Well, Nat and Steve have some important things to discuss. And then they wander off topic, but in an interesting way. What was it Will Rogers said? "I never met a digression I didn't like." Yeah, something like that.
Thursday, February 25, 2010
Digression: The First
Among my favorite words to live by are:
Time flies like the wind, but fruit flies like bananas.
I see the proposed draft of the DSM V is now considering junking Asperger's Syndrome and hiding it under the general rubric of "mild autism".
I'm not sure either my son nor I like that. As a friend has said, "When you've seen one aspy...you've seen one aspy." Notoriously difficult diagnosis (I've seen grad students come to blows over it--"No, zey have no math skills vatever!!!")
I do know everyone descended from my wife's father has a broad range of symptoms, such a broad range it gives the lie to ever being able to scientifically diagnosis ANY mental disorder other than "undifferentiated schzoiphrenia" though I have met a paranoid schzoiphreniac. He was a lawyer, a truck driver, an airline pilot, and a computer programmer. He claimed to know Perl; I didn't so unless it was Pearl who used to fix my shirts back in the antedilivial south we were not on the same page. Or shirt. Or page fault.
So many of the same symptoms are in so many different diagnoses, it's like going down the rabbit hole, or taking multiple choice tests. Okay, for THIS diagnosis the patient must exhibit 5 of the following 8 symptoms UNLESS ameliorated by childhold sexual abuse by a maternal aunt. "NO, I don't like that one," says (naturally) Aunt Greta. "Vat about sexual abuse by the paternal Aunt? Vat vas her name? Gracie? Ja, much better." Knit one, drop one.
And don't say "Good night, Gracie", just yet. That cigar may have been just a great smoke but it was also a fantastic phallic symbol.
Take my wife's family. Please. Alcoholism, depression, OCD, Tourette's, something that looks like Fragile X but can't be. This is evidently not a Y chromosone inherited complex unless both his X AND his Y chromosone are defective.
Today's digression concerns David Brin's brilliant novel, The Postman.
No, I'm skipping all the symbolism and how it holds us together. That's the obvious stuff (too bad Kevin Costner failed to grasp it). Instead I want to focus on something I call the Peacock effect.
In a classic case of Darwinian evolution gone awry, female peacocks have bred male peacocks that are even more useless than the males of other species. By that, I mean the incredible male peacock tail feathers. They have reached a point where they are now not of any survival value but just the opposite. In a few hundred thousand years, those specatular tail feather displays will vanish as they become more and more counter-survival.
This connects to my digression because I read of several women in The Postman who were essentially taking the opportunivity nature and technology gave then to begin culling from the human race males with undesirable characteristics. I saw this theme also hinted at in Sherri Tepper's The Gate To Women's Country.
Women have it within their ability to breed better people, better men, simply by culling those with whom they mate and reproduce. At this point in our male-dominated history, I think that while this is somewhat cold-hearted sounding, it may be in our species best interest. End hierachial dominance/management systems. Move towards consensus thinking. I've had the please, many times, to work with women managers, and I have had my bad moments with it--getting things started is a complaint--but I like the management style. A lot.
We men have dominated history so much we have completely overlooked a tremendously powerful problem solving method sitting right next to us.
My brother-in-law Mike was 53 when he died in 2005 of a MRSA infection. Often pronounced MERSA, the acronym stands for Methycillin Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus. But don't worry about what the acronym stands for. Worry because MRSA is one of the so-called super bugs that have been bred by overuse of antibiotic medications, particularly the most powerful ones, in the treatment of inappropriate diseases, like colds or the flu, where antibiotics are useless in the first place, or where the super-antibiotics were used first, thanks to Bug Pharma's pushing of them, instead of simpler, older, and still effective antibiotics.
Mike's story is particularly sad. He had asthma most of his life--he got discharged from the Navy because of it. The last couple of years of his life he had no regular job; he had worked for the IRS and got dismissed over some disciplinary issue no one in his family knew the details to. The word always was it was in the lawyer's hands. Meanwhile, he worked, under the table, as a bartender, and treated his asthma with other sufferers unfinished inhalers, the ones they had left over when they got new ones. Someone even gave him a nebulizer.
But one of those friends gave him an inhaler infected with MRSA (over 30% of the population are a symptomatic carriers--you're okay unless it gets into your blood). So when Mike started to wheeze one night he grabbed this inhaler and started blasting MRSA directly into his lungs and heart, tissue that is particularly vulnerable to the bacteria. Of course, each whiff made things worse but he had no way of knowing that and kept using the fatal inhaler. At some point he realized he was in serious trouble and called a friend to take him to the county hospital.
But by the time they got there, Mike was effectively brain-dead. Certainly beyond any hope of saving.
Which leads me to my somewhat less fatal encounter with MRSA or a close relative…but I digress.
My son's psychiatrist is putting him on Invega Sustenna. You may have heard of it, though today was my first encounter with it.
Life with Paul has gotten to be intolerable, with constant outbreaks of anger and yelling, tension levels beyond imaging. This comes on top of the loss of my job and medical insurance and a vast reduction in income, which Paul blames all on me. We had a first rate afternoon today. between me taking him to the psychiatrist and then an extended trip to WalMart to stock up on groceries before the next round of bad weather (predicted: 2-4 inches of snow overnight).
It's been clear from conversations with him that his mind is seriously disordered if not outright schizophrenic. He talks constantly all about very esoteric religious things, like the Cabal, the Illuminati, the FreeMasons, Ancient Egyptian and Roman and Greek practices, the sort of stuff I learned from watching the street life in downtown Portland to associate with paranoid schizophrenia. When I took him to the doctor today I had a folder full of the strangest mishmash of metaphysical mumbo-jumbo I've ever seen, stuff he's printed in the last few days and chanted at me nonstop for days. And you know me and my eclectic interests--from astrology and astronomy to zen and quantuum mechanics.
Except my stuff makes sense or I dump it. He's just the opposite.
Today when I found out about the new medication it was like getting my life back. A handful of times in my life I've been in crises so deep I really doubted my sanity. And then Something would happen. The truth would emerge and I would find my hold on reality was solid after all. These weren't moments of extreme joy, just relief, usually accompanied with tears.
We have a unique relationship with this office. We each have our own therapist and one doctor. It's unorthhodox but works for us, both here and in Orlando before this. Today after coming home and wanting nothing more than to kill Paul I called my therapist, Kris. Kris Strong. Really. And she is. She was the one who finally told me about the Invega Sustenna and what it was about, and seemed genuinely shocked I had no idea Paul was in the depths of some Manic Psychosis or schizophrenic break with reality. I ended up crying for a long time, thanking her endlessly for letting me in on the Secret. She thought I was kidding at first, being sarcastic. But nothing could have been further from the truth.
This medication looks and sounds a lot like halperidol. Paul was on a round of treatment with that when he was about 11 and did incredibily well. I've always wondered why they took him off it. Side effects were my guess, but that was three cities ago, and I know I'll never know.
Now I wonder what I should tell other parents in this geneological zoo of a family. Because there is no question there's a genetic component to this--too many generations affected, too many individuals damaged. Even those, like me, otherwise unaffected, unafflicted.
I believe Cary Grant had to continually remind himself of that all through "Mr. Lucky". Besides I think it came naturally to him.
ReplyDeleteI see the proposed draft of the DSM V is now considering junking Asperger's Syndrome and hiding it under the general rubric of "mild autism".
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure either my son nor I like that. As a friend has said, "When you've seen one aspy...you've seen one aspy." Notoriously difficult diagnosis (I've seen grad students come to blows over it--"No, zey have no math skills vatever!!!")
I do know everyone descended from my wife's father has a broad range of symptoms, such a broad range it gives the lie to ever being able to scientifically diagnosis ANY mental disorder other than "undifferentiated schzoiphrenia" though I have met a paranoid schzoiphreniac. He was a lawyer, a truck driver, an airline pilot, and a computer programmer. He claimed to know Perl; I didn't so unless it was Pearl who used to fix my shirts back in the antedilivial south we were not on the same page. Or shirt. Or page fault.
So many of the same symptoms are in so many different diagnoses, it's like going down the rabbit hole, or taking multiple choice tests. Okay, for THIS diagnosis the patient must exhibit 5 of the following 8 symptoms UNLESS ameliorated by childhold sexual abuse by a maternal aunt. "NO, I don't like that one," says (naturally) Aunt Greta. "Vat about sexual abuse by the paternal Aunt? Vat vas her name? Gracie? Ja, much better." Knit one, drop one.
And don't say "Good night, Gracie", just yet. That cigar may have been just a great smoke but it was also a fantastic phallic symbol.
Take my wife's family. Please. Alcoholism, depression, OCD, Tourette's, something that looks like Fragile X but can't be. This is evidently not a Y chromosone inherited complex unless both his X AND his Y chromosone are defective.
But...I digress.
Today's digression concerns David Brin's brilliant novel, The Postman.
ReplyDeleteNo, I'm skipping all the symbolism and how it holds us together. That's the obvious stuff (too bad Kevin Costner failed to grasp it). Instead I want to focus on something I call the Peacock effect.
In a classic case of Darwinian evolution gone awry, female peacocks have bred male peacocks that are even more useless than the males of other species. By that, I mean the incredible male peacock tail feathers. They have reached a point where they are now not of any survival value but just the opposite. In a few hundred thousand years, those specatular tail feather displays will vanish as they become more and more counter-survival.
This connects to my digression because I read of several women in The Postman who were essentially taking the opportunivity nature and technology gave then to begin culling from the human race males with undesirable characteristics. I saw this theme also hinted at in Sherri Tepper's The Gate To Women's Country.
Women have it within their ability to breed better people, better men, simply by culling those with whom they mate and reproduce. At this point in our male-dominated history, I think that while this is somewhat cold-hearted sounding, it may be in our species best interest. End hierachial dominance/management systems. Move towards consensus thinking. I've had the please, many times, to work with women managers, and I have had my bad moments with it--getting things started is a complaint--but I like the management style. A lot.
We men have dominated history so much we have completely overlooked a tremendously powerful problem solving method sitting right next to us.
But...I digress.
My brother-in-law Mike was 53 when he died in 2005 of a MRSA infection. Often pronounced MERSA, the acronym stands for Methycillin Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus. But don't worry about what the acronym stands for. Worry because MRSA is one of the so-called super bugs that have been bred by overuse of antibiotic medications, particularly the most powerful ones, in the treatment of inappropriate diseases, like colds or the flu, where antibiotics are useless in the first place, or where the super-antibiotics were used first, thanks to Bug Pharma's pushing of them, instead of simpler, older, and still effective antibiotics.
ReplyDeleteMike's story is particularly sad. He had asthma most of his life--he got discharged from the Navy because of it. The last couple of years of his life he had no regular job; he had worked for the IRS and got dismissed over some disciplinary issue no one in his family knew the details to. The word always was it was in the lawyer's hands. Meanwhile, he worked, under the table, as a bartender, and treated his asthma with other sufferers unfinished inhalers, the ones they had left over when they got new ones. Someone even gave him a nebulizer.
But one of those friends gave him an inhaler infected with MRSA (over 30% of the population are a symptomatic carriers--you're okay unless it gets into your blood). So when Mike started to wheeze one night he grabbed this inhaler and started blasting MRSA directly into his lungs and heart, tissue that is particularly vulnerable to the bacteria. Of course, each whiff made things worse but he had no way of knowing that and kept using the fatal inhaler. At some point he realized he was in serious trouble and called a friend to take him to the county hospital.
But by the time they got there, Mike was effectively brain-dead. Certainly beyond any hope of saving.
Which leads me to my somewhat less fatal encounter with MRSA or a close relative…but I digress.
My son's psychiatrist is putting him on Invega Sustenna. You may have heard of it, though today was my first encounter with it.
ReplyDeleteLife with Paul has gotten to be intolerable, with constant outbreaks of anger and yelling, tension levels beyond imaging. This comes on top of the loss of my job and medical insurance and a vast reduction in income, which Paul blames all on me. We had a first rate afternoon today. between me taking him to the psychiatrist and then an extended trip to WalMart to stock up on groceries before the next round of bad weather (predicted: 2-4 inches of snow overnight).
It's been clear from conversations with him that his mind is seriously disordered if not outright schizophrenic. He talks constantly all about very esoteric religious things, like the Cabal, the Illuminati, the FreeMasons, Ancient Egyptian and Roman and Greek practices, the sort of stuff I learned from watching the street life in downtown Portland to associate with paranoid schizophrenia. When I took him to the doctor today I had a folder full of the strangest mishmash of metaphysical mumbo-jumbo I've ever seen, stuff he's printed in the last few days and chanted at me nonstop for days. And you know me and my eclectic interests--from astrology and astronomy to zen and quantuum mechanics.
Except my stuff makes sense or I dump it. He's just the opposite.
Today when I found out about the new medication it was like getting my life back. A handful of times in my life I've been in crises so deep I really doubted my sanity. And then Something would happen. The truth would emerge and I would find my hold on reality was solid after all. These weren't moments of extreme joy, just relief, usually accompanied with tears.
We have a unique relationship with this office. We each have our own therapist and one doctor. It's unorthhodox but works for us, both here and in Orlando before this. Today after coming home and wanting nothing more than to kill Paul I called my therapist, Kris. Kris Strong. Really. And she is. She was the one who finally told me about the Invega Sustenna and what it was about, and seemed genuinely shocked I had no idea Paul was in the depths of some Manic Psychosis or schizophrenic break with reality. I ended up crying for a long time, thanking her endlessly for letting me in on the Secret. She thought I was kidding at first, being sarcastic. But nothing could have been further from the truth.
This medication looks and sounds a lot like halperidol. Paul was on a round of treatment with that when he was about 11 and did incredibily well. I've always wondered why they took him off it. Side effects were my guess, but that was three cities ago, and I know I'll never know.
Now I wonder what I should tell other parents in this geneological zoo of a family. Because there is no question there's a genetic component to this--too many generations affected, too many individuals damaged. Even those, like me, otherwise unaffected, unafflicted.