Category: House MD

A friend and I were chatting earlier this week during the TV show House, and I did a quick math count of the amount of pain medication I have floating around my own house, at the maximum (right after I’ve filled my prescriptions) and what I have on hand currently. I mostly did this to show that the numbers they were discussing on the show weren’t as high as they were implying.

Anyhow, it came up that I really have stopped talking about having and living with a chronic pain problem. I didn’t think this was true until I took the time to look through both journals, and yeah, I guess I have stopped talking about it. I suppose part of it is, really, what do I say? “Woke up this morning. Arm hurts. Got coffee. Dropped yet another mug, because at early’o’clock I can’t seem to remember to use my left arm…” I don’t want to turn myself into a victim, or a pitypoint. Yep, got a chronic pain problem, it’s irritating, it slows me down, next?

It has been implied, however, that this is just a way of holding it in and not dealing with it, or sharing and allowing those friendly towards me to be supportive. I’d argue, but I’ve been told that there are more of them than me, and I’ll lose.

I guess talking about it makes it real, and I don’t really want to make real the fact that things have been rough lately. I had a lot of writing and typing to do in the last week, which has made the general pain worse, and I seem to be having some new symptoms. I’m not certain if it’s related or not, but I’m having dissociation issues, where I can get comfortable, cross my arms or whatever, and a bit later I realize that I have no real sensation of my arms, especially my right one, existing. I can’t feel it under my left fingers, or feel my left arm under my right fingers. On top of that, which always causes a bit of a freak-out when I realize it’s happening, is the pin-pricks of upset nerves. It’s the whole tingling-when-waking-up feeling, racing up and down both arms.

Unfortunately, I suspect this might mean the problem is spreading. However, I am hoping that maybe there’s just some circulation issue going on, separate from the CRPS. I’m going to have my blood glucose checked again, too…

So that’s the health update in a vague nutshell. I’ll try to be a bit better about talking about it, but truth be told, I’m still feeling very self-conscious, knowing people actually read this. There’s the balance of information and privacy that I’m still wrestling with, and so far as the CRPS goes, I’m simply not certain how comfortable I am discussing it on any broad scale. I don’t want people seeing me as anything other than how I portray myself, and it’s hard to not feel like talking about the pain will undermine the portrayal that is out there.

Tonight’s episode of House dealt with the idea of faith healing, something that comes up a lot these days in medical journals. What is the power of prayer? Does faith healing work? Can miracles happen?

I realize it’s a symptom of my interdisciplinary training, and perhaps of being under Phillip’s thumb in particular, but I think a more interesting question is why miracles can’t happen? After all, a miracle is just that which we don’t understand. As has been often remarked, our technically is magic to those who don’t understand how it works, as is often our medicine. The typical example is a cell phone in the rain forest, although I’d argue there’s an awful lot of technology and medicine that might as well be magic for our understanding – there is simply the belief, the faith that it will work, because someone is being told it will work.

How is that so different than hearing a faith healer tell you the same?

Of course, we of the rational, medical type say we have medicine, we can take the time to understand how technology works. But we can’t fully understand how the body works; we keep finding new things, miracles keep being rationalized and understood, filed away into things to learn and knowledge to distill.

If we have learned one thing, it’s that the body is an amazing thing. Who’s to say that the power of the placebo effect, the mind, isn’t enough to help some people? We know, scientifically, medically, that positive thinking does positively affect our health, including to help us recover from illness. Who knows?

We don’t, so it gets filed away as faith healing fakery and fraud. But in ten years, perhaps it will have a Latin name and a textbook. That’s the way knowledge goes, a part of life for both miracle and medicine.