Sunday, September 8, 2013

fugazi: i'm so tired set to bergman's seventh seal


seems appropriate.

i woke up at 4a yesterday and today. i'm beat. yesterday night, we went to the emergency room because Tim was in pain, and we still had not received any results. they were nice, and they told us exactly what my research had been: either cat scratch fever or lymphoma, though they said hodgkin's lymphoma, and told us to get a biopsy.

though i've been doing a tremendous bit of research since 4a, and i don't think it's hodgkin's because they checked certain areas of his body, particularly his hips, where nothing was wrong (i later learned in my research that 83% of patients have pain there). also, it isn't a lymph that is common to hodgekin's, which is a systematic disease that spreads from lymph to lymph, and generally begins in the neck, and there was nothing there either. also, a lymphoma mass is not painful, and Tim is in quite a bit of pain. also, without showing us the results, the initial doctor told us that Tim had a high white blood cell count. seeing the charts, the normal person is 11.5, and Tim is 11.7. that's no great cause for harm. so truly, i can say that dude was a dick. he saw a young dude like Tim go in there, referred from a walk in clinic, and sent him to the hospital then cancelled his appointment on Friday and refused to call back with the results. when we would call there, no one knew who the hell Dr. Sellman was. i think everyone who has had to deal with medical issues has a story like this. my family has a million from what my dad went through, maybe starting with that weird experimental surgery they thought they were doing because they thought my dad was some goon with intestines that were doing something they'd never seen before. turns out, my dad was just some goon who let his colon burst days before, and decided to just sit in his chair, in silence, and deal with it. what a goon. 

anyway, there are other things that cancel out hodgekin's, so i feel pretty confident in all of that. but i don't think it's cat scratch fever either. only because our little animal, Layla, 



has never cut Tim too deep. i mean, she would have had to rip into that flesh solid for all of that to happen, and that has never happened. i think it's just an infection. but i am not a doctor, which is funny because lately i feel like being a doctor is like being a weatherman. in these experiences in the past few years, i've realized that medicine is so ridiculously archaic, and doctors only function through a process of events that they test then mark off of the list. even when Tim had to get a sonogram of his arm, even though they realized, right away, that it wasn't a blood clot, they still had him on the table for 45 minutes to map his track of veins in his entire left arm. nuts. people are nuts. in conclusion, i think being a run of the mill, basic hodge podge take-this-pill doctor is pretty damn easy. easier than getting a doctorate in literature. everything the doctor's said i had already learned through research. 

maybe i'm a witch doctor. putting my faith in medicine is equivalent to putting my faith in church: i believe in God, i believe in the human will, heart and body, and especially the mind, but there are very few people that i think are capable of intervening between the two. not to say that it isn't possible, but like Tim's strange extra veins and extra branching arteries, which we saw while he was on the sonography table for 45 min, and make him appear bionic from the inside, it can occur, but it's highly unlikely.

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