thyroid returns

The good news: My thyroglobulin levels are down. Way down. They're down so low, that if I weren't taking thyroid medication, I'd be dead right now.

Why is this good news? Because thyroids produce thyroglobulin, and if your thyroid has been removed, thrown out and incinerated, and then what's left is destroyed by radiation, and what's left after that is given over to a plague of locusts, you'd better not have substantial levels of thyroglobulin in your bloodstream, because if you do, that means you still have cancer cells.

And as I pointed out to Evangline, there also were no measurable amounts of Green Globulin or Hobglobulin in my blood. This is good, since I failed to develop the proportional strength, speed and agility of iodine after being bitten by a radioactive iodine this May. The jury is still out on whether I have "iodine sense," as several people have pointed out that I do seem to have the sense of iodine these days.

I'm supposed to return on Jan. 2 for another visit with the endocrinologist, who is counting on me to pay off her remaining loans for med school. The big excitement at that point will be an injection of Thyrogen, a synthetic form of the thyroid stimulation hormone that the pituitary gland produces.

I am unable to think of a decent wisecrack about Thyrogen, despite the way its name reminds me of estrogen. If you can think of one, let me know and I'll use it next time, with appropriate credit.

If for some reason Thyrogen unexpectdly stimulates any measurable thyroid activity, and my thyroglobulin levels jump afterward, I'll get a repeat experience of what happened last time. That mans another round of being unable to keep warm, having a harder time staying awake during the day, and getting phone calls from nonexistent people at six in the morning.

That is unlikely. So let's celebrate the good news in clear conscience. My thyroglobulin levels are down.

half-deaf

As if being diagnosed with bursitis and cancer this year weren't enough, now I have more good news: I'm half deaf.

The hearing loss, which is about 10 percent worse in my left ear, is an indirect result of the cancer surgery two weeks ago. The anesthesia and breathing tube apparently conspired in an effort to give me a sinus infection. That sinus infection has conspired with cleft palate surgery I had as an infant, and now I have fluid in my inner ears and can't hear well at all. To add insult to injury, I had to ask the ear doctor what he had said when he told me I was half-deaf.

In a healthy person, when fluid gathers in the inner ear behind the eardrum, it drains naturally down a part of the ear called a station tube and enters the person's nose, where it's blown out sooner or later. Because my cleft palate required corrective surgery when I was still an infant, the muscles controlling my station tube don't work quite right, and sometimes the tube remains shut, so my ears can't drain. It's a lot like the feeling you get when you're on an airplane and your ears won't pop. (Same principle, different application.)

So the doctor has put me on a new prescription that he hopes will help. If it doesn't, I may need tubes put into my ears for the first time in about 25 years. If it comes to that, with my luck, the doctor will trip and poke me in the eye, leaving me half blind.

still sick

I am so freaking tired of this cold. I have been sick for the past 12 days. It's past the point of fevers and aches, but when Rachel and I were getting ready to go to the supermarket today, I started puking once we got outside the front door and couldn't stop for about five minutes, and we ended up staying inside. I did the same thing tonight about an hour after dinner. My sinuses are clogged, and when they're not clogging, I feel like I'm drowning in a river of phlegm, or I'm coughing one up. It hurts my head, my side, and my throat, and leaves me unable to sleep decently

life in the land of the sick

Having two children in the school system is proving to be more than our immune systems can handle. At the moment, all four of us are under the weather to one extent or another.

Evangeline has it the worst, right now. She missed two days of school last week, and appeared to be better, but she woke up around 4 a.m. last night complaining of a tummyache and having a fever. Natasha gave her some children's Motrin to bring the fever down, but when we checked on her again this morning, around 10, she was hovering at 102.5 degrees again.

I got her into the bath to bring her temperature down, since you're not supposed to use Motrin twice in the same eight-hour period, and got her an appointment at the doctor's at 11:30. The diagnosis was that she apparently has bronchitis. He prescribed a potent cough medicine and an antibiotic, said she shouldn't participate in gym class this week at school, and said he wants to see her again in a week.

And of course, there's still the rest of us. Rachel just has a runny nose right now, but Natasha's also home from work and I've got some sort of chest congestion that sends me into coughing spasms when I lie down to sleep. My ears also feel like they're stuffed with cotton, which is never a good sign. I have an appointment with the doctor's office tomorrow, since they were all booked up today.

Last year, of course, when Rachel was too young for preschool and I was homeschooling Evangeline for kindergarten, we passed the entire fall and winter without any major illnesses. Now that the girls are both in school, we appear to be making up for lost time.

still sick

I wonder if I have walking pneumonia. Dawn Goodwin had that once, down in Haiti, for about three months and never knew until she finally went and got it checked.

I've been sick about a week now. Physically I feel much better, but the amount of phlegm is driving me insane. I ended up having to skip a tremendous business networking opportunity last night because I was feeling awful all afternoon and evening, and ended up throwing up about a football's worth of mucus into the sink. (And isn't that a pleasant image?)

And today, it feels like it's back, but worse. My ears feel like they're stuffed with cotton, and I feel like sometimes I'm coughing so hard that I can't breathe and feel like I'm going to pass out. It's impossible to get to sleep at night, because as soon as I lie down I start coughing so hard the room shakes.

Enough is enough. I'm going to the doctor's on Monday.

down and out

Evangeline, Rachel and I have caught the flu or some other sort of cold that has had us laid up the past few days. yesterday was especially brutal. Evangeline and I developed fevers, with hers reaching 102.5 degrees in part because (I discovered) she wasn't drinking enough. We were sluggish and lethargic all day, and kept taking naps. (I very shamelessly seized the opportunity for a quick siesta while they watched "Lilo and Stitch."

attack of the macrocephalites

I took the girls to the pediatrician on Tuesday. Evangeline needed a chicken pox vaccination before school starts, and Rachel needed a couple vaccinations herself before she can start preschool. That went fairly easily, despite their trepidation over getting shots -- Evangeline had just had four shots the previous week, one of them quite painful, and my attempts to get her in a positive state of mind by having her sing "I want to get a shot / Right in the butt" to the tune of "You Can't Get to Heaven" were ultimately unsuccessful.

I don't remember our last pediatrician doing this, but the nurse on Tuesday took a tape measure and measured the circumference of Rachel's head. When the doctor came in a few minutes later, she had a worried look on her face, and measured Rachel's head again herself.

"Let me guess," I said, "her head is bigger than normal."
"Well, yes," she said.
"In fact, it's off the chart."
"Yes," she said.
"And you're worried that she might have hydroencephalitis," I said.

The doctor started to laugh a little, since this was obviously familiar territory for me. Maybe she had noticed the size of my own head, which has been mistaken in the past for a three-story building.

"Well, hydroencephalitis or other related problems," she said. "Has her head always been large?"

"My wife thinks so," I said. "And she would know best. She calls it the Learn family head, and it is big enough for an entire family. She gets that from her father."

It turns out that Rachel, while she is only in the 25th percentile or so for height, is off the charts for head size. The doctor showed me the standard distribution for head size on children her age, and Rachel was well outside the norm, meaning she looks something like MODOK in the old Captain America comics. Still, as the doctor noted in the exam, Rachel was engaging in healthy imaginative play, responded to complex requests, had tremendous fine and gross motor skills, and was in no way impaired in her language ability.

In other words, she's a macrocephalite -- a fancy way of saying she has a big head, just like her father. Let's just hope she doesn't get the figurative big head that goes with it.

Also, as of Wednesday afternoon, I am one tooth lighter than I used to be. Now I'll agree I need to lose weight, but my mouth is not where I would like to lose it. Still, I had a broken molar and the dentists decided either they couldn't repair it or (I think more likely) my insurance company or their DMO policy said they couldn't repair it because they could just remove it instead, more cheaply. Worst of all, the smegheads wouldn't let me keep the tooth to put under the pillow and get a lousy 25 cents from the tooth fairy.

So now my mouth is lopsided because I have no lower right rear molar, but on the upside, my head is as big as ever.

health care

Check out this story on Common Dreams.

I'm kind of curious to hear people's thoughts on this subject. We have insurance through my employer, but it's not exactly great. It would cost me about $80 to get a prescription filled for the topical ointment I need to treat my psoriasis. Not surprisingly, my psoriasis has gone untreated for some time, even though it covers probably about 25 percent of my back at this point. I have insurance, but I can't afford to use it.

Having a child, incidentally, would cost us about $3,000 before the insurance kicks in. Nice, huh?

I don't think I would favor national health care, on the simple grounds that it likely would make health care a total nightmare. But I have to admit, the direction we're going now doesn't seem much better.

unhealthy speech

The Japanese eat very little fat and suffer fewer heart attacks than the British or Americans.

Contrarily, the French have lots of fat in their diets and also suffer fewer heart attacks than either the British or Americans.

Conclusion: Eat what ever the heck you want. It's speaking English that kills you.

nothing saps the spirits like a summer cold

The worst part of having facial hair is all the mucus that gets caught in my mustache when I'm sick.

One hairy fellow I met back in 1992 complained that catching food there was the worst part of having a beard. With all due respect to Cookie and his greater number of years of experience with facial hair, I have to disagree. Aside from the slice of watermelon that was stuck there for three weeks after a picnic last summer, I've never once had food caught in my beard.

I wish it were the same for other items as well. But every time I've blown my nose the past three days, there have been not-so-subtle trails left behind, and when I've woken up in the morning, the hairs under my nose have been painfully stiff, like the spears of a tiny army on my upper lip, poised to strike the first enemy they encounter.

All that's stopped me from shaving it all off and being rid of the nuisance is the prospect of having to clean my electric razor afterward.

For the past few days I have been as sick as the proverbial dog. It's not as debilitating as the time I had amoebic dysentery, nor as painful as when I had dengue fever, but in the past three days I've coughed so much that my head feels like a tree that's gone two rounds with a lumberjack. My joints ache, my muscles are sore and even my toenails feel too tight.

Nothing saps the spirits like a summer cold. This one has left me ill-tempered, out of sorts and delirious. I've slept later and for longer hours, and even when I'm not asleep, I just lie around and generally am unproductive. (Once I figure out how all this differs from when I'm healthy, I'll let you know.)

And yet, despite the incongruity, I find that colds actually bring back some nice memories. When I was a child, my mother had a special knack for taking care of us when we were sick. Aside from the usual benefits of being sick - staying home from school, sleeping on the sofa and watching TV all day, and getting out of delivering our paper routes - my mother would say at least once a cold, "You know, you would feel a lot better if you could throw up that big glob of mucus in your stomach."

Something about those words gave them a measure of healing power. Mom would trot out her magic phrase, and in no time the sick person would rush to follow the prescribed treatment, along with anyone else who had been within earshot. To this day, whenever I get sick, I can still hear her saying those magic words.

Natasha of course has extended her wifely sympathies to me the past few days. Earlier today, after I had taken a shower, dressed and changed the baby's diaper, I announced I was going back to bed for a nap.

"What?" she said. "But you just woke up!"

It was less than an hour later that I saw how much she truly cared. The bowl of cereal I ate for breakfast proved to be too solid for my stomach to handle, and I found myself rushing to the bathroom to follow my mother's timeless advice.

I could read Natasha's thoughts like a book. "Poor Dave," she thought. "I can't stand to hear him suffer." And with that she closed the bathroom door and played a Steve Taylor CD as loudly as she could.

Of course, now I seem to be on the mend from my cold, while Natasha is just beginning her turn. Since I've had what she is getting, she has my full sympathies.

But at least she doesn't have a mustache.


Copyright 2000 by David Learn. Used with permission.