And It's One...Two...Three...
What are we fighting for?
For those readers who have been lurking around since about 2010 already know, I never get a little sick. I get skin-of-my-teeth, life-threatening, call a priest or a hippie or something sick. One of my first series on this blog was about my experimentation with acupuncture after my first (and so far only touching wood) bout with multiple sclerosis and loss of eyesight.
Acupuncture does work, by the way.
Next, it was dengue, typhus and amoebic dysentery all at the same time. You ain’t lived until you’ve had a horse needle shoved into your liver and blobs of amoeba stuff come flowing out.
This time, it was pneumonia. It was so bad that by Sunday afternoon last I was literally biting at the air trying to get something into my lungs. Since this is me we’re talking about, it couldn’t be that simple. Apparently, my pericardial sac was filling up with fluid, causing arrhythmia and palpitations, along with a swollen aorta and flop sweats. But we couldn’t leave it there either.
I had some kind of parasitic infection in my gut that was causing swelling that was pushing up on my diaphragm. Basically, there was a three-way offensive on my air supply, and I was left in a kind of analogical ballroom in Istanbul, waiting for Zelensky, Putin and Trump to show up.
Mrs. FarSide was ecstatic! Despite the fact that there is rarely anything wrong with me, and when there is, it occurs about every 10 years and no amount of health maintenance program would have stopped it, the missus absolutely lives to have me at the doctor’s office on the off chance there might something to worry about.
For myself, I would rather have my fingernails torn out through my tonsils than to be anywhere near a doctor of any kind. The only reward for my travails was once again proving the old joke: ask 5 Indonesian doctors a questions, and you’ll get 27 opinions. That’s one opinion based in each of the major religious groups, plus a handful or so based on old wives’ tales, jungle magic and Pfizer informational inserts.
I was pleased to note that Indonesian healthcare has advanced somewhat. My first interaction lo these many years ago was a 6-bed ward with wall fans. Now they have modern 2-bed rooms with A/C that penguins would love, but only at night when one least needs it. The hospital has its own app too, which I was regularly reminded to download and give 5 stars.
What buggers the living daylights out of me concerning modern Western-style “healthcare” is the constant need to take “samples” of everything. My wrists are swollen and bruised from the incessant poking and prodding with needles to suck a bit more lifeblood out of me for more lab tests which maddeningly refused to show I was anything but dead-center normal except for the obvious infection that had a stranglehold on me.
It also annoyed me that the serious chin-stroking and hushed conversations moved away to a corner with the missus, since I had this annoying habit of looking up every prescription and diagnosis, to see if I agreed with it. When I refused to take beta blockers, noting that I do not now nor have I ever had a cholesterol problem, well that was the last straw. Patients are expected to be credulous and passive in their healthcare regimens, and certainly never question someone with a decade of expensive indoctrination.
So I spent seven days literally tied to a hospital bed by a catheter with one end in my bladder and a specimen bag anchored to the bed rail on the other end. This gave me all of about one meter of free range, which I used to keep my mind engaged, by playing with topology to get my self into the most bizarre positions possible before the next round of nursing came along.
I survived the ordeal, as I typically do, though my kids extracted a promise from me to see the heart specialist tomorrow. I expect this will result in yet another pile of pills to ignore and another EKG tape showing a reasonably healthy adult male who was triple-ganged by three infections at once and lived to tell the tale.
At least I’m good to go now until 2035.
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There’s only one film that fits today’s narrative, and that is the greatest showbiz movie ever made: All That Jazz (1979). The hospital party scene, specifically. Only show people get to live, die and tell their own story like this, and Bob Fosse was among the greatest of show people.
The only good bug is a dead bug on the Far Side:
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Maybe "The Hospital" starring George C. Scott and Diana Rigg is a better movie choice:
"We heal nothing! We cure nothing!" George C. Scott.
On my final night at Healdsburg Hospital, I told the nurse, "No more drugs! No more blood samples!" They let me go home the next day.
I took Lomodil when the dysentery got really bad in the Amazon. Mostly, I lived on black bread, watermelon, coffee (bad Brazilian coffee), water, lots of water, and lots of beer.