defeat

I effing hate ants.  This afternoon marks a peak incident in the rising number of the pests who have over-ridden my bathroom, living room and kitchen each morning and afternoon for the last several weeks.  Maybe it's because I worked a very long and labor-intense day.  Maybe it's because I had coffee this morning and am still on-edge.  Maybe it's because I'm tired of planting spiders in various corners of my home and willing them to gorge themselves (yes, I actually do this and spiders have become so my friends through Spring that I do so with my bare fingers).

Maybe it's just because I came home and walked into my kitchen and stepped on a two-inch thick trail of ants leading from behind the fridge to the [sealed] garbage and recycling bins (it is of note that the traps that I set in the crevice between the fridge and wall were totally desolate).  Perhaps it has something to do with my being startled into jumping for safety to an ant-free zone and looking down to see that I had skipped onto yet another trail of ants -- headed, seemingly, to my dishwasher.

I would even go so far as to speculate that it has something to do with my spending 25 minutes (yes, I clocked this shit) vacuuming up ant trails, taking out the garbage and recycling and Lysoling every inch of linoleum.  This was precious energy that I so carefully preserved throughout the day, and which I had hoped to use to run this evening after a long day of standing at the bench and staring into hours worth of statistical manipulation.  It could, however, also be because when I re-entered the kitchen with emptied/Lysoled bins, the two-inch thick trail of ants had entirely replenished itself...

It could be because of any of the above reasons that I am now feeling totally defeated, exhausted and not chillaxed.  However, I think it was walking out of my kitchen feeling that I had finally won the battle, plopping heavily onto my couch and seeing that my living room carpet was alive with tiny black beasts that ultimately did me in.  I just gave up and cried into the couch pillow.

In a history of 9 houses/apartments, I have never seen anything like this.  I cannot wait to move out of this miserably maintained crap hole.

Nothing like a little H.K. humor and some garlic broccoli to  lighten a girl's heart.  Isn't it something that I am more likely to be undone by ants than by Crohn's?..

Just another serenader

What am I going to do in three months when I can't cure my ails with days like this?  I do love to be in the ocean, truly, but nothing revives like a PNW river.

 

We had a heart to heart last night, H.K. and I.  He's scared, which puts the situation in a startling new light for me.  The process of decay is not easy to hide, nor do I consistently give it my best effort in front of H.K., poor thing.  It was necessary for him to express his worry, I think, for me to remove myself from brooding and take initiative (read: wait more optimistically for my GI appt. at the end of May).  This is not an unbeatable foe; it requires only the cooperation of my physicians and a plan of attack that can be undertaken successfully within three months, because hell if I'm going to be thrown back into the darkness of 2009 before the move south... and hell if it's going to make me put off school for another year.  It's hard to keep in mind that I'm not a unique scenario, just another serenader... on lots of antibiotics.

Perspiration stains and varicose veins...

Manuscript accepted.  Data collected; results surprisingly awesome.  Small miracles.

But at the end of the day, no matter how it sparkles, I wind up in front of the bathroom mirror for twenty minutes massaging and inspecting brittle bones and applying every kind of imaginable medication to my various districts of rotting flesh.  Throughput is a background distraction. 

New developments this evening: yet another cavity creeping up from below my gums on that one tooth that is barely standing and cost me a fortune to keep and cap (whom I have dubbed FitzMolar, as he has proven wholly illegitimate), and "pretty severely" Staph-infected scalp psoriasis.  Thank you Universe for that call just prior to supper -- although, it probably saved me from my deep immersion in #scimom blogs and the depressing daydream of what a magnificent father H.K. would be and what a terrible idea it is for me to consider engendering spawn.

Funny how quickly all the glory washes away and I crawl into bed seriously contemplating dentures and the removal of my uterus. 

My eyes look shot, my belly's got a pot and there's a pimple on my nose...

I am the Entertainer

I luvs nausea-free mornings.  I luvs them.

Today is Behavior Day, which marks the highly anticipated culmination of five weeks of therapy for my most venerable participants.  It also means that for the next ten hours, I will sit down perhaps once, juggle a protein assay whilst crunching data between behavioral tests, and probably not eat until supper.  I might even present said data to my boss before attempting to toss together an abstract to submit to SfN 2011 before the deadline in two weeks.  Maybe.

And I will most definitely be checking in on Wiley to see if my most recent manuscript re-submission has been accepted.

One must take advantage of days like this.

Crohn's, Parkinson's and hypochondriasis

Typically, I post research reviews in HWAH, but today's report involves a degree of hypochondriasis which I deem too personal for the "professional" demeanor of HWAH.

The first article that I read this morning was a report on two case studies of young women who developed Parkinsonism (PD) after adalimumab (Humira) treatments (there was, of course, mention of a similar case associated with Infliximab (Remicade)).  Wouldn't it be funny, I thought, if my Crohn's treatments lead me to develop the disease whose study launched my research career?  I decided that it would be ironic, but not funny.

Naturally, only MRI scans and Unified Parkinson's Disease Rating Scale (UPDRS) scores were reported.  No biomarkers, no longitudinal coverage.  I do appreciate case studies and understand their valuable contribution to biomedical science, but it always bothers me that they feel so incomplete.

The causal relationship was primarily based on motor symptoms developing after 7 mos. (Case 1) or 11 mos. (Case 2) of Humira therapy.  The cited Remicade case showed symptoms only 1 week following a first treatment.  And though Parkinson's cannot be ruled out in the first two cases, many studies of early-onset PD are associated with the Parkin gene mutation, good response to levodopa therapy, and slower progression compared to late-onset PD.  This suggests to me that since no biomarkers were reported in the current study, it is equally possible that early-onset PD was already en route to phenotype and possibly exacerbated by the TNFalpha blockers.  In defense of this hypothesis, both case studies responded well to Carbidopa/levodopa.

Who says that only medical students get Medical Student Disease?  With all the allergy symptoms that I've developed over the last six months, why not add potential PD to the list?  Granted, I've been on Remicade for 18 mos. now with no perceivable motor impairments, but what's to say that it wont manifest later on?  After all, my allergy symptoms were comparatively delayed.  If I weren't moving and beginning graduate school in the next few months, I would drop Remicade and experiment with supplement and diet maintenance.  The reason that this is a bad idea is that I will likely relapse as I have so often done on supplement and diet plans, make miserable the 22 hr. drive down to Southern Cal, and cause me to fail out of school within my first term.  So plz, PD, stay away until I'm at least 60.  Thx.


Ha AD, & Jankovic J (2011). Parkinsonism and dystonia associated with adalimumab. Movement disorders : official journal of the Movement Disorder Society PMID: 21495070

Spring

Spring has sprung.  It is still mostly gray, rainy and often sleety.  It is still invariably no more than 55 degrees at the warmest parts of the day.  But... the ants are out.  A sure sign of Spring.

I am grateful that our bug infestations in the PNW exclude scorpions, bed bugs and brown recluses.  However, I can't bring myself to be at peace with waking up on the couch to a horde of ants crawling up my afghan and in my hair.

Neither can I abide waking up in the morning and coming downstairs to a kitchen that seems to be alive with an entire anthill.  Not a crumb of food or dirty dish to be seen, mind you.  The entire counter space, stove top and empty sink were crawling.   (and it is of note that the fruitbowl on said counter space that held two ripe bananas was devoid of any Hymenoptera).

Thank goodness that Sunday is Adventure Day.  We wiped out the horde, hopped in the car and headed north.  Lego store, bit of hiking, and Phở.  Standard.  Phở is always good for H.K.'s sinuses and my nausea.  The exercise is not so much, although as I think I've mentioned, that will hardly stop me.  The nausea is settling into its Springtime routine; it swells after I've eaten [anything], when I have forgotten to eat [anything] for more than five hours, and is exacerbated when my sinuses flare.  Bring it on -- I'm armed with Phở, Netti Pot, five kinds of nasal spray and even more variations of antihistamine.

We arrived home to find that the counter tops had been resurfaced with a fledgling ant colony 1/3 the size of what we encountered this morning.

in which ambition is met with not so positive reinforcement

The PNW continues to sweep the skies with both effulgent blue and hail.  And it makes me think I have special powers or some such chimerical baloney.  This afternoon, feeling especially accomplished after a long day, I came home and ran.  And felt great about it.  And lasted for a whole 2 miles.  And then collapsed on the couch like a dead tree.  A repulsive dead tree untouched even by organisms of decay, and with a coelom full of turbulent sea water that has no business being there.  Nausea, heartburn, colon spasm; the whole gang came to partay.  I can't even keep tea down right now, but at least my fatigue feels warranted.  I may not eat for a day or so after this one.

Why is it that I am most motivated to exercise, or run errands or do chores when I feel [physically] most miserable?  It's almost as if when comfort sets in I'm perfectly happy to just sit back and enjoy it.  Then, when the rotten feelings come I feel an extra push to run myself into the ground in order to beat them at their own game.  Except most of the time I don't feel better for it afterward.  Or maybe the ambition is just a side effect of the sunshine... In any case, despite this [not so] positive reinforcement that now has me desperately pinned to the hard, flat, motionless couch cushions, somehow I don't think I'll be deterred from running again tomorrow afternoon unless an icy storm hits.