Why is Pink Eye so terrifying?

As we start dealing with having the #twinfants in daycare, the subject of Pink Eye came up, because one day @hawkmetta woke up with an eye that was red and itchy. We brought him to the doctor who said "he just got a bit of his cold in his eye." Apparently, grown-ups don't normally rub their snot into their eyes– which is nice. We called the day care who said "a mild cold is fine, and as long as it's not Pink Eye, he can come in."

This is very interesting to me, because I've told some people about this and I've been somewhat amazed at the visceral reactions of abject terror that people seem to experience at the very mention of this pestilence. It seems like the most horrible affliction, rated up there with leprosy. You have a cold? Wash your hands. You have the flu? We live in Protestant Work Ethic America, so come to work, but keep that shit to yourself.

You have Pink Eye?! Don't come near us! Stay in your house and bolt the door!

So, I decided to look into what Pink Eye actually is. Turns out that "Pink Eye" is actually "Conjunctivitis," which basically means "Your eyes is inflamed." So what causes it?

Conjunctivitis is caused by viruses, bacteria, allergens (like pet dander or dust mites), and irritants (like smog or swimming pool chlorine) that infect or irritate the eye and eyelid lining. (CDC website)

So, the dreaded Pink Eye is really nothing more than "your eye is itchy and irritated." And there's no one cause. It's not like "Pink Eye is caused by this specific virus which also causes a host of other terrible illnesses such as…" No. I thought that it was "A thing" like the flu, but it's just a garbage bucket term for "a red, itchy eye."

Why is it that workplaces (and, apparently, day cares) will allow people to come if they have a cold, or even a flu (honestly, you know you've seen people at work with the flu, and you know you've probably gone). The Influenza virus can be tremendously dangerous to many populations. Yet, when someone has a red, itchy eye– which might be caused by that same common cold virus that would be acceptable to carry into a workplace, but which might also be caused by dust– it is absolutely irresponsible to be around other people?

It seems to me that this is fear based in ignorance. Either we should take a real flu infection seriously– which we have to admit that, as a culture, we do not_ or we should not be so terrified of a red, itchy eye.

Because the way we currently react– with ambiguity toward serious illnesses and terror towards mild or innocuous conditions– seems dubious and silly.

#glorious

CDC Features - Pink Eye: Usually Mild and Easy to Treat

Pink, itchy eyes? Conjunctivitis – or pink eye – is common in adults and children. It sometimes needs medical treatment, depending on the cause. Know the symptoms, get treatment if needed, and prevent...

Posted at April 29, 2013 at 01:03PM on Google+

Recently, I learned that one could add embedded Google+ Comments on any page. Naturally, this appeals to me since I send my users to G+ to comment anyway. This provides a nice comment system in the place that I want it, embedded right into my blog posts.

It’s simple, a wee bit of code:

<div id="comments"></div>
<script type="text/javascript">// <![CDATA[
gapi.comments.render('comments', {
    href: window.location,
    width: '624',
    first_party_property: 'BLOGGER',
    view_type: 'FILTERED_POSTMOD'
});
// ]]></script>

Added using the Post Ender plugin, and we’re in business. Now, encouraging people to comment in Google+ is automatic, and I still have no SPAM worries.

Went out to visit @hawkmetta and @ceciliathered at daycare for lunch. Absolute nightmare. I expected it to be bad, but this was so much worse than I ever imagined.

Hawk was sleeping alone in a pack-n-play. Alone! In a pack-n-play!! He would never take a nap at home without +Jessica Metta sitting next to him, on the futon, holding a pacifier in his mouth. Yet there he is, just acting like nothing's the matter, snoozing away! No swaddle, no pacifier. It was terrifying!

And there's Cecilia was just happily sitting in some stranger's lap– smiling and starting to drift off. A stranger! Cecilia hates strangers! She could never go to sleep without laying next to her mommy at home. And she sees me and doesn't freak out and make me hold her! She just smiled at me!

This is absolutely terrible. How do I deal with the fact that they are perfectly fine without us?! Do I pull them out of daycare?! We should pull them out. This can't continue. There is no where this can go that results in an emotionally codependent child. This has to stop.
--
#glorious

Posted at April 23, 2013 at 04:15PM on Google+

Farewell, Uncle. I began with you.

#glorious

Posted at April 23, 2013 at 02:43AM on Google+

The creatures have returned. #glorious

Posted at April 20, 2013 at 11:41AM on Google+

Unfortunately for me, that is much, much worse.

The Twinge

Back in the last days of January, I got a small twinge in my left knee. I noticed it while I was sleeping: a sharp pain on the side of my knee about where the ligaments are. I didn’t think too much about it other than “Well, I guess it’s time to get on my bike.”

For basically my entire life, or at least since the first couple years of high school, I’ve had to keep my legs strong. I started Cycling early, and did Tai Chi every day as well as studying a number of other martial arts, primarily Aikido. I spent time swimming, cross-country skiing, doing gym exercises– anything I could to keep my legs strong. I didn’t run too much, because at the time, running was the path that led me to knee pain, but I did a lot of walking.

A lot of walking.¹

I did all of these things because I had to keep my legs strong. If my legs are not strong, my knees hurt, and they often hurt to the point of locking up or just collapsing from under me suddenly. But sometimes, changes in life cause me to get off track, or get lazy, and my legs get weak, I get out of shape. When that happens, my knees start to hurt and I think “Well, there’s my forcing function. Time to get back in shape.”

So, a few months ago when my knee twinged at night, I really didn’t think any more about it than “Well, I guess it’s time to get on my bike.” I looked over at the two cribs in the nursery-come-daddy’s-bedroom, said “Okay, babies, you can’t be an excuse anymore,” and then went back to sleep.

In the morning, I woke up and both sides of my knee hurt. “Shit,” I thought, “I really need to get on my bike.”

The next day, my right knee started hurting.

Three days later, both of my knees were swollen like footballs and I could barely walk.

These Walking Blues

Now, to be clear, “barely walk” is not an exaggeration. I am often rather stoic about pain² simply because I’m used to it. I deal with pain like this all the time, so can easily tune it out and just continue as if it’s not there. This was different. This was excruciating. Merely standing was difficult because any pressure on my knees felt like someone was driving a rusty railroad spike into them. Simply getting up to go to the bathroom was painful enough that sometimes I would just cry out.

But sitting was not much better, because I couldn’t get my legs into a comfortable position without feeling like there was a piece of metal sticking out of my knees. And lying down was actually worse, because any lateral tension was a spike, but any extension was a heavy ache. There was no position in which I could lie down that didn’t cause my knees the most serious pain.

But, I had to go on. We have twins, I can’t just sit and mope. So I dealt with it.

Simply walking was honestly the most painful thing I can remember. Imagine if every time you moved your legs, it felt like a jagged piece of rebar was being dragged through your knee joint. And when you stopped moving your legs, there was a jagged piece of rebar merely sitting in your knee joint. “Fucking awful” doesn’t even approach the descriptive necessity.

But I’d still grab both twins in their car seats and carry them out to the van when we were leaving. I still came to work, taking a ridiculously long time to climb six stairs to my office. I even took the babies on our daily walk– during which their stroller functioned as “a walker,” and I shuffled along, in painful slowness, without bending my knees, while trying my best to enjoy the clouds in the sky and my time with our babies.

In short, I tried to live a rather normal life, despite the fact that I would end every day actually sobbing.³

And then I would get almost no sleep because any time I shifted my weight, I would wake up shouting in pain.

The Great Search

Early on in this terrible period, I saw my doctor, who recommended NSAIDs and, after some interviewing, decided that it was likely Parvovirus, because that had been going around and I showed the common symptoms. The prognosis was “let it run it’s course, since there’s nothing we can do, and come back in a couple weeks.”

Well, a couple weeks went by, and then a few more. The amazing time compression abilities of twins meant that it was actually a month after the first appointment when I went back, still with the same knee pain.

Thus started “The Great Search.” What follows is a journey from doctor to doctor, doing test after test, going from possibility to possibility. I’ve seen both an endocrinologist and a rheumatologist, had blood drawn for every test conceivable, and more than blood tests.

In fact, now we come to that disturbingly colored liquid sitting on my stove. Don’t worry, like I said, it’s not the bodily fluid that you’re thinking of. It’s simply water with food coloring. But that’s so much worse than a cup of piss, because a cup of piss is really normal– with the possible exception that you don’t want to see it in a cup.

I went to  a rheumatologist on Monday morning for more testing. The liquid in the photograph represents the amount, and damn close to perfect color, of the fluid that the doctor drained from my left knee alone. This is the doctor who– after interviewing me and coming up with an assumption about my level of pain, did a physical exam and took a look at my knees and said “Oh wow! You are stoic! This is really bad! I never assumed it was this bad by talking to you…”

Stoic? Well, you do whacha gotta do, right?⁴

He injected some cortisone into my left knee, ran some more tests, and told me to come back in two weeks.

Where Do We Go From Here?

It’s honestly insane how many fucking tests I’ve had done: kidney function, liver function, sedimentation rate, lyme disease, rheumatic markers, gout, pseudo-gout,⁵ blood sugar, cholesterol, heart function, endocrine function, Lupus… It’s Insane.

And what’s the outcome? I am one healthy-assed son-of-a-bitch… with #seriously fucked up knees. It’s amazing. On every fucking test I have done the result is “Yup, you’re right in the healthy-ass motherfucker range on that one, too.”

So where do we go from here? No idea. There are a couple of other crazy possibilities like Human Leukocyte Antigen (HLA) B27– whatever the fuck that means- and Spondyloarthropathy (gesundheit), as well as some possible intestinal issues like severe colitis and Crohn’s disease.

Craziness.

In the meantime, I’m trying to walk more with the babies (walking being the easiest exercise I can do with them that doesn’t kill me with pain), and doing what little exercise I can elsewhere. We have a bike attachment for the stroller, and I want to get back to Aikido (even the thought of falling and tumbling gives me shivers right now), but it’s coming really slowly. The couple of times I tried my Tai Chi workout, I almost collapsed. So for now, I take it slow, wait for tests, and hope to god I can walk tomorrow at least as good as I can today.

1. Walking, mostly alone, was actually an escape, a meditation, a way to survive what I felt was a very difficult to deal with environment– but that’s a bit of another story.
2. this is the term a doctor recently used for me, it’s not mine.
3. Again, let’s be clear, that’s not an exaggeration. Babies in bed, Jessica asleep, I would lay down on the futon in the nursery, find a position that was the the least uncomfortable, and just fucking break down. It’s incredibly tiring to deal with that much pain all day, and at the end, when faced with even a chance at a respite, my body would just convulse with relief and despair until I passed out.
4. Truthfully, the pain has been lessening over the past few weeks. An almost unnoticeable lessening every day. In any day, I could not look back on the previous day and see any difference, but I could look back a week and think “I can walk a bit easier than a week ago.” So I wasn’t telling him about the end-of-the-day sobbing. I wasn’t that stoic.
5. pseudo-gout! Really! that’s a thing! It’s exactly like gout- but not gout. That’s just fucked up, God.

I do so love Google Now. I love its personalized search capability and its very context sensitive information display in my #android notifications window.

It's great swiping down and seeing a travel time and optional directions to a place I've just searched for, or searIt's rather funny that at certain timIt's rather funny that at certain times of the day, it'll tell me the time to get to work or home, but I always chuckle when it shows me the travel time to work is 5 minutes and then gives me the option to use navigation.

It's not perfect though. It's rather funny that at certain times of the day, it'll tell me the time to get to work or home. I always chuckle when it shows me the travel time to work is 5 minutes and then gives me the option to use navigation.

"Uh yeah, Google, I think I can manage that trip on my own"

But do you see how far we've come? Not only am I talking to my phone as if it's actually interacting with me, the implication here is that they are some trips that I can't manage on my own. Who'd have said that 20 years ago? #scary #glorious

Posted at April 11, 2013 at 11:23AM on Google+

Here's a sweet view from the driver's seat. A picture I snapped while pushing our stroller on a walk this evening. It's a pretty common, and completely heartbreaking, sight.

Lately, whenever @ceciliathered (brown) and @hawkmetta are next to one another (which, let's face it, is "always") Cecilia hold out her hand and Hawk takes it. At first, I thought it was just them flailing around, since they're still young enough to do that, but now I'm convinced it's at least partially intentional. Sometimes it looks accidental, but many times, their arms flail until this happens, at which time they kind of calm down and just stay there, holding each other's hand.

Their 5 months old on Sunday. They don't even eat solid food yet. But they know they have to stick together. They know they have each other. It breaks your heart, doesn't it? #glorious

Posted at April 11, 2013 at 12:54AM on Google+

Posted at April 09, 2013 at 05:08PM on Google+

from Google + on April 09, 2013 at 04:13PM