Cymbalta or Medical Marijuana

Head to a doctor, complain of chronic pain -- well, at least chronic pain related to the idea of chronic fatigue syndrome -- and you might be offered an opiate, but it's more likely today that you'll be offered one of the new drugs specifically targeted toward neuropathy.

I did. I said, "Post-polio syndrome feels to me like some of the symptoms people with chronic fatigue syndrome complain about. What about Cymbalta or one of those other drugs being pushed by Big Pharm.?"

A little study, a bit of agreement, and a measure of dollars later, I swallow my first pill. And once it flooded my system, it seemed to work. To a degree. Enough to reduced the Tylenol 4 to one pill on most days.

But in the back of my mind, I've always thought that marijuana would be a better, more natural choice. Medical marijuana is legal here and there, but not the here where I live. And so I don't intend to try it. But it's always in the news.

I'm not one much for conspiracy theories, although I do tend to believe in Murphy's Golden Rule -- He who has the gold makes the rules. -- but even at that I'm not sure the pharmaceutical companies are central in opposition to medical marijuana. It seems instead to be one of those things that defy the logic with which I view the world.

Does marijuana as improper medical treatment mean we should also deny any pharmaceutical used on the street to a patient in need?

James Dickey, A Memory

In the New York Times, Dwight Garner has written a neat little lit-crit analysis of James Dickey's Deliverance, both the book and the film. You can read the complete essay here.

I cannot remember if I came to Dickey's poetry through Deliverance or to the novel through his poems. I remember several of them, one most affecting being "The Eye-Beaters."

Reading the beautiful analysis of Deliverance in the Times had me remembering another piece written by Dickey, neither poem or novel. It was an essay, appearing in one of the popular magazines like Life or Newsweek during or shortly after the Vietnam era.

In it, Dickey wrote of getting a haircut in a southern barbershop. His hair was long, and he wanted it trimmed but kept long, and there's was a bit of ribbing from other patrons. I don't really remember the point of the essay -- tolerance, openness, free expression, I suppose -- but I remember the final image.

Dickey gets out of the barber chair and dons a jacket, perhaps a denim jacket, on which an eagle holding a banner has been embroidered. The banner bears the word Poetry. 

Funny, isn't it, how a written image lingers in memory?

DISH TV and Other Woes

High definition signal fails. We pay an extra fee every month so that we can have high definition television.

"Sorry, sir," says the customer service representative. "I'll have to send a technician out. I cannot fix the problem from here."

"Fine."

Technician arrives. Problem fixed. Satellite dish (DISH installed) is no longer solid its mount and has drifted off signal path.

Everyone is satisfied.

Bill arrives, including a $95 service charge.

"Why am I being a charged a service fee if it is DISH's equipment that needed repair? Am I not paying $82 a month for your signal, including high definition? If your equipment cannot receive your signal, why should I be charged to repair it?"

"That's our policy, sir," the customer service representative says, "unless you have a service contract at $6 a month."

"That eliminates the fee for any service call?"

"Not exactly, sir. You must pay the first $15 of any service call."

The logic of commerce is that, especially considering we are beyond the reach of cable and DISH will charge us $225 if we choose to terminate service and change to DIRECTV.

Jan (James) Morris, Writing, and Biology as Destiny

Those who man the barricades against efforts to reduce gender discrimination often revert to Biology is destiny. I think I used to be one of them, at least until I married and watched how my wife struggled against some of sexist tendencies in her field of science.

Yesterday there was an interesting piece in the New York Times, on a new book titled Delusions of Gender. In the article, the reviewer mentions the writer Jan Morris.

But Dr. Fine persuasively argues that it is, in fact, all in the mind. Jan Morris, the historian, travel writer and male-to-female transsexual, saw this implicit stereotyping firsthand: “The more I was treated as a woman, the more woman I became. ”

I recently reviewed a book by Morris for the Internet Review of Books, one in which the writer offers character sketches, observations, and vignettes gleaned from her career. The book is Contact! A Book of Encounters, about which I observed in regard to the author's change of gender ...

So we have a book—Contact!—dozens of contacts, people met and remembered through the journeys of a writing life—from the pen of Jan Morris who was once James, and it is thoroughly and pervasively seamless, leaving the author’s gender transition a curiosity, leaving us to marvel at the complexities that make us human, but ultimately irrelevant to what arrives so shiningly upon the page. 

It's a complex subject, obviously, especially since females seemingly will remain central to the western idea of family. But will it be the humanist, democratic western culture that will drive the world's social evolution in the future? That has been so, at least in the realm of science and industrial progress, since the Enlightenment, but there's no guarantee that will continue as economic power shifts to Asia.

All I know, at least from casual observation, is that women have more opportunity than ever in the west, and yet women still face gender prejudices that keep them from collectively influencing our culture to the same degree as males.

The Invisible Usefulness of Being

A writing group I participate in studies a creative nonfiction essay each week. We exchange thoughts about what does and doesn't work in accomplishing the goals of creative nonfiction, the goals being much like paraphrasing Potter Stewart's description of obscenity.

I know creative nonfiction when I see it.

The last two essays we've studied have been truly me-focused. And I didn't see much in the way of the authors attempting to use individual experience to create universal lessons, which to me is the only reason to write a confessional, me-focused essay.

Which brings me to disability. I'm tried of writing about disability as it pertains to me. Perhaps I purged myself of all the anger and regret and frustration and Look at brave me left in my psyche after I wrote and published my memoir.

But if you ride around on your fanny, you cannot help but roll into some really great material.

Scene 1

We are in a photography studio for some family pictures. My wife has made the appointment, and so I'm not surprised when the photographer addresses her as we move into the background area. His first words to me are directed to my wife.

"Let's put his chair here in the center at angle, and then we'll gather the rest of you around him."

I move my chair to the center of the scene, and he moves behind his equipment and returns with a black cloth, which he attempts to drape around my power chair. "What are you doing?" I ask.

"Don't you want the chair covered?" he asks my wife.

"Why?" I say.

My wife looks at him without answering, no doubt biting her lip in anticipation of the next clumsy remark and my rancid response. But it is her day, and I decide I won't take the photographer to school.

The photographer says nothing further, but he still does not look at me. Instead he moves away and goes on with arranging the other nine people in the family around my chair.

Scene 2

We're on our way home and turn into a Cracker Barrel restaurant because my wife has fried chicken, mashed potatoes, and white gravy on her mind. As we wait to be seated, I somehow find myself near the entrance to the restrooms, and I'm momentarily stranded because my granddaughter has flicked the control button for the wheelchair to the "off" position. An elderly man, perhaps well into his eighties, tall but stooped shoulder, thick black gray crew-cut, and pants elevated above belly-button exits the restroom and finds me blocking his way.

"Wait a sec," I say. "I'll get out of your way."

"That's fine. That's fine. I'll squeeze by," he replies.

He does. And moves four or five steps down the aisle, only to reverse his course and step back close to me, saying, "It's always good to get out, isn't it? We can always see someone worse off than we are and feel better about ourselves."

With that, he pats me on the shoulder and moves on to his dinner.

There are essays in both those incidents, but I suppose I'm bored by their repetition and have nothing new to say about this particular coin in the disability exchange. It has two sides, as you'll note: people with disabilities are too often either invisible or they are seen as one of those Maybe things are really so bad for me examples Fate sends stumbling into the path of those souls who need a bit of cheer.

 

My Dog Is My Hero

An essay I wrote about our life with a retired racing greyhound, a fellow named Sportin' Yuppie, will appear in an upcoming anthology, My Dog Is My Hero, to be published by Adams Media on September 18, 2010.

It turns out a person can actually read the essay via the Amazon "Look Inside" link. Click on Table of Contents. Click on my name.

Venting Self-Consciously

image source  

My correspondence has continued with my friend who is venturing into public for the first time carrying an ventilator to compensate for post-polio syndrome respiratory insufficiency.

My vent is the new Trilogy, which is about the size of two shoe boxes stacked atop one another. It comes with a soft carrying case. The thing is, I don't need it. Unless I'm tired. Or asleep. Or to survive.

Normally, it sets on a roll-about, and I come to it. When out in the world, I tote it around, not using it when ambling about in my chair. When I arrive at a place, I simply set it on the floor or a table. I suppose I could bungee the gadget to the back of the wheelchair when it comes time for me to breathe while driving.

Funnily enough, my biggest problem -- that is, when I seem not to breathe correctly (meaning, sufficiently) is when I'm eating, and post-eating. It seems to take every kilowatt of my energy to digest food after a meal, which comes on top of being able to eat and talk at the same time. With that, I suspect I'll soon be toting it into restaurants.

It's a new experience, going public with a set of mechanical lungs, and it's one I've resisted for a very long time. Why?

Ah, the ugly, tawdry, preening idea that deep in my psych that carrying around a ventilator makes me feel more fragile and weaker than my conception (or perception) of The Real Gary.

That in turn means I've been brainwashed into accepting society's long-held perception that people with disabilities are less than ... weaker, dependent, less useful, non-productive, that we are our disabilities rather than simply people, with everything good and bad that identification suggests.