We've got to stick together
After all, everybody's good enough for some change
Saturday, February 21, 2004
Excuse me for being angry with my mother for having me at the tender age of 18, but I was born too soon, in the cosmic sense. I want to be able to diagnose my own illnesses on the internet and download the patches directly into my cerebellum. I can do the former but not yet the latter. The onset of Bell’s gave me an excuse to scour the web for information. Who needs a physician when I’ve got WebMD?
But the internet’s otherwise calming effect backfired very quickly as diagnoses of cancer, dementia, heart disease, croup and whooping cough infected my browser. Not that I was displaying any of these symptoms, mind you, but have you ever heard that saying that the number one cause of cancer among mice is ‘studies’? I was studying myself to death.
And the studies show that we all get something. One out of every eleven women will get breast cancer. One out of every five people will develop heart disease. One out of every six people will develop diabetes. In fact, there are 30,000 known diseases, only 10,000 of which are curable.
We are each of us a ‘one-out-of’.
And of course, my wife was doing the same research on her laptop. (We’re very cute, by the way, both of us in the kitchen, me on my desktop, she on her laptop, always surfing the internet 6 feet apart.)
Her findings were even bleaker.
“VebMD say you geet Bell’z Palzee from herpes! You bastard!”
I rolled my one good eye.
“Not that herpes,” I said. “The good herpes.”
“VTF?”
- - -
Bell’s Palsy Symptoms –
- Facial paralysis on one side of face
- Difficulty/inability to close eyelid
- Drooling
- Loss of taste
- Pain behind ear
- Increased alcohol consumption*
- Sexual aggressiveness*
- Sexual frustration*
- Further increased alcohol consumption*
- Screaming ‘I am not an animal’*
- Apologizing/groveling for forgiveness*
- Passing out*
- Nausea/headache*
*My own particular symptoms, which have not been verified by other national studies of those afflicted with Bell’s Palsy. But I’m telling you.
- - -
So the real dilemma with the whole episode was the timing. Sure, Friday might seem like a good day to come down with a debilitating illness, but back in February 2004 I was a consultant, flying around the country every other month to deliver three-day trainings for the AmeriCorps program. And I was supposed to be in San Francisco on Sunday, paralyzed head or not.
Alex tried in vain to stop me, but there was no way I could get a replacement on one day’s notice. And anyway, Rosie O’Donnell was about to get married. San Francisco was the place to be in February 2004, in case you don’t remember.
I went to bed a second night unable to close my right eye. In the morning it offended me, in the biblical sense. But I left for the airport anyway.
Alex stood crying at the doorway, anger and compassion all mixed up into one like an ill-advised dessert.
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