Necator Americanus: Superfriend!

M’aider!

Its been going on for 2 weeks and 2 days, and still I’ve written nothing about it.

I suppose I was hoping that it would be over with and done at any moment. But it hasn’t, and this afternoon, once again, I took to my bed with a fever of 101.3

It began at just about the moment of my 2 month inoculation anniversary. And since that day, every afternoon, and sometimes over night my temperature becomes unmoored and starts its run up and down the thermometer. This happened on or around my one month anniversary; it lasted for a few days then was normal again for a month. It seemed reasonable to me that this would be more of the same & I’d be fine in a few days. Now on day 17 I’ve lost my good attitude. B. even said, a night or two ago, that maybe 18 days should be my limit, before calling the hospital.

But I don’t want a visit to club-Med where the only ideas they’ve got are to pump me full of fluids and IV antibiotics. It usually works, I’m not going to deny that, but I think we’re up against something different here, something other than a Crohn’s flare.

You see, while I sit here with the colon spasms and the fevers, and the weakness, wishing I could go to sleep or die; the fistulae are getting smaller every day.  It’s rather remarkable,  no change for over a year in the size of these channels, and in the short time since I’ve been inoculated with N. Americanus, thy have shrunk –I would guess–about 75%.

So, are the temperatures the result of my body, now weaned of Prednisone, trying to fight off these worms?  Or is it the result of my body rushing to stitch up the fistulae?

Now 24 hours after I started this post, my temperature is 99.5 and I feel week, violated, and miserable.  I slept for 14 hours last night, and took naps all day, trying to escape the alien presence that has taken over my body, taking Aspirin, Tylenol, & Motrin in every conceivable combination, wishing only for some Percocet to make the pain go away.

If any of you have any ideas, thoughts, or suggestions on the matter;  why my body is riven between healing wounds and the draining of blood, thick ropey clots of it, and puss, and mucous; please let me know, because I can not handle much more of this and I expect that soon I will end up in a room on 11 W. Doan Hall, OSUMC.

There is a long tradition in this country, stemming from our Calvinist past, of contempt for the poor.

There is an attitude that poverty is god’s judgment against you, some sort of predetermined fine, put in place before one could even have committed the infraction. Worse still, was the suspicion that some kind of moral contaigen was involved, so that even if one’s fate was predetermined, spending too much time around the unfortunate might cause god to reconsider your fortunes.

As America expanded westward across the continent, these ideas become confounded with proto-libertarianism, further making the less fortunate an object of contempt. Now, in the 21st century we have what look to be perfectly legitimate commentators on Fox news, strenuously arguing that to give a shred to the the poor, the uninsured, the sick, the homeless, will break the back of the “middle class” and further more, encourage the poor in their folly of poverty.

What I do not understand is why the left stands there, agape at the charges being made against them, yet will not look at their detractors and call them Liars. Misinformation, obfuscation, falsification, inaccuracy. . . I have heard every polite synonym used for what is going on, but not the the one essential truth. The right is lying, and the reason they are lying is that they are really and truly afraid that anyone else’s gain is their loss. They would rather have 46 million of their fellow Americans without access to health care, then contemplate sharing. They will go so far as to make up, invent out of whole cloth, nay, lie about the consequences of universal coverage to themselves then permit such a thing to happen— Probably because of that contagion factor I mentioned above.

Now some Washington Insiders are talking about taking the “public option off the table” since it is “so disturbing to so many people.” But I ask you, if a lie is disturbing to your constituency, is it not better to refute the lie and clear the air, than to capitulate to it, allowing the liars to come back and lie another day, about something else. Remember, the Republican party has clearly stated that if this works, they will use it as an inroad to undermine the entire Obama presidency, which I think can be directly translated as “show that &%$#@ who’s boss.”

Just because our legislators and our commentators will not use the Liar word does not mean that you and I must not. You will certainly hear many strange things in the next few weeks, my own mother asked me the other day if I’d heard that Obama intended to take health care away from people over 65. Stand up, stiffen your spine and call them Liars. We can man the battlements when our elected representatives will not, and if all we have on our side are John Stewart and Stephen Colbert, at least we can watch them every night and and laugh. But together we will not loose.

Do not blink, this is war.

PS: somewhat after I posted this it occurred to me that I implied that the Republican party was racist.  I’m sorry, I did not mean to imply this.  I meant to say it outright.  If you have any questions on the subject I call to your attention the Republican Party mouth piece, Fox News.

I noticed on Yahoo News today that the White house is considering eliminating the “Public Option” from the health care reform.

I can not adequately describe to you how I felt as a surge of anger washed over me.  For the past 30 years Insurance companies have grown slick and fat upon the misery of the American people.  Just yesterday I heard about a woman whose insurance company capped cancer coverage at $100, 000.  She still sick, but they’re done with her.
DONE WITH HER!!!!

Fox news is ramming the fear of Death Panels down the throats of the uninformed, who are then showing up apoplectic to “Town Hall Meetings”  shouting down the very legislators who are trying, for once to do the right thing.  And these poor slobs never for a moment realize that they themselves are $100,000 from the only Death Panel they’ll ever really see, the one that says too bad when the next chemo bill comes.

I sent an e-mail to the president first thing this morning (8/17/09).  Tomorrow I will call my Senator and my congress woman.  They will not do this to me.  The corporations will not win again, while I sit here and suffer trying to decide if I can afford the whole Asacol prescription this month or only half because the price of gasoline has gone up again.  The CEOs of Nationwide & Travelers & Medical Mutual & Merc & DuPont & Ross &c. &c. &c. do not ever, ever, ever have to worry about that.  When did I become a second class citizen, why should I be?

So please, call your representative tomorrow and insist that we do not capitulate to corporate greed merely because they have been, as they always have been, so good at manipulating public opinion over these past few weeks.

I went into the metal smithing studio last night for one reason really, and it wasn’t to work.  I’ve had enough on my mind these days to crowd out the making of art.  I went to meet B.X. whose wife has Crohn’s disease.

As it turns some of the metal workers go out with the stone cutters on Wednesday night for an late cocktail, that’s where the Metals studio Mgr K, met B.X. .   She’d told him about me, and about the worms (because we are one in the same now, I suppose, ) and although he was astonished he wanted to meet me.

As much as I preach that we must continually be on our best behavior, and not act like the religiously converted, it was difficult for me to meet a person who could so clearly be helped by this therapy and not become rather . . . emphatic.   Having done my best to tell him that I could be feeling well for any number of reasons, and not the $2500 one,  I never the less stressed that I was, for the first time in years, feeling well.

Then I went home, and passed such a painful bowel movement that I threw up.  Then I did it again.  And should I not have been paying close enough attention, I had chills and night sweats twice during the night followed by yet another harrowing poop this morning.

Why this should have been so I can not say.  But I will say that I am guilty of having feasted on Cole-Slaw at a cook out earlier in the week.  And amidst all the troubles last night there was almost no blood or mucous at all.  But why now, so many weeks after inoculation did I have these problems?  Is it because I did not knock on wood (hard to to in metals and stone studios respectively)  is it because these things are inevitable in the first six months, as one’s immune system is becoming inured to the presence of N. Americanus?  Is it because I stressed myself, going out so late in the evening, when I am usually the sort who

A.  Avoids going out in public after dinner lest she have a colon melt down.

or

B. Takes care of herself by relaxing and not running around the city after meals.

Choose the answer based upon your level of cynicism.

I am tired of pain.
Fundamentally and profoundly exhausted of half hourly trips to the bathroom that feel as though I am passing an anaconda through the eye of a needle. That, I suppose, is the essence of suffering; growing tired of the inevitable.

I’ve been surviving on a combination of Aspirin & Extra Strength Tylenol; one of each, every six hours.  But yesterday, if I was going to make it to a doctors appointment I was going to need stronger measures.  A quarter of an oxycodone, approximately 2.5mg, (give or take the crumbs on the bottom of the pill cutter) made things right, for a while.  Several hours later I was passing thick clots of blood, in penance.

I have a stricture some 35cm in.  Near where my transverse and descending colon meet.  Inelastic scar tissue that prevents the easy passage of stool.  Backed up in my transverse colon, the pressure and the pain builds and I feel as though I’ve been sucker punched in the gut.  I suspect that the only relief will be to have that bit removed. This means a colostomy until it heals, if it heals.

That is the problem with Crohn’s disease, the persistence of wounds in the digestive system.  That is what these worms are intended to correct.  The theory is that they suppress the immune system so that wounds can heal and further insults to the tissue do not occur.   Never the less, there was some suggestion that surgical anesthesia itself was toxic to intestinal worms.

M.. of Autoimmune Therapies, posted to our forum yesterday that the only drugs known absolutely to kill the worms, (aside from Albendazole, of course, which is meant to kill them,) are “Inhaled anesthetics that belong to the class VOCs, Volatile Organic Compounds.”  Which means that getting a filling may be more problematic than having your appendix out.
Still, we wonder and we worry, but worrying is a choice.