Not thinking in title mode, I guess. But here's a picture:
The swearing in ceremony turned out to be a kind of big nothing, but it was amusing, and W. Niece looked fabulous, like a real lawyer, and it least it wasn't too long. When we got there, they said there were too many people, so all family and friends would have to watch on TVs set up in other, smaller courtrooms. Okay. Then the TV set up was just awful, with a pounding din coming over from the other room for an hour before it actually started. We did see Niece before it started, when her husband and his parents joined us in our family/friends room, where we had front row seats. Then it turned out to be that they swore them all in in unison and we saw no one at all on the TV except the presiding judge and a few other speakers. But they were so clueless, these big shots, that they didn't realize that when they stood up, their heads were cut out of the picture, and the sound was so bad that no one could understand them. The "keynote" speaker declined the judge's invitation to step over to the podium, so when he stood up to speak, he was completely off camera. But it was over before 5:00 -- we had been told to expect not before 5:30 -- so that was good. And we saw her right after, with all her offical certificates and everything, which is when I took this picture of her with her mother, the Sibs.
I feel like my body is falling apart faster than the main patient on an episode of House, but again, brain chemistry being what it is, I'm relatively okay, mental/emotional stability-wise. I'm considering cancelling my appointment with the gastroenterologist tomorrow and going to see my internist instead, since whatever I've got is clearly not just gastrointestinal. (Now I've got hives. And no, I don't live anywhere near the E. Coli outbreak in New Jersey this week, and I haven't eaten at a Taco Bell in ages.) And since my doctor is retiring at the end of the month, I'd like to go in and say good-bye and thank you anyway, so maybe this is my ticket. Just what he needs on his way out, a mystery.
Speaking of not having E. Coli, and I may have mentioned this before, you know I have some of the hypochondria. (Well, I know I've talked about that before, but that's not where I'm going.) I inherited this from my mother just as surely as if it came in the DNA. She was apparently like this all of her life. Anyway, when I was a kid, about 8 years old, my parents bought a set of The World Book Encyclopedia for the house. I thought this was totally cool, and my father thought to his dying day that our 1961 World Book was the ultimate research source -- Cassandra the Librarian here could never dissuade him of that -- but to my mother, it was a source of medical information. Whatever she thought she might have, she looked it up, and then she knew whether she did or didn't. It was the essential informational tool of her life.
Oh. My. God. Can you imagine my mother with Internet access?
Internet access is totally the razor's edge to a hypochondriac. We love it, we hate it. We can check our symptoms and find out just how serious this whatever it is we think we've got it is. (When K was diagnosed with Post-Viral Fatigue Syndrome when she was in high school, the specialist said to me, a little tongue-in-cheek, "Now, don't go looking this up on the Internet!" but of course I did. The articles said exactly the same thing he'd said, so there.) I used to really like the Mayo Clinic site, but now I mostly go to WebMD. According to whom I am unlikely to have:
- A bowel obstruction.
- Shingles.
- Toxoplasmosis.
... and a couple of other things, I don't even remember what else I looked up. Even so, you got to wonder about some of these things. Shingles, for example, affects the elderly, most likely, and you can't get it more than once. But I had shingles when I was 21 -- so did R, btw -- so is the rest of it true or not? Can I get it again? How can I be sure? And as for toxoplasmosis, I could actually have it, it just won't be a problem unless I'm pregnant, and I really don't need WebMD to diagnose that one. Anyway, I rarely fit the typical description of conditions I actually do have: no one suspected appendicitis because of my age, no one suspected an acoustic neuroma because of its location in my brain. And how on earth did I come up with a latex allergy two months after the appendectomy (when I was covered in tape), when the incision didn't heal?Okay, enough is enough. The only conspiracy theory I'm suspecting here is that I should have taken better care of myself for the last 50 years -- assuming my mother looked after me for the first four or so -- and I'd be way better off now. (Fi's excellent cartoon notwithstanding.)
Speaking of my health and going on 54 years ago, about two weeks after I was born, in January 1953, I became very, very sick. How this came to light is that my sister, who was then four and a half and with whom I shared a room, heard me crying or whimpering in the night and climbed into the crib to soothe me, stroking my back, etc. When my father opened the door to see if we were sleeping, he saw her in the crib with me and freaked out, but her being there is what led him to notice that I was burning with fever, since I was not, by that time, crying. (This is how the Sibs saved my life.) Doctors still made house calls, and our family doctor lived in our apartment building there in the Bronx, so he was there within minutes. And told my parents that the only thing that would save me was penicillin, which was still fairly new, and that if I turned out to be allergic to it, I would die, but I would die without it. So I got it, and the rest is history, but that's the story I was going to tell you about how the Sibs saved my life. And probably why I've been a hypochondriac as long as I can remember.
(Yes, yes, a hypochondriac who becomes legitimately ill is not the same thing as a baseless hypochondriac, and I am the former. The brain tumor, the broken leg, the appendix, all real. Even so. Do I really think that I might have toxoplasmosis? I think not.)
