Health

Urination on Hot Days

It's a hot day, you've been hiking, and suddenly you feel the desire to urinate.

West Nile Virus 2

The price we pay is mass histrionic behavior. And is that good for our health?

West Nile Virus

West Nile Virus killed its first California victim here in Orange County. Am I afraid?

White Blindness at Home

My head turned like a paint mixing rod and I stumbled across the living room, tripping over chairs and cat toys.

Prescription

More salt. If I run into Lot's wife out there in the desert, I'll give her a lick.

Implant Progress

I've been licking at a flat head like a manhole cover in the space before my last surviving molar on the lower right hand side.

What's Polluting Your Neighborhood?

Enviromapper can show you where the dumping is going on and the location of the nearest Superfund site as well as a host of lesser evils such as keepers of hazardous waste, smokestacks, and waste water dischargers.

Homo Omnivorous

...our nearest relatives among the apes, such as the chimpanzees, have problems digesting meat without resorting to a lot of physical activity.

The Lesson of Tito

Ours is not to eradicate but to compromise and aid them in compensating.

Why the Poor are Fat

"Our poor are fat" is a way of exculpating the rich from responsibility for the worsening state of affairs in this country.

Savage Love on Fat

I'm looking for the thin man who used to be there.

Catholics and the Hanging Gut

Why not just feel good about the way we look?

The Politics of Fat and Exercise

It had nothing to do with staying healthy, everything to do with eugenics.

Fundamentalism is Overpermissive about Fat

"Oh, I eat very little," you hear them say. Then you see them, with their plates piled high at a smorgabord and you know that most of them are liars.

An Asthma Attack

The deadly sin of sloth will kill me yet.

My Right Kidney

If you see me, don't feel sorry for me.

Yelling at the Universe

Sometimes the only thing you can yell at is the Universe.

Misery

After spending two hours outside of the house, I need a good ablution.

Heart Attacks: Are You at Risk?

Karyn and I want you to know that women are at risk for heart attacks.

The Ghost in the Jaw

When you have surgery done on the jaw in a place that is dead, the body screams elsewhere.

Dental Insurance Fraud

We think that teeth are not a part of the body, that fixing them is a luxury item like a nose job or a facelift.

The Surgery

I've had fillings that pained me more.

Before Hydrocordone

Mark that as the last creative turns of phrase that I can manage for the next few days.

The $2200 Mandible

I shall be in the chair, having my jaw turned into a kind of cyborg.

Mandible Computer Tomography

A short tech who wore a loose Hawaiian shirt escorted me into the room where they kept the magic donut.

Rocketing!

You just can't turn your back on a health problem.

Between Fashion Threads and Gluten

Our commercial masters want us either anorexic or obese so they can possess symbolic units, totally invisible, without substance, and yet more persuasive in our lives than the idea of God.

Our Weight Problem
Like a lot of other Americans I struggle with a weight problem. I exercise regularly but that only burns so...

Vile to Write About

I record even that which is vile to think about.

A Deceitful Disease

The hardest part of being sick with a cold is arising in the morning with the feeling that it is all past, then feeling the phlegm build up during the course of the day until you are spitting yellow mustard in parking lots and public bathrooms.

Give Me Hyperactivity or Give me Death

I think I nearly died last night.

What a Day for a Daydream

No, today was not for daydreaming. It was for fighting the world and doing my darndest to feel better.

The First Hour

Boadicea comes to lie on me, but whenever I cough, she jumps off. She doesn't know that a cough isn't a scolding, I think.

Snort more Nitrous?

Just to see if I could score one up on Yule, I went looking for a web page that would describe the sinuses and explain what they are there for.

How's My Cold?

Please wish it the worst of luck in the days to come.

The Blessing of a Cold
I woke up with a sore throat this morning. It cheered me up. Now I have a reason to loaf...

Diseases with no cures, just comforts

I've never been bitter about my diabetes. It's just a disease doing its thing. Being mad at it is like being mad at the rain for leaking through the roof or at the roof for getting old and letting the wind shift the shingles so that the rain can come in.

Smoker Patrol at the Studio

In the Studio Theater, I was the Law. I had power over them.

Cough Syrup Abuse

In the absence of signs suggesting abuse, I caution against treating your teen ager as a convict in his own house.

Poison Tree

Last month when I told my mother about my discovery, she said "Your stupid grandfather ate lots of those berries and they never killed him."

An Attack of Gout

My left big toe nixed my plan for going to Barton Flats today. An invisible ring of pain encircles the joint that connects it to the foot.

Voice of the Body

I got to thinking how I, at age forty five, am like that old cat.

Sulky

While making a crossing on the trail back from Holy Jim Falls, I chose to travel by means of the cemented stones on the right rather than the unsteady line of stones on the left.

Root Canal Surgery

The needle's the part I hate the most.

Broken Arm

That's the spot. That's where you fell. You broke your arm on the sidewalk. You must tell that to Mom or else we'll both be in trouble.

In Defense of Quarantine

When I opened my eyes, my mother looked at me strangely and started unbuttoning my shirt. She gasped and buttoned it up again straight-away.

Sunburn

I burned myself out on the hike yesterday. My right arm more than my left which is odd because it was midday and both were equally naked.

In the Asteroid Belt

I suffer all this -- the sneezing, the itching, the doubts about my longevity --this because of the promiscuous, uninhibited sex life of weeds, trees, and shrubs.

Pain Pills 2

.... suffice it to say that things got out of control because one of the two was on pain pills and lost it.

MedicAlert Bracelet

Being asthmatic doesn't make me a wimp. Being depressive doesn't make my views -- as long as I am aware when I am spiraling into it and trust those closest to me who have educated themselves about what I have.

The State of My Jaw

One more week of soft food and then oink oink oink!

Peridex™

Dentists swear by it for the antiseptic effects it has on the gums. Patients swear that it is one of the worst tasting concoctions ever produced by the pharmaceuticals industry.

Soft Foods

I'm on soft foods for another two weeks. This also excludes nuts, lettuce, rice, and other stuff with invisible feet that take them into the hole between the molars on my lower right side.

Pain Pills

I just don't get why people want to make themselves sick to the stomach for a few hours of lightheadedness.

From the Scarlet Hermitage

The main thing keeping me home isn't pain, but the fact that if I go charging around town, pumping my heart, the wound in my mouth is about to bust.

An Extraction Under Conscious Sedation

The drugs they used to sedate me prevented me from accumulating the complete set of folders from which my memory could draw to write about what they did later.

Oral Surgery 3
The tooth is pulled, and Joel is home, doped up, and upstairs watching a video. All went as expected. More...

Oral Surgery 2

Back when I have a mind again

Oral Surgery

I am resigning myself to this: that every so often, for the rest of my life, I am going to suffer one of these procedures.

Stocking Up

No solid food for a week. That's the mandate from my periodontist.

Fistula 5

The disease is in the jaw bone now. That's why the tooth must die.

Fistula 4

The fistula has grown to about the size of a lentil and feels like a hard bean lying between my gum and my cheek. It appears to range from silver gray to bruise blue.

Fistula 3

Number 30 tooth must die

Fistula 2

Number 30's roots looked good except for a slow healing area at the base of the rearmost one.

Fistula

The hygienist ran a gloved finger along the facial side of my gums. A sharp balcony, no longer than three grains of sand lined up, jutted out beneath the temporary crown on the lower right where Dr. Morrison had done a root canal last April.

Montezuma's Revenge?

Hardly.

On Prozac Horror Stories

Human bodies aren't turned out on an assembly line with interchangeable parts as the critics seem to want you to believe: we're different enough that what helps one person can harm another. Doctors know this.

The Origin of Toothache

Painful imagery, eh? See. You can never trust a god!

Weighty Affairs

Could it become the fashion of the future to travel places where TB remains at large as a weight cure?

On Dental Misadventures

It's hard to be going through this stuff. People don't realize how different we all are, that each mouth gets wired in a different way.

A Teeth Cleaning
April conducted me through a long fishhook of a hall to a room that occupied the place of the barb....

Dental Disaster

This time the broke into two pieces. One comprised two of the sides and the other included the other two and the top. They fit together neatly.

In Sickness

The fever came upon me last night.