Recently in Health and Illness Category

I would say that watching this made me feel sick, but illness is too risky these days, given what's going on.

In case you've never tried it before, let me assure you that It's really hard to take a picture of your back. I had to use a mirror to make sure that the camera was actually aimed at me and not at the wall behind me.

Yes, that splotchy red expanse of skin is my right shoulder and back, and no, I was not injured in some horrible accident. Or rather, I WAS injured in some horrible accident, once upon a time, and the gross bruising is evidence of that. It's just that the injury is old, and the bruising is recent. Also self-inflected.

See, I was employing a technique called gua sha (read all about it in a Wikipedia entry or at a website called Gua Sha), which I LOVE both because A) it works and B) I can do it myself--at least on some parts of me.

If there's anything I enjoy, it's coopting Mormon discourse and using it for my own ends. Especially rewarding is turning heated rhetoric on old white guys who have deployed it as a weapon against any who defy them. Which is why I so enjoyed sending the letter below to Senator Orrin Hatch:

Dear Senator Hatch:

Here's what I've done so far today:

1. Woke up and got out of bed at 5:30 a.m., which is about 90 minutes earlier than I usually get up. However, it's also three hours later than I got up yesterday, so I was happy. Furthermore, even though I tossed and turned last night, even though I was bedeviled by strange dreams and woke up often, it was a chemical-free night. That's right: no sleep-inducers, not herbal, not prescription, not OTC--not even liquid! I try to vary what I take during a really bad stretch of insomnia so I don't become too dependent on any one thing, and a really bad stretch of insomnia is what I've dealt with for the past few weeks. But I hope that after last night, it has broken--I hope, anyway. I HATE being awake in the middle of the night and exhausted during the day.

2. Read this really awesome piece in the NY Times magazine about our interactions with whales. It was moving and interesting and profound, and after reading it, I thought, "Well! No matter what happens during the rest of the day, at least I've read this, and that will salvage this entire day, and overall, I will count today as a good day." Ha!

3. Went for a nice long walk while the humidity wasn't grossly intense and the temperature uncomfortably high and the sky overcast and gloomy. Which was another reason I figured today would be a good day.

4. Tried to feed my cat, who had most of her teeth removed on Tuesday.

Somewhere in grad school I came across the idea that when you're healthy, you have a body, but when you're sick, you ARE a body--you are reduced to and limited by the malfunctionings of your physical self. I haven't blogged much during the last two weeks because I have been busy being a body. I was going to provide details of the succession of dreadful ailments I've suffered from (a nasty cold, menstrual cramps, a really horrible allergic reaction, including hives and edema, to something I ate) but they're not interesting. Anyway, I feel better than I did, but still not good, and I have a backlog of duties to attend to, as all sorts of things besides blogging got neglected while I spent the better part of two weeks on my couch, napping fitfully or watching Buffy episodes I'd seen over and over and thus didn't have to think about. But I will try to post something substantial before the end of the week.

Continued from my post yesterday.

With the clarity of educated hindsight, I can look back at my life and see that I suffered my first serious bout of depression as a young teenager--serious enough that I ended up in the hospital, though not for depression. No, I was hospitalized because of the effects depression and sadness had on my body: I lost six pints of blood--half the blood in my body--through intestinal hemorrhaging, which the doctors, after conducting a slew of tests and subjecting me to unnecessary exploratory surgery, attributed to "stress."

This being 1978, I was told I had made myself ill, and that I better make myself well, or else next time, I'd probably die. No one offered me any counseling or therapy; and so I dealt with the whole thing the only way I could, which was to become anorexic and even more obsessive and weird about religion than I'd previously been.

Here's a story that was all over British press yesterday but has yet to appear, so far as I can, in the American Press: According to a story from the Guardian, another from the Independent, and still another from the BBC, researchers at the University of Hull have concluded that anti-depressants are no more effective than placebos in treating all but the most severely depressed individuals.

There are several things about this that I think are important. One is that this story is not being reported by the US press. I read the stories in the British Press yesterday but didn't write about it until today because I wanted to give the US Press time to get around to noticing it. This morning I checked the NY Times, the LA Times, The Washington Post, and USA Today, and couldn't find a mention of this story in any of them. OK, it's a study by a British university, but they're American drugs, taken by a hell of a lot of Americans. This story was important enough in the British press that it was the lead story for the Independent and the Guardian. I think it merits attention in the US Press.

Another is that the researchers didn't conduct new studies; as the Independent put it, they simply "conducted a meta-analysis of all 47 clinical trials, published and unpublished, submitted to the Food and Drug Administration in the US, made in support of licensing applications for six of the best known antidepressant drugs, including Prozac, Seroxat – which is made by GlaxoSmithKline – and Efexor made by Wyeth." Still, according to the Guardian,

In my last entry, I talked about the history of bathing, having just read a book on the topic. I mentioned that in various times and places, people managed to live six or seven decades without ever washing their hair or taking a bath or brushing their teeth. Admittedly, living this way meant that they were far more prone than we are to things like carbuncles (something Ashenburg doesn't mention but which I briefly found fascinating ten years ago or so in that "Oooh, how disgusting!" way) and being toothless by age 40, but it didn't necessarily kill them, or cause their flesh to fall off.

(That is, not washing one's hands or body didn't necessarily kill the unwashed one. It did sometimes kill the people that one touched--for example, the many women who died of pueperal or childbirth fever, contracted when they were attended by doctors with unwashed, germy hands. Ignaz Semmelweiz, the doctor who suggested that his esteemed colleagues should wash their hands before touching a woman's filthy nether regions, was ridiculed out of the medical profession by men who greatly resented his outright assertion that they were somehow unclean; he died in an institution, a broken man.)

But here's that something can make the flesh fall from your bones, and might potentially kill you: flesh-eating bacteria, transmitted by skin contact and resistant to antibiotics.

ICK!

You can contract it from sex with an infected person, but you can also get it from contact sports. It's common in kids.

The article doesn't say how it is eventually cured for the people who contract it, only that "One in five infected patients in the US required hospital treatment."

But it also mentions the best way to avoid infection. That's right: "probably [probably! They don't know for sure] to wash thoroughly with soap and water, especially after sex."

I have a pretty good immune system and the ailments that tend to impair my health aren't usually infectious, aside from a mild cold from time to time, or the occasional bout of food poisoning, but I tend to recover very quickly. Normally I'm not the least bit hesitant to shake someone's hand but this is REALLY gross. Then there's the full-body massage I get every three or four weeks: I don't suppose I'll stop, but I might have to talk to my massage therapist about this. But how do you say, "I'm mildly concerned about contracting a gross infection that causes my skin to rot from the outside and my lungs to rot from the inside?" It's not a conversation I'm used to having.

I own a book called Love Is in the Earth. It's an encyclopedia of various gems and stones, both precious and semi-precious, but it won't tell you how to judge their monetary or aesthetic value, how to cut or set them. Instead, it explains the mystical healing properties of the stones listed in it.

Now, that sounds like a lot of mumbo jumbo to plenty of people, but I was profoundly and profusely ill at more than one point in my life, and collecting pretty stones and hoping their vibrations would do me some good seemed as sensible as visiting a man in a white coat, who would bombard parts of my body with invisible "rays" (as in X-) or "waves" (as in sonar) as some sort of diagnostic procedure, and then tell me stuff I already knew, such as "You're ill," before adding, "but I don't know how you got that way and I don't know how to make you better, so go home and hope it clears up and if anything changes, come back."

Understand: I still visited the guy in the white coat, but I figured I should cover all my bases. So I also bought pretty stones. I would hang them in front of my window, or put them under my pillow, or tote them in my pocket, though I was also fond of carrying them about my person in the form of earrings, pendants, rings and bracelets. People have asked me, when I've mentioned buying the stones, "Didn't that get kind of expensive?" I suppose it has, if you count the really fancy stones in really fancy settings that I wear as jewelry.... But the cost of all the loose stones I've ever bought in my entire life hasn't come close costing what I paid for prescription drugs during a single year of grad school. (This was back before we managed to get a grad student union at the University of Iowa.) Not only were the stones cheaper; they were also more psychologically empowering, and still look pretty in the container where I keep them.

So, the bad news was, I was really busy.

The good news was, I have a constitution that can handle it.

A few weeks ago at work they had this program called "Know Your Numbers," where you could have these tests done, evaluating certain basic indicators of overall health.

And despite the fact that I eat basically whatever I want whenever I want, despite my refusal to even set foot in a gym, and despite growing up in a home where the primary cooking fat was rendered bacon grease, I'm really healthy.