic, disgusting, reprehensible criminal proceeding morphs into a modern-day Super Circus.  Loud mouthed cable prattlers play to every one of our human frailties, all in the name of “complete coverage” where “you won’t miss a moment of this.”

A bright and popular young man is dead.  An intelligent, articulate and mentally compromised young woman faces the possibility of her own execution or at the very least an entire life locked up.  Two families who were living their lives and minding their own business are now devastated and burdened with this sick tragedy forever.

This wasn’t a kangaroo court with a mock jury.  This wasn’t a medieval jousting match.  This was no scripted reality show that makes stars out of whack jobs.  This was the real deal; true life…and true death.  Shame on those who cheered.