Thus it came to pass that when I had my recent appendix situation, I visited a doctor I’d never met before. I liked him a lot; he was very personable and funny, and he explained the purpose and intent behind the different pokes and prods that went into his diagnosis. More importantly, he correctly identified my appendicitis quickly and was very clear that I had to go to the ER right away. While I think it would be a stretch to say that he saved my life with his astute diagnosis, he certainly helped me get the situation under control quickly and with a minimum of hassle and discomfort.

The only reservation I had about him came from his business card, which I grabbed from his office on the way out to the ER, in case the doctors there needed to know his name. After getting home from the hospital, I came across it in my jacket pocket, and noticed that under his name was the word “Homeopath”. I was shocked; he had seemed like a real doctor! He worked in an office building, had two receptionists and took my temperature with a digital thermometer. I didn’t really know what was going on, so I decided not to veto him on such a small thing, but rather discuss it with him the next time I was in to see him.

Which brings us up to the present. My knee’s been hurting lately, so I went to see him yesterday afternoon to have him look at it. While waiting in the front office, I took a look at his business cards, mainly to remind myself if they said “homeopath” or “homeopathy”, and was amazed to see that they said “family practice”. I wasn’t sure what to think, so when the time came I tried to approach the situation with as little bias as possible; I told him about the two business cards and simply expressed my confusion. He explained that he has two business cards, and that he must have accidentally given me the homeopathy one on my previous visit. My worst fears realized, I gritted my metaphorical teeth and asked him, with all innocence, what he could tell me about the subject.

The torrent of ridiculous codswallop that emerged from this man’s mouth was spectacular. He talked at me for over a half hour, telling me how exciting and special homeopathy was and how much he loved it. He told me about one patient who had chronic pain she described as “constricting”, for which he prescribed a preparation of python, neglecting to mention which part of the snake was used. Another patient had anxiety which she described as an “oval bug” attacking her with its legs and who complained of recurring dreams of her family dying in a house fire. For this he prescribed a preparation of “Coccinella Septempunctata”, or ladybug. (“Ladybg, ladybug, fly away home…”) Finally he told me about a schizophrenic patient he treated with a preparation of cannabis, because the patient described a fear of being separated from the universe and a sense of slow time.

I wish I was making this up. I wish I was creative enough to even be capable of making this up! His procedure seems to be to simply ask patients vague questions until they give him answers sufficiently specific to allow him to tie it back somehow to some kind of homeopathic preparation. Since he does this work at a naturopathic clinic (not, thankfully, from his “real doctor” office which I was visiting), his patients come predisposed to believe his rationales and the placebo effect makes many of them exhibit signs of a cure. Combined this with a healthy dose of confirmation bias and it makes the doctor feel like it’s something that really works. I eventually had to ask him for the name of a book just to get him to shut up.

So, long story short, I still need to find a regular doctor. Hopefully I’ll get lucky soon.

Oh, and for those who care, the problem with my knee is that I hyperextended either my right gastrocnemius. It probably happened when I was using a dangerously incompetent shoveling technique while digging a hole in my backyard. I’ve been icing it; it’s feeling a lot better.

Wednesday, January 27th — I wake up in the morning with an odd pain in my side. I think at first that it’s a pulled muscle, but it doesn’t act that way. I decide to wait and see what’s up.

Friday, January 29th:

1:45 — The pain is still there, it’s definitely not muscular. I decide a doctor should probably take a look at it, so I call to make an appointment. I’d assumed it’d be for sometime on Monday, but they’d just had a cancellation, so I drive right over.

2:30 — I see the doctor, who is now a general practitioner but had for many years before been an ER doctor. Long story short, he tells me it’s 50/50 that it’s appendicitis. He said that if he’d seen me in an ER, he wouldn’t let me leave without a blood test and CAT scan. Since it was late Friday afternoon, he didn’t feel he could get me those tests quickly enough in his facility, so he sent me over to the local hospital.

3:00 — The body shop where I was having my car worked on, calls to let me know that my car will be ready at 4. Since I know that, even if I don’t have appendicitis, I’ll be in the ER all night long and I’ll be stuck with my crappy rental car over the whole weekend. So I head back to work to tie up a few loose ends and wait for the car.

4:00 — I pick up my car and head to the ER.

4:15 — I go back to the body shop to give them my rental car keys, which I’d forgotten.

4:30 — Arrive at the ER, am triaged, and wait for admission. I call Marika to let her know what’s going on.

6:00 — I’m admitted and shortly later Marika arrives. The staff at Evergreen is very efficient. Within an hour I have an IV in, they’ve drawn blood and have taken a CAT scan. The radiology tech turns out to be a friend of Marika’s, so she helps expedite the process. She’s also really funny and made the whole process go very well.

7:30 — My doctor comes in and confirms that I do, indeed have appendicitis. He says my white count is not much higher than normal, so it probably hasn’t ruptured, but they are going to remove it immediately in any case.

8:00 — I’m taken to the OR and sedated. I remember asking the anesthesiologist if he thinks that I can make it to “4″ at the part where you count down from ten. He doesn’t think it’s funny. I, unfortunately, do not remember much after then, so I’ll never know how far I got.

9:30 — I wake up in post-op. The surgery was a success, I’m cured, hurrah. The rest of the story is just recovery and is not very interesting, apart from one anecdote:

It’s around 2 on Saturday morning and the night nurse has again awakened me to take my vitals. My temperature is 39 °C and she says that I have a slight fever. After she leaves, I start to wonder what 39 °C is in °F and since I can’t get back to sleep, I decide to work it out. I end up with 63.2, a number that certainly isn’t a fever and, were it correct, would have occasioned (I hope) significantly more concern on the part of the nurse.

It wasn’t until the next morning that I realized my mistake — I’d thought, in my drug-induced haze, that the freezing point of water in °F was -32, not 32. So my math was as follows:

°F = (39 * (212 + 32) / 100) – 32 = 63.2

But it should have been:

°F = (39 * (212 – 32) / 100) + 32 = 102.2

Which is indeed a slight fever and probably the reason I got a second course of IV anitbiotics around 4am. My temp is at 98.7 right now, so don’t worry. I’m feeling fine.

As a gamer and a computer programmer, I generally find that I’m good at puzzle solving and at imposing order on disorderly situations. But this wasn’t a puzzle to me; it was a complete breakdown of my expectations for how roads fundamentally work. It was like as if the road suddenly went straight up the side of a building; I had no idea what to do. I knew which road I wanted to leave on, but I simply couldn’t figure out how to get there; did I drive straight across? Did I go around the edge? Was there some serpentine path that would be best? I felt like if I did the wrong thing, some SUV would come barreling in from another street and t-bone me into next Tuesday.

I think the essential thing here is that driving is dangerous, and to protect ourselves, we regiment it as much as possible. There are very few places that I drive where lanes aren’t clearly demarcated, turning orders aren’t well-defined and all you have to worry about it not rear-ending the guy in front of you and taking your turns at the right time. Once all of that was taken away from me, even though I was the only moving car in sight, I was paralyzed. I think it’s similar to the confusion people feel when moving from a right-side-of-the-road country to a left-side-of-the-road country, or vice versa.

I understand there are people who drive around in fields and other unmarked area all the time and they don’t have any problems, but that’s not me. Those folks are probably the ones who are always burning through a light just after it turns red anyways. I hate those guys.

In other news of yesterday, I accidentally bought two christian rock CDs in uncorrelated events.

In the past I’ve pooh-poohed these kinds of devices, but now that I actually have one, I really like it. I might even start putting some movies on there to watch on the bus. Earlier today I was reading over lunch and came across a word I didn’t know. The book described some people’s amazement at discovering that their friend had two omphalos instead of the usual one. If I hadn’t been able to look that word up online with my phone, I would have accepted only the face value of that joke and not gotten the real humor.

Verdict: well worth the money. Also I can play solitaire on it.

I, of course, had to have it. And I did, much to the waitress’s surprise and Marika’s chagrin. It was really good, although pairing a lollipop with pancakes, as it turns out, isn’t a great idea.

This is not the kind of thing I expect to encounter in a furniture store. Also, they were out of the thing I went there to buy. I’m going to go back next week, but not on Tuesday.

This is where the trouble starts; I can’t think of how to describe this guy. I think I tend to focus on details about people rather than their overall look, and all I could think of about him were that his fingernails were very dirty, he had a huge piece of dead skin hanging off his lower lip, and he seemed very stoned. While these were all accurate statements, it’s not the kind of way you want to identify someone you don’t know to one of his co-workers.

In panic, I looked around the store, hoping I could just point him out, but he was nowhere to be seen. Finally I stammered, “He was – he was wearing a sweater.” This didn’t help much, and we both looked around the store for a while, but to no avail. Then he asked me, “Did he have curly hair?” “Yes!” I replied excitedly, although in truth I had no idea as to the nature of the hair in question, it seemed a reasonable answer. He walked off to a door marked “Employees Only” and stuck his head in. A moment later he backed out of the room and behind him was the man who had helped me earlier — with curly hair! He wasn’t wearing a sweater though; it was one of those fleece vests, over a t-shirt. However, nobody said anything, my credit was applied and all was well.

I got the DVD for Fishing with John which is wonderful and I encourage you all to pick it up.

First, I thought to expand the reaction to elsewhere in my body:

“I want to be so strong that when I sneeze, I break my own leg!”

Then, to elsewhere in space:

“…so strong that when I sneeze, I break somebody else’s ribs!”

Then, there’s the scatological example:

“…when I fart, I break my pelvis!”

And finally, the combination:

“..when I fart, I break somebody else’s arm!”

What do y’all think? Which one is funniest?