Semper Ubi Sub Ubi

readme:

Spring is here, spring is here, life is skittles and life is beer, I think the loveliest time of the year is the spring, I do, don’t you? Of course you do.

So sayeth the Bard (Tom Lehrer), but it’s been a whole lot like January around here lately, which is to say gray, cold and bleak. Of course, this is Ohio. I’m sure it’s nicer where you are. Unless you’re also in Ohio, in which case, can you fetch me some cat food from the store? That incessant yowling on top of the cold gray bleakness is getting to me.

You know what’s funny? It’s 27 degrees out there, has been for a week, we just got three inches of snow, and the grass is growing. Big green clumps of grass. Take a hike, suckers. This year I’m gonna spray the lawn with Agent Orange and tell everybody Global Pattern Baldness is to blame.

Onward. Gosharootie, lookie there! It’s March, which means that it’s National Multiple Sclerosis Awareness Month. I have recently been informed that March was picked to be MS month because they both begin with “M.” Apparently I shoulda/woulda figured this out on my own were it not for my creeping enfeebleation, which [pausing for breath] I am told I may choose to blame on my very own MS but which is more likely actually due to my addiction to chocolate doughnuts and pizza. Whatever. Anyway, you should all donate to the National Multiple Sclerosis Society because they do real work and fund real research (as opposed to simply “raising awareness”). The official MS color, by the way, is orange, which is kinda yucky and reminiscent of traffic cones, but far enough from pink that they probably won’t get sued.

There are all sorts of theories floating around about MS, and I, predictably, have my own. Not about what causes it, although I’m fairly certain that chocolate doughnuts are innocent and pizza has proven therapeutic benefits. My theory is that MS is actually grossly under-diagnosed, especially among men. I was finally diagnosed about six years ago, but I had gone to doctors starting in my 20s, for pain and cramping in my legs, numbness in my legs and hands, intermittent severe eye pain (and partial blindness on two occasions), dizziness and balance problems, and occasional stabbing, blinding pain in the side of my face (which turned out to be trigeminal neuralgia).

Nobody ever suggested MS, and by “nobody” I mean several highfalutin’ neurologists and neuro-ophthalmologists, along with a procession of doctors and dentists whose usual response was “Beats me. Pay at the desk.” Since all my symptoms came and went, I was more than happy to chalk everything up to random weirdness and limp stoically along. I got very good at concocting reassuring, if somewhat far-fetched, explanations for my problems. My mother once suggested, in my 20s, that the sporadic pain in my legs might be due to my having had rheumatic fever as a child. That sounded so reasonable that I was still believing it six years ago. The punchline to all this is that I had been presenting absolutely classic MS symptoms for all those years, but until a freshly-minted internist suggested MS, I didn’t even know what MS was. I think I used to confuse it with muscular dystrophy. So the moral here is this: If you’re experiencing strange intermittent numbness/cramping/pain in your legs, or sudden loss of vision, you should probably go to a neurologist.

But choose wisely, grasshopper. For instance, while it’s true that most cases of MS are diagnosed among people in their 20s, a diagnosis after 40 is not unusual. Patients, especially men, presenting with primary progressive MS above that age are not, as Columbus Monthly’s “Best Neurologist in Columbus” declared after examining me for ninety seconds, “Rare as hens’ teeth.” (Yes, the idiom is “scarce,” and “rare” implies that some hens do have bicuspids, but I didn’t feel like getting into it.)

He then airily told me I just needed to get more sleep, to which end he suggested that I amend my daily routine and stop drinking coffee at an hour when I would ordinarily still be asleep (apparently I should get up early to not drink coffee), a remarkable suggestion that I feel was worth the price of admission (for which he billed me multiple times after my insurance company had paid him). Serves me right for going to some clown who crows about his “personal style” on his web page. Both the neurologist who eventually diagnosed me with MS and the great folks at the OSU MS Center, who confirmed it, later pointed out that he apparently hadn’t looked very closely at my MRI or other test results. But his hair was perfect. 

It also serves me right because Columbus Monthly is reliably and often hilariously wrong about everything. Their “Best Italian Restaurant” a few years ago turned out to be a decrepit mold-pit in a half-vacant strip mall in eastern Columbus featuring a steam table straight out of a 1950s prison movie, food stains on the walls and a staff so inexplicably hostile that we left before even trying to order. In retrospect, considering the overall atmosphere of the place, I now suspect that the whole operation was just a cover for some sort of illegal funeral parlor.

So, anyway, here’s the March issue. Have fun, send me some questions, dagnabbit, and if the mood strikes you, please consider subscribing. Every month around this time I nervously check my PayPal balance to see if our hosting charges will squeak through on the first of the month, and at the moment that is far from certain. Operators are standing by. Act now!

And now, on with the show…