I was at a Midwestern medical center, taking internal referrals. The referring physician was a medical doctor I had never heard of. Of course, there was no information about why a 70 year old grandmotherly woman with white hair and a surprisingly pleasant smile had been referred.
She told me she had headaches. She was very happy that she did not have one on that day. They were horrible and even an emergency room injection of narcotics did not do anything for them once they started. They were variable, sometimes brief and sometimes lasting a whole day. They could be on either side, or both, but most often cut a line from above one ear to above the other ear. They were getting worse and quickly.
One of the smartest things anyone ever told me (It was an ancient professor in France, who was so experienced he had to say smart things once in a while) was that if a patient could not be diagnosed, or did not make any sense, just spend more time with the patient and get more history. He said that very often patients knew exactly why they had the problems they had. Read more on Unconventional Cure — Leave The Headache Behind…
Filed under Diagnosis, relationships by on Aug 6th, 2010. Comment. 
The Notorious KFC Double Down
“Forbidden fruit” has become forbidden meat. At least, I think, in California. I remember when my husband and I first came here, I heard some people call it the “Granola State.”
KFC’s “Double Down” is already out there. Sounds like the nutritional pundits are weighing in on this one. I never would have believed, in my earlier lifetime, that anyone from Yale would have anything to say about KFC. Read more on The Fattest Food…
Filed under weight by on Aug 5th, 2010. Comment.
I remember the time when the only person who ever held my hand was my mother of blessed memory, with my father of blessed memory as a rare substitute. I mean, if the four of us, both parents and my brother and I, went for a walk, my father would get the better behaved child, who was definitely me.
Mommie had told me quite clearly that I could not cross the street without holding a hand. We lived near an expressway, and cars went fast.
Many years later, when I brought my husband to the parental house to meet her, she was gratified that I did not have to navigate this treacherous place without the anchor of my hand, and that I never had. A tad overprotective, perhaps, but like a therapist colleague once said after meeting my family, better they are like this than like the ones who don’t give a damn. Read more on I STILL Wanna Hold Your Hand…
Filed under relationships by on Aug 4th, 2010. Comment.
I always thought it lovely that people use the most sophisticated technology available in their era and try to describe the brain with it. A steam engine for Freud. A computer for the moderns. Everyone acknowledging that the brain is more complex than anything they can possibly describe.
Sometimes you have to simplify things in order to use a concept. I always had trouble with this “left brain/right brain” thing. People have laterality. They have dominant sides. I am right handed. Minor medical problems show up on the left side of my body a little more readily.
My brother of blessed memory, who had Asperger’s syndrome, was diagnosed early on as having an “ambivalent” mind and a laterality problem by an overzealous school headmaster who really believed he had seen it all. My mother of blessed memory suddenly “remembered” something which I had never heard before, about my brother having tried to write with his left hand, and her thinking it was a bad thing, and trying to make him write with his right hand. My guess is it was an epiphenomenon of the Asperger’s maybe, but dear Harry’s problems obviously went a lot deeper than laterality.
I remember reading some of the “split brain” experiments, stories of poor folks who had a disconnect between the right and left parts of their brain. Coming up with words to describe things they saw in their left cortical visual fields, coming up with pictures they could describe in their right visual fields. Read more on Left Brain/Right Brain…
Filed under Brain by on Aug 3rd, 2010. Comment.
There is a story about myself which I don’t enjoy telling. As a matter of fact, believe it or not, I don’t much like to talk about my own strange history. But my husband gives me cues. We were having a pleasant luncheon with a person with whom we wanted to have a working relationship. Since it was mostly business and financial, and I have never claimed such things to be my “strong suit,” my husband did most of the talking. I think the person we were with, although he said little, wondered at least a little if I were clever enough to do the scientific and medical part of the consulting we were talking about. So my husband said it.
“Tell him about when you got expelled from 4th grade.”
Nobody asked my age, but after some precocious grade-skipping, I was, as far as I can figure, 8 going on 9. I was in a local public school, in a city where the school system was of very low repute. My father of blessed memory had done a little substitute teaching several years before, and the superintendent of schools was a “friend of the family.” Read more on How The Gifted Child Got Expelled…
Filed under Brain, News by on Aug 3rd, 2010. 1 Comment.
“I see him every day at work and I am attracted to him, really a lot, like I want to be with him all the time.”
She was 25 and hot by most common ways of assessing such matters; with olive skin and dark eyes, well made-up and skirt a little on the short side. A smile sneaked gently onto her face as she talked about this guy.
Workplace Affair
She told me she was happily married, with a three year old at home, and a good husband, one of the husbands everyone else wished they had, and she did not want to screw that up. Her face got dreamy and she kept talking and I could only wonder about one thing.
Is this the best problem she could come up with?
I saw her in a clinic in a poor part of town, where nobody had jobs let alone husbands, and this was her problem. Read more on Hard To Keep An Affair At Work Only…
Filed under relationships by on Aug 1st, 2010. Comment.
I’m working on a book about my weight loss (150 lbs. over the past two years), and have been going over pictures that illustrate how I looked from my peak to where I am now.
Actually, I am still losing, but stabilizing. Keeping off is not a problem. Most things people think are problems are not problems, if people would gather knowledge and actually think about it. They don’t. They listen to friends and women’s magazines.
Thinnest President Since Lincoln?
Weight is a tough problem. It is “multi-factorial.” There are physiological things, genetic things, environmental things, and lots (I mean lots) of psychological things that are part of this. I think of them not as tricks or tips but as factors, real factors. I do not think people should pick and choose what seems “easy;” rather, they should focus on doing what works. Read more on Eating Myself Slim…
Filed under weight by on Aug 1st, 2010. Comment.
Even though it has been slow and gentle, my weight loss (yes, 150 pounds without surgery in a couple of years and yes, I will speak of it more later and elsewhere) means, among other things, that I have located some new veins — and today, an artery.
Now the veins that made me happiest were, and still are, the ones on the back of my hands. I have a memory etched into my soul of a chief resident in neurology at the University of Minnesota who told me privately,and with all of the discretion that he could figure out how to muster,that I should be ashamed of being as fat as I was. Because if ever I had a serious health crisis, and nobody could find a vein, someone could die from lack of a proper venous access. It didn’t take any training in psychiatry to figure out that some time, in the past not too distant to that remark, he had failed to find a vein in someone who died. Of course, I felt horrible. But oh, the joy as I slowly lost weight and was able to locate, when I had enough liquid volume on board, big juicy veins on the back of my hand, even as I can now. Every time I look at them I think “Wow. Even a first year medical student who has never seen a vein on a living person would not only know immediately I have wonderful veins, but could pierce them with just about any kind of tubing, no matter how poorly suited for the job. They could not miss. They would be happy. They would think they are the next star of “Boston Medical” and they would call their parents and ask for some spare money to celebrate. This is what it is to be a “real doctor.”
Actually, most veins are now pierced by far less qualified and far lower paid professionals, certified “phlebotomists.” They have taken my blood in unskilled and inappropriate ways, sometimes screwing up all pretense of sterile procedure by doing things like ripping fingers out of latex gloves to get a better “feel.” Another cheap doctor substitute, foisted on people who do not know what they are NOT getting. Read more on As If By Magic An Artery Appears…
Filed under medicine, Research by on Jul 27th, 2010. Comment.
The Fourth of July has come and gone this year. Once again, I have managed to avoid every parade and every fireworks display. This time, I did not even hear a firecracker.
The last time I saw fireworks was several years ago when a chronically depressed and critical (but on some level intellectual, highly cultured, and fun-loving) threw a party as she happened to be living in a rented home from which three fireworks displays were easily visible. I remember that although I was my usually pretty stone cold sober self, many of her intellectual, highly cultured, and fun-loving friends had no trouble becoming rip-roaring drunk.
Perhaps patriotic holidays are one of those days, like New Year’s (Eve) when the “amateurs” get drunk; the people who otherwise are not terribly likely to do so. The “professionals,” the backbone of Alcoholics Anonymous, probably watch fireworks stone cold sober while smiling at the “amateurs.” Read more on Public Displays of Patriotism…
Filed under Family by on Jul 26th, 2010. 2 Comments.
I can barely remember when getting on a scale meant a “good” thing. It was about the time of age three or four. I was “growing,” so my height got measured every once in a while, too. Putting on weight was “healthy” growth.
The next time I heard the word “healthy” used in that manner was when my husband’s grandmother of blessed memory, who was quite nearly blind, put her hand on my thigh, and slapped and felt it in the way older women are justified to do, and said “I am glad you are a healthy girl.
Some time not long after that first time that putting on weight was good, it changed suddenly and completely. My mother did not see the contradiction that I told her about. I had to clean my plate. That was told me unequivocally everytime I sat down to eat. But when I was weighed, I was getting fat and it was bad. She acted as if she were totally blind to what to me was, even then, a stupid and obvious contradiction. I have since decided that the customs mothers live and pass on come from some mystical realm of logic, and have less to do with anything akin to reason than they do with some sort of mindless revelation validated by repetition and mimicking, probably of her mother, and so on back through an infinity of Jewish mothers. Not that I think this experience is particularly Jewish, or particularly ethnic in any way. If the patients I have seen (as well as the friends I have had) over the years are any indication,such messages about weight in general and the relationship of weight to food are as ubiquitous as air. Read more on Women+Weight+Scales=PANIC!…
Filed under weight by on Jul 23rd, 2010. Comment.