Ornoth

I’ve always been a little – sometimes a lot – older than the friends I hang around with. So I figure some folks might be wondering how it’s going following my recent stroke… What it’s like to live with the realization that a portion of my brain is, literally, dead.

The most pertinent fact is that my stroke is over. Actually, it was probably over by the time the EMTs showed up, but then there was the whole diagnosis and treatment protocol and investigation and followup plan. But now, six weeks later, that episode is as much a piece of history as my first driving test.

Physically, I’d like to say that I have no lingering aftereffects. Sensation returned to my left hand over the first 48 hours, and that numbness had been the only significant aftereffect.

The psychological impact was more lasting, manifesting in several flavors that’ll fill the balance of this blogpo.

Betrayal

Easily the most prominent emotion has been the feeling that I was betrayed by my body. For sixty years, I knew in my bones that my body could thrive and succeed no matter what outrageous demands I placed on it. Eating like a 14 year old? No problem. Bike 150 miles in a single day? Piece of cake! Going out drinking and nightclubbing until 4am and getting up at 6am to facilitate meetings with Fortune 500 clients? Easy-peasy! Work 80 to 120 hours per week for nine months straight on a death march project? BTDT.

But completely out of the blue one morning, the body I’ve relied upon all my life suddenly betrayed me, with no warning, while doing nothing more strenuous than walking down a staircase, something I do dozens of times every day.

I can’t tell you how much of a shock that was. I’ve been through the classic responses: anger, grief, bargaining. The only one I missed was denial, because it just wasn’t possible to ignore.

Mistrust

Trust, once broken, is difficult to restore.

Even after the hospital sent me home, I didn’t feel that I could just go back to a normal life. Even though that episode was over, I didn’t trust that I wasn’t still in imminent danger. I still felt that I had to stay vigilant, on guard against anything that might come up, even though I know that I’m not in full or direct control of my body’s health. Once bitten, twice shy.

Hyper-awareness

Because of that, I’ve been hyper-aware of every little niggle that arises… and in a 61 year old body, there are plenty of them.

I have developed some neuropathy in my feet, and any time a body part “falls asleep” sets off stroke alarms in my head. And that pain in my armpit: could that be a lymphoma? The stitch in my side kinda feels like a kidney stone, or maybe diverticulitis. The pain in the opposite side is probably pancreatic cancer, or maybe just liver failure. And my chest pains might be a symptom of atrial fibrillation, which is a huge risk factor for stroke.

I’m not normally prone to hypochondria, but nor am I used to waking up one morning and having a stroke. Even after consulting my physician, I can’t say for certain whether all these maladies are complete fiction, or real but minor discomforts, or something far worse.

Fear

What does the future hold? How much longer will I live? The truth is that I have almost no information and very limited influence.

That’s hard. It’s a cause for anxiety, uncertainty, and unease. In a word: fear. Raw existential dread. Not something I’ve ever had to face directly, so it’s one of those unpleasant “learning experiences”.

During the day, there’s enough stuff going on to distract me from all this, but the fears are more insistent at night. Keeping one’s imagination in check is a full-time job!

Living a normal life in this midst of all this is not easy! But then, what’s the alternative?

Fortunately, every morning I get up and notice that I don’t appear to be fatally ill. And after six weeks of evidence to the contrary, my worst fears have weakened to the point where life has started to feel normal again.

Coping

What helps? Good question.

Has my longstanding meditation practice helped? Somewhat. Meditation taught me how to distinguish between skillful thoughts and unskillful thoughts as they arise; that I don’t need to give full credence to everything a fearful mind envisions; and how to short-circuit the mental proliferation that can fuel unnecessary fear about the future. It also allows me to see that my moods and emotions are intensely charged interpretations of one possible future – not reality itself – and that they are essentially both transitory and empty of real substance.

That doesn’t mean that I’m able to dispel all my fears, especially in the dark, lonely silence of a late night, with nothing to think about other than my body, its ephemeral nature, and its treacherous sensations.

The thing that seems to help most is the simple passage of time. As I mentioned above, day after day, the worst case scenario doesn’t seem to happen. And that data has slowly piled up into an irrefutable conclusion that I seem to be mostly okay, at least in this moment.

Not that I feel like I can trust that just yet. But it does seem more and more plausible as each day goes by.

Conclusion

I am subject to aging. I am subject to sickness. I am subject to death.

These irrefutable truths are hard to face, and they’re a rude awakening that every one of us will have to come to terms with, at a time and in a manner we do not control. And this society does a shitty job preparing people for this immense challenge.

I’ve had a conceptual understanding of these truths since my sister died following a stroke fifty years ago. In my life, they’ve been reminders of the preciousness of life. Now they’re more omens about the precariousness of life. My life. My very finite life.

I haven’t posted anything about the Covid-19 pandemic other than one brief update at its onset. Now that our lockdown has spanned a full year, I should probably document how it’s been.

Our active social life

Although it’s not as if I haven’t written about it… When the virus was two months old, I had an update ready to publish; but with the pandemic story continuing to evolve each week, we never reached a good point to stop and summarize.

Six months in, I revisited that draft and added a framing story, showing how our lives had evolved from pre-Covid, to onset, and then to longer-term steady-state. But that too never saw the light of day.

Now it’s been a year, and I still don’t feel I can do the subject justice. On one hand, what little I have to say seems like the mundane, everyday trivialities of spending a year as a shut-in.

On the other hand, it’s difficult to put the stress and unease into words that convey what it’s been like, knowing that outside our 1,200-square-foot apartment a quarter billion people have contracted this novel, insidious disease, leaving 3 million people dead in its still-reverberating wake.

So let me guide you through a year of life under the pandemic, chronologically, step by step. I apologize in advance for any repetitiveness.

For the full experience, you might choose to begin with my initial March 2020 blogpost entitled “Miles Away From Ordinary,” which describes our outlook at the time of the initial lockdown.

Two months later, in mid-May 2000, I wrote the following:

We’re now ten weeks into our Coronavirus quarantine. How has it gone?

Over two months, I’ve gone outside for one grocery run, three long walks, three short walks, and that’s about it. Outdoor cycling hasn’t happened at all, save for one brief excursion to observe the Ride of Silence. We haven’t picked up restaurant food or had any delivered. I’ve had to defer my plan to recreate my family’s spaghetti sauce due to ingredient shortages and lack of freezer space, but have happily added burritos to my cooking repertoire.

After taking a 10 percent hit to my net worth, I’m about 50% recovered financially. I’m surprised that the stock market bounced back so readily and hasn’t re-tested its March lows. Aside from stocks, I’ve happily got a couple CDs earning a healthy 2.2% and 2.8% that don’t mature for another year; a rare victory over interest rates which have dropped to zero.

Given the widespread economic damage done during the lockdown, I fully expect more pain to come, and a drawn-out recovery, with some sectors (e.g. retail, restaurants, live sports & entertainment, travel & tourism) having to make radical changes before consumers will return.

There’s growing calls to end the lockdown and allow businesses to open, which doesn’t make any sense to me. Two thousand Americans are dying every day due to Covid-19. The virus has killed more Americans in the past two months than all U.S. casualties in the entire Vietnam War. And the death toll is projected to increase to 3,000 Americans per day by June.

Everyone is relieved that we have managed to “flatten the curve”, ensuring that peak simultaneous cases don’t overwhelm our medical capacity and giving researchers time to work on a vaccine. But no one seems to have picked up that flattening the curve also means extending its duration, lengthening the period of time it might take for the overall population to become exposed to the virus and develop herd immunity.

The basic scenario hasn’t changed one bit in the past two months. There are more than a million carriers walking around our country — with thirty thousand more infected every day — and those are only the ones with obvious symptoms! We still have no treatment and are months-to-years away from a preventative vaccine, and we’re only testing a microscopic subset of the population. We have no idea whether individuals who survive gain future immunity to Covid-19, but there's anecdotal evidence that people can indeed become re-infected.

Yet people seem to think the danger has passed and we should relax the restrictions that have successfully limited the virus’ spread so far. I don’t care if you’re dipping into your savings or feeling “quarantine fatigue”; why did we order people to stay at home in the first place if we’re just going to turn around and rescind that order at the precise moment when the infection rate and death count are both at their peak?

To those protesting against our nation’s efforts to reduce the impact of the pandemic, I say: Every generation of Americans has had to make sacrifices to defend this country; but today’s prima donna “patriots” are so soft and self-absorbed that they can't even handle being asked to go home and sit tight for a few weeks. To those clamoring for bars and restaurants to re-open I say: you people are shortsighted, selfish, and pathetic.

Irrespective of what our government advises, I plan on being extremely conservative in resuming normal life. I’m not itching to hit the local restaurants, visit friends and relatives, see any shows, or travel. While I miss biking outdoors, I don’t want to ride anywhere near other people, especially anyone who hasn’t taken the danger seriously.

My goal, more than anything, is to avoid this virus as long as I can, in hopes that eventually progress will be made toward detection, treatment, and prevention. But that hasn’t happened yet, and I’m not willing to wager my life that the danger has passed, especially when evidence clearly shows quite the opposite.

As you can see, I was pretty skeptical about our American exceptionalism right from the start. Back in the early days when grocery stores couldn’t stock toilet paper, ginger, baking flour, or yeast, and when meat purchases were rationed.

That was in mid-May. Time passed, but the six-month anniversary of the outbreak prompted me to revisit the topic. So I wrote the following fragment in late August and early September:

In May I wrote — but never shared — a little blogpo about how things were going two months into the Covid-19 lockdown. Now here we are six months into a pandemic, and the situation has evolved slowly. Perhaps now it’s time to actually share my thoughts, before the whole episode blows over and is forgotten.

The initial phase went pretty well for the most part. Being fully locked down actually wasn’t a huge change from our normal winter lifestyle. Inna stopped her already-rare visits to her downtown office, restaurant food was declared off-limits, and our grocery trips became less frequent, meticulously planned, and considerably more expensive. I added burritos to my cooking repertoire.

Our social lives have been limited to a tiny number of masked porch visits with friends. The two local meditation groups I sometimes lead both went online, and my former Kalyana Mitta (spiritual friends) group from Boston — who are now spread all across the United States — reconstituted itself on Zoom.

Through the end of May, cycling was 98% indoors, but I got outside more over the summer, though only for short rides. With all my cycling events cancelled, I’ve mimicked most of them indoors, on Zwift. You can read all the details about how that’s gone on my cycling blog. And I even registered as a virtual rider on this year’s Pan-Mass Challenge!

Financially, we’ve been fine. Inna’s job remains secure. Savings and investments took an initial 10% hit, but have more than fully recovered. With interest rates pegged at zero, I’m very happy to have a chunk of cash earning 2-3% in CDs; but I’ll need to figure out what to do next spring when they mature.

By then my lack of faith in Americans was fully proven out, leaving no need to make further dire predictions. I was mostly occupied with Inna and my domestic situation, which had reached a sustained level of quote-normalcy-closequote.

Which brings us to March 2021, the anniversary of our Covid-19 lockdown. What is there to say now?

Winter was hard. No social contact with anyone. No outdoor cycling at all, not even occasional walks. Just a solid five months of staring at these same unchanging apartment walls.

As if the pandemic itself weren’t enough to deal with, 2020 also brought us the murder of George Floyd and subsequent Black Lives Matter protests and rioting, severe Australian bushfires, Prince Harry renounced membership in the British royal family, there was the sudden appearance of murder hornets, the horrific Beirut explosion, an economic war with China, Brexit finally happened, a major Russian cyberattack, oil prices crashed and actually went negative, the stock market pulled back, fanatical right-wing lockdown protestors stormed the Michigan state capitol, and the historic Aricebo radio telescope collapsed. Oh, and notable deaths included Kobe Bryant, Little Richard, Alex Trebek, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, and John Lewis.

American “exceptionalism” was on full display. Over the winter holidays, infections soared and the body counts rose to 3,000… then 4,000… then 5,000 per day (and 880,000 per day globally). And still people disregarded pleas to wear face masks in public and called for businesses and schools to re-open.

The sitting President of the United States was impeached for asking the Ukraine to investigate his opponent, then got Covid himself, and had protestors at a church teargassed so he could pose for a photo op, blasphemously holding a Bible.

America’s Presidential election was pathetic and terrifying. We had the most divisive, violent election in 50 years, followed by open insurrection and the occupation of the US Capitol by domestic terrorists incited by an openly lying lame duck President in direct violation of his Constitutional oath. But despite all this, he was vociferously defended by his morally bankrupt political party. My country: the shitshow.

Following the overdue removal of our virus- and election-results denying “leader,” we are finally producing one conventional and two novel messenger RNA vaccines which are presumably extremely effective. We’re still in the early days of distribution, but people are getting inoculated, which is the thread of hope that we’ve all been clinging to since this ordeal began.

So after a long, hard, dreary, stressful winter, the impending return of spring comes with some long-awaited, tender shoots of hope.

Inna will be fully vaccinated this month. Unfortunately I'll have a much longer wait, because I don’t meet any special age, co-morbidity, or career role qualifications.

And the weather should start permitting properly-masked and -distanced social contact, as well as solo outdoor cycling... although don’t ask about my bike and the continuing complete unavailability of both new and replacement parts!

So there’s a little bit of hope that this spring we might be turning the corner. It’s still overshadowed by the knowledge that even fully vaccinated it’ll be another year before life gets back to anything “normal”.

It’s still hard to write about. For an entire year, our lives have been reduced to the most mundane, uneventful commonalities, which makes for a pretty boring read.

And it’s still just as hard to articulate the lingering, perpetual stress, discomfort, and unease of living with this pandemic. Getting a haircut or an eye exam and new glasses still seem like remote, almost inconceivable luxuries. And bike parts… well, as I said, don’t get me started about that.

And still, we endure. Be well!

I haven’t made a lot of noise about my mother’s death in January, and I don’t intend that to change. Everyone has their own method of dealing with loss, and I feel that making a big emotional scene is about the least respectful thing I could do in most cases.

I’m also not going to devote any more space in my blog to the hardships of five months away from home, enduring a very much unwanted Maine winter. There’s no need to discuss my role as caregiver during the ups and downs of her hospitalization, my tasks arranging the funeral, dealing with probate, selling her car and furniture, closing her apartment, and wrapping up her finances. I’ll even skip over seeing members of my family and a few long-lost high school friends I caught up with.

I’ll only briefly mention the powerful sense of relief once I had all those things behind me, and how very, very, very good it has been to finally be back home.

It sounds like I’ve ruled out just about everything I could possibly write, thus obviating any need for this post. But no, there is one thing I do want to share, and that’s a handful of laughs. One of that trip’s bigger realizations was how deeply important humor is to me, and its usefulness as a way to cope with even the most stressful times.

Amidst all the difficulties of the past four months, there were a handful of precious smiles worth remembering. Here’s a few.

One morning my brother and I were at her nursing home with my mother when she required emergency transport to the hospital. When the EMTs showed up, I briefed them on her condition, what medication she was on and when she had last taken each, the measures the nursing home had taken in response to her situation, and so forth. I was apparently so organized and on top of the medical lingo that—as I later found out—they actually thought I was the resident doctor!

During her emergency room trips, my brother and I sometimes hung out in the ER’s little kitchen area. Being me, I snooped through their cupboards and was surprised to find a gallon jug of molasses. Wondering what the heck they’d need so much molasses for, I consulted Google and immediately regretted it. Whatever you do, *DO* *NOT* google “emergency room molasses”!

At one point she was in the cardiac unit and a nurse and I were helping her walk. She fainted in our arms, and since the nurse was unable to reach a call button, she slapped a button pinned on her uniform. “CODE YELLOW, CCU ROOM 1! CODE YELLOW, CCU ROOM 1!” blared over the intercom and more than a dozen doctors and nurses ran into the room. Apparently “code yellow” is their shorthand for “patient out of control”, normally used for unruly or violent situations; kind of silly for an unconscious 90 year-old!

She was in and out of the hospital several times, occupying a dozen different rooms. However, after a two week stay in Room 118, her next readmission was coincidentally right back in to the same familiar room.

At one point, a prisoner from some local jail was in for treatment, with a policeman posted outside his room. His family brought a cat in with them for a visit, which is pretty surprising to begin with, in a hospital. But apparently the cat got loose in the middle of the night, resulting in a penitentiary-style lockdown of the ward and all the patient rooms until they recaptured it!

Whenever a newborn was delivered in obstetrics, they played a lullaby tune over the intercom. My mother enjoyed hearing it, although it felt very odd to hear it playing during two of my mother’s worse sessions.

The hospital allows visiting family to raid the small kitchens in the ward, so my brother and I started enjoying free ice creams during our occasional opportunities to step out of her room. I joked that I was doing my part to increase US healthcare costs.

One of the few things my mother would reliably eat was milkshakes, made with two cups of ice cream. So when the floor ran out of ice cream, my brother and I blamed her (even if we’d eaten more than our fair share)!

The doctors also ordered that the staff keep tabs on my mother’s blood sugar levels. We joked that it was because so much of their ice cream had disappeared…

It confused the hell out of me that I couldn’t buy a sugared cola drink anywhere in the entire facility: not on the floors, not in the ER, not in the cafeteria or coffee shop, nor in any of their vending machines. Apparently sugar is strictly verboten! But I couldn’t square that with all the free ice cream stocked on the floors for patients and family!

Ordering lunch one day from “Room Service” (when I worked there as a high school student, it was called “Dietary”), my mother wanted tomato soup. Asked if she wanted a bowl or a cup of soup, mom asked for a bowlful of tomato soup, but in a cup…

Auto-on, motion-detecting faucets… Great for keeping one’s hands sanitary, but a complete disaster when they’re placed in the only open section of countertop in the room. On multiple times someone would move mom’s dinner tray to the counter next to the sink, only to have the faucet helpfully spray the tray, the person, and entire room with water.

Although we came to know most of the hospital staff by name, one day a new nurse came in. Seeing two guests, she asked, “Husband and son, I presume?” Yeah, no. My brother might be aging, but he was still 22 years younger than my mother. I might better understand “Son and grandson”, since there’s nearly a full generation between he and I…

Her treatment included regular doses of morphine, which naturally zonked her out. Even at her worst, just before a new dose she would relate a list of things like medications that the nurse should know about and take care of before she “lost time” due to the effects of the morphine. My mother was always both very organized and very much a take-charge person.

She had been a lifelong nurse, so there were some things in life that were normal for us but which seem strange in retrospect. For example, most kitchens have a pair of tongs for grabbing hot items like baked potato or corn on the cob. We didn’t have that… Mom had several old pairs of stainless steel surgical forceps that she used for cooking!

And finally, the thing I think is ludicrous but which no one else seems to appreciate. Mom would naturally use empty cans or plastic containers to store stuff in. In cleaning out her freezer, I came across a couple plastic tubs that originally held a spread product called “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter!”, which my mother used for storing… (wait for it…) butter! Doh!

These were the kinds of things that kept us on our toes and provided brief moments of much-needed levity during an incredibly stressful time. Looking back, some of them remind me that my mother was a normal person. Normal people have all kinds of quirks and idiosyncrasies, which you discover during the rare times when you have to pore over their belongings in detail.

I can’t say that I’m a big fan of losing a body part that has been with me since birth.

The first time I consciously noted the discomfort in my abdomen was in August, after I finished the Pan-Mass Challenge. I didn’t really pay much attention to it. It came and went, but eventually it became clear that it wasn’t just going to go away. By the end of September, it became prominent enough that I scheduled a visit to the doctor.

After describing my symptoms, the differential diagnosis was gall bladder, which was later confirmed by ultrasound. It made sense that my discomfort presented after the PMC; the gall bladder is involved in the digestion of fat, and PMC weekend typically marks the celebratory end of my training diet, when I finally allow myself to binge on high-fat foods like ice cream and cheese, after avoiding them throughout the spring and summer.

While I waited for a surgery date, the only way to manage my discomfort was to go right back onto a diet that was even lower in fat than my training diet. It was tolerable at first, but very limiting, and as the weeks dragged on, it got pretty damned boring.

Things proceeded pretty slowly. I talked to my GP in September, then a wait for an ultrasound, then a wait for a consult with a surgeon. He told me the surgery would probably happen in three weeks, at the beginning of November. Seven weeks later, November had passed with no surgery appointment and no word from the hospital.

I started a new job on Monday December 1st. That day, I came home and gathered up my paper mail from my mailbox, which included a notice informing me that my surgery was Thursday morning! You would think they would have called to make sure I was in town that day, or at least make some attempt to find a date that worked for me. Nope… Here’s your date, take it or suffer!

You’d think they would give more than 48 hours’ notice, right? Nope… So what if it’s your first week on a new job; if you want relief, you’ll clear your schedule on short notice. Ironically, their instructions included things to be done a week before surgery; I should have consulted a fortune teller, so that I’d have known to do those things five days before I was notified of my appointment!

The big challenge for me was finding someone who would take me home from the hospital. I’d already gathered four friends I hoped I could rely on, but one was out of town, two were unable, and another wasn’t responsive. I was pretty haired out until my friend Roopa agreed to help. Without her kindness, I would have had to cancel the surgery.

The actual surgery went pretty smoothly. While I expected hours of sitting around waiting, someone was usually talking to me, whether it was a prep nurse, an OR nurse, the anesthesiologist, his intern, the surgeon, or his intern. On seeing I was a cyclist (the unique tan markings are present year-round), the prep nurse gave me a memorable pitch for doing the American Diabetes Association’s North Shore Tour de Cure, which she oversees.

Once the appointed time came around, they wheeled me into the OR. By then I was already mildly sedated, but I remember the unique pattern of the lights. When the anesthesiologist put the mask over my face, I decided to count aloud for them, so that they’d know when I was out. I was told to just breathe deeply, and that pretty much was the end of that!

I have very little recollection of the recovery room, save for someone ringing Roopa to come pick me up. They wheeled me out and down to the car, where I lifted my arms in mock victory. Roopa got me home, where my halting gait caused one of the condo staff to ask if I’d been in another bike accident, but I replied, “No, just out of surgery…”

We made it upstairs and I flopped onto my bed. While Roopa very kindly ran down to the corner CVS for meds, I stripped off my jeans and shirt, hopped into PJs, and pretty much passed out. When she returned, we chatted for quite some time before she exercised her option to go home. I slept on and off a bit more.

The first 24 hours were challenging. Hydration and pectin drops were key because my throat had been irritated by intubation.

Being something of a Luddite about pain medication, I skipped the Percocet they prescribed, and didn’t even take any over-the-counter stuff. I’m a cyclist; I’m used to far more intense discomfort!

The worst pain was the dissipation of the CO2 gas they use to distend the abdomen; it irritates the diaphragm, but the signals sneak up that nerve and manifest as really sharp cramping pain inside the shoulder joints. That took a few days to dissipate.

After spending most of the day sedated or asleep, I opted to stay up late, then slept only briefly before waking up again at 4am. But that worked out okay, because I really wasn’t tired and had enough things to keep me entertained.

The surgery had been on Thursday, which worked well. Friday I spent most of the day sitting up at my desk, and was even able to remotely attend a couple work meetings. Each day I got a little bit stronger, tentatively introduced a little bit more food into my healing digestive system, and the pain slowly diminished. On Sunday I showered, shaved, and took the temporary dressings off my four incisions, leaving just some steri-strips. That made me feel a lot more human.

After three solid days of recovery, I headed back to work on Monday. I took the train in to the office and worked a regular day. Tuesday the trains were backed up, which forced me to walk the mile to work. None of this was fun—it challenged my stamina—but it did help me get back to normal functioning.

In the meantime, I experimented adding high-fat foods to my diet. Cookies. Cashews. Donuts. Pizza. A burrito. Fajitas. Lindt chocolates. And Häagen Dazs ice cream! My system took everything in stride, without any of the discomforting “downstream effects” that can accompany gall bladder removal.

Now, twelve days after the surgery, I’ve been cleared to do anything I want, including returning to kyudo and cycling. My sutures still require a little more time to heal, but life has pretty much returned to normal. I seem to be able to eat whatever I want, and I can finally make life plans without worrying about an operation with an unknown date and outcome.

About the only question I have left is how this might alter my on-bike nutrition needs during really long endurance rides. But I’m pretty confident, and eager to find out. But I’ll wait a while longer, letting things heal until springtime makes long rides possible again.

But overall I’m happy to say that I couldn’t have imagined a more successful outcome.

There’s an idea that pervades society that men act like wimps when they get sick. Naturally, this has been advanced and perpetuated by the female lobby, but I think many men generally accept it, as well.

Usually, ideas that are so universal have at least some basis in fact. After all, if only a handful of women thought men were crybabies, that myth wouldn’t engender the universal credence that it does today.

So there’s probably some truth behind the statement that men react more strongly to, say, the common cold than women do.

The question then becomes: why?

Most women would answer by re-stating the presumably obvious fact: because they’re wimps! But is that really the most likely explanation? Is it really plausible that it all boils down to one personality flaw that is shared among all men on the planet, but not a single woman?

Consider an alternative hypothesis. Is it possible that men actually experience cold symptoms differently than women? After all, there are precedents for gender-specific diseases and variations in diseases. Unfortunately, I don’t think anyone has done a study of differences in how the genders experience common illnesses.

Frustratingly, when I mentioned this idea to one of my female friends, the answer was categorical: “No, men are just wimps”. Even in the absence of any data, she refused to admit that it was a possibility that men and women experience colds differently.

That kind of categorical dismissal reminds me of other gender-based physiological issues that were scoffed at for centuries: pre-menstrual syndrome and menopause. After having spent decades trying to get men to recognize and accept the reality of PMS and menopause rather than dismissing them, one would think that women might be more open to the idea that men, too, might have physiological symptoms that differ from their own.

Never mind the fact that calling men wimps also perpetuates the whole “men must be macho and never vulnerable” stereotype that women usually rail against.

But no, women seem perfectly willing to treat men’s symptoms as fiction, just as nineteenth century men did with women’s ailments that today are accepted as medical realities.

Of course, I’m not asserting that men actually *do* experience illnesses more intensely than women. I’m merely saying that since that is such a universal observation, perhaps there’s some physiological basis for the idea that men experience more suffering from colds than women.

My position is that we just don’t know, because no one has done the research. And if you’re not even willing to admit the possibility, then I think you should carefully examine why you feel so strongly about it, in the absence of any objective data to back it up.

So I say to today’s women the same thing I would have said to men who derogated women for PMS and menopause: before you cause harm by mocking your significant other’s symptoms, keep an open mind and consider offering them some compassion and understanding, rather than using their malady as an opportunity to take your “loved” one down a peg.

Because no one has proven that men’s apparent suffering is a purely mental fabrication.

As featured in a story called “Love an Adventure” that I wrote for DargonZine back in 1994, I’ve always felt that an adventure is simply doing something you’ve never done before, no matter how small.

Well, the past 48 hours have provided several such “firsts”… or a lot of adventure, if you care to look at it that way.

Having unquestionably arrived at mid-life, today I had my first diagnostic colonoscopy.

It was the first time I’d even been under any form of anesthesia. That made it more challenging (and more of an adventure) for a control freak like myself, although ultimately it wasn’t as difficult an experience as I’d feared.

It was also the first time I’d even been in the hospital for any kind of actual procedure. I guess I’ve been lucky so far, because my few experiences in hospital have been trips to the ER for minor issues: twice to get a few stitches in my right elbow from bike accidents, once due to a childhood bike accident that left me unconscious, and once recently for a fainting episode where I also lost consciousness.

So as you might imagine, I approached the procedure with some trepidation.

The prep was pretty heinous, consisting of two doses of heinous-tasting and explosive laxative, and nothing but (gallons of) clear liquids for the 48 hours leading up to the blessed event. Picture passing all that liquid in a marathon eight-hour bathroom camp-out. All that left me weak, thoroughly chilled, and with a stomach that sounded like Satan On Steroids.

The procedure itself… Well, it’s pretty brief, and they do give you enough of a sedative to ensure that you’re really out of it.

In the end (pun intended), I survived it. Between the icky medicine, the gallons of water, the hours on the john, the chills and weakness, the lack of eating, the IV, the sedation, and the procedure, it was something of a challenge, but I managed to get through it.

I suppose it doesn’t make very much of a story, but it was a pretty big thing for me to get through. Very glad to finally have it behind me (so to speak).