Dairy of a Madman

It’s not quite as catchy as Faces of Death, sure, but you could get so much more mileage out of a series called Faces of Sick. You can get an entire volume just following people around Bailey’s for a couple of weeks, for instance.

And then, you could put a camera on me, because sometimes, I’m an absolute moron who thinks he’s bulletproof. I took a week off at the end of February to deal with what turned out to be part one of a sweeps-month cliffhanger of the flu. That seemed smart enough, right? Of course, I didn’t completely take the week off — there was a show to be played, and I don’t miss Exhibit(s) gigs, paid or not. And there was work around the house to be done. And so forth.

As of this past Sunday, I felt the relapse coming on, and forced myself through the show at Dave’s. Not so bad — I drank water all night, avoided alcohol, and took it as easy as I could. Monday, I felt worse, but came into work nonetheless — partially to avoid falling behind again, partially to avoid burning any more sick days. Went home, and promptly fell asleep for fourteen hours. I suspect part of that was my body forcing me to chill out (my original plans involved rearranging my house into the summer format, so I don’t melt in my sleep), and part of it was an under-the-surface depression that has been lingering for a few weeks. Yesterday: again, a little worse, still, but can’t miss the gigs, even if they don’t pay me anything. And can’t miss the cable-access television show appearances, even if I don’t say word one (I like to think it was my contribution to Eric’s fascist leader appearance).

And so today: the flu is passing (all over but a slight ache and a lot of coughing and sniffling), only to be partially replaced by conjunctivitis. Yup, pinkeye. Whee. And I think I might have laryngitis coming on.

Throughout all of this — and over the past two years, whenever I get more than a mild cold — what concerns me is not the illness itself. That’s just a pain-in-the-ass that I do my best not to allow to slow me down too much. Constantly lingering in the back of my head, though, is the curiousity as to whether or not this will be the time that I get another visit from the CIPD fairy, as I did back in December of 2003.

Amazingly, it looks like I never bothered to document all the fun that I had back then, so let me try to do a brief recap here real quick: over the course of a few weeks, following a month-long run of flu followed by laryngitis followed by some stomach bug, I began to lose feeling in my extremities — fingertips and toes, spreading fairly rapidly inward. At the peak, after about three weeks, it felt like I had thick socks on my feet up to my knees, thick gloves on my hands up to my elbows, and there was a constant pins-and-needles tingling at the tip of my tongue and nose. I had trouble walking, because I couldn’t tell when my feet were fully on the ground; so I walked with a cane, and was moving toward a walker. I had little manual dexterity (I have a few things that I tried hand-writing during this time, and it’s comical, to see me writing like a three-year-old with seizures); bass playing was no longer something that I was very good at (and it hurt, too, to get that intense shock with each note), and my ability to grasp was on the decline. Oh, and my balance was terrible, too; showering required constantly holding onto the curtain rod to make sure that I didn’t fall when I closed my eyes.

It took what seemed like a brutal amount of time for them to figure out what I had - blood tests revealed nothing, no vitamin or nutrient deficiencies, no markers for MS or ALS or any number of other exotic-sounding diseases that I might have had. Finally, a few fun neural tests (even if your brain can’t get signal to your fingers, apparently a machine can, and you too can be a frog in a biology lab) revealed that I have a condition called Chronic Inflammatory Polyneuropathic Demylenization, or CIPD (referred to more commonly on the net at CIDP, it seems). The long and short of it: my immune system attacks my nervous system at the trunk of my spine, and no one seems to know just why.

Oh, and before you internet detectives start crying wolf, the immediate response was an AIDS test, and I’m clean. God knows how, but I’m happily disease free after all this time. So to speak, at least…

But CIPD, according to the literature and my doctor, often shows up in people (as does it’s cousin, Guillain Barre) after an illness — specifically, respiratory or gastro-intestinal. Or the flu. They don’t know why, though I’ve heard suspicions that the immune system doesn’t recieve the messages that the body is clean, and so keeps looking for things to eat, and it just so happens that certain virii are remarkably similar to the myelin that surrounds your nerves.

Whee. Lucky me.

And so I spend my sick days looking around the corner, ahead, wondering if it’s coming back this time. They assure me that it will be back — that’s the chronic part of all this, after all. And the treatments involve either steroids — prednisone, which knocks your immune system offline long enough for the nerves to repair themselves, leaving you open to illness, weight gain, and the shakes, not to mention eventual severe liver damage — or plasmapheresis, where your blood gets cleaned. Outside of your body. Not a lot of fun, as I gather, and also leaves you reliving the symptoms towards the end of each cycle.

Not to mention the brief panic that sets in when I sleep on an arm wrong, and wake up with no feeling in one of my hands.

And then you could make volumes of the Faces of Sick series about mental illness. Bipolar disorder can be fun, but enough about me: let’s talk about real sickness. Like people who would want to view “molestation on demand,” for instance.

Y’know, I can wrap my head around a lot of things. A lot. Things that have bothered some people that I’ve known. Things like murder, and brutality, and death. I’ve done enough studying (and maybe there’s a part of me that’s wired just so) that I can empathize with the criminal and the disturbed, and often enough understand where they’re coming from, why they do what they do. But this… It’s beyond me. Not the preferences, or the turn-ons; I think, just like gay men and foot fetishists and even boring vanilla old you and me, what we are attracted to is beyond our control. And the people in this world that are drawn to seeing young children as erotic objects shouldn’t be vilified as much, perhaps, as pitied; as bad as it is for me to be attracted to women that I will never have, how bad must it be for those who find excitement in a ten-year-old?

But those that feel these tendencies should be separated from those who feel and act upon them. With sturdy walls, strong enough to block out the gas that you might fill that room with. Oh, and the walls should have spikes, and barbed wire. And maybe the floor can be made of razor blades, and covered with a thin sheen of lye.

An animal is no different from a man in that it cannot help what it instinctively feels. Man and beast alike, we all get hungry beyond our control, and we all crave things to sate our desires — be they flavors of food or objects of lust. The difference between man and beast is the self-control to act or not act on these desires, depending not on whether we can get away with it but on whether said action is right or wrong.

I say, if you’re gonna run with the beasts, you get put down with ‘em.

But hey, I have a condition, and parts of me eat other, perfectly good parts of me. So what do I know?