Friday 1st May (evening). As well as the re-bricking, Swine Flu comes up a lot. James says it isn't Swine Flu, it's Influensza H1N1. There are jokes about catching it off mosquitos, about how pigeons can carry it, but if that's the case then isn't it Bird Flu? About the stew my dad used to make, with pigeon and pork and rabbit whatever else came along. Can you get Rabbit Flu?
We go out to Main Street again and lot of people are there. It's Friday night. A lot of teenagers. A lot of students from the University. A girl at the crepe stall has a black eye. One of our party, another Anna, orders a crepe made with buckwheat and filled with ham, cheese and strawberries. It's a new combination she's trying. By the time she's eaten the top half, the bottom end has denatured into a shiny grey swamp. On the way back to the apartment, James and I talk about chronic pain syndromes, about fibromyalgia. He says what a disaster it is when people get referred to the University for diagnosis. How he thinks it might even be harmful to them. They get scans done, they discover an illness they can't understand because the doctors don't, nothing gets solved. People with fibromyalgia get chronic muscular pain, symmetrical aches in opposite parts of the body, plus a weird collection of diffuse symptoms affecting sleep, cognitive function, digestion and weight, vision, movement. I ask him if it's another name for what Freud called Hysteria? He says 'I could believe it.' There have been a lot of names for this. Cassandra Complex, Hysterical Neurosis, Hypochondriasis, Somatization Disorder, Conversion Disorder. It's a collection of problems, real things that people suffer from, with real pain, but with causes that are hard to find. Doctors don't like these things. They're hard to pin down. The conversation reminds me of something called Post-Concussion Syndrome. Most people get better after concussion. About 10% continue to have problems - headaches, loss of sleep, memory problems. Nobody knows why. It's something to do with anxiety, with being unhappy, with becoming hyper-vigilant for the symptoms of concussion. It's hard to treat. There's no medicine for it. Nothing you can give a person.
so .. you can buy buckwheat pancakes at the side of the road - i need that here
ReplyDeleteI'll get a photo next time.
ReplyDeleteSwine Flu (or influenza h1n1, which is this particular strain of the same thing) has genetic components of what are traditionally thought of as avian flu and human flu as well as pig flu. It's a massive load of hype about something that does not affect very many people much at all apart from those close to the couple of dozen people in the world who've died from it, for whom it's tragic. With a current global death toll of 'a few per day' it currently looks like one of the world's least dangerous virulent diseases. Meanwhile thousands of people survive with brain injuries...
ReplyDelete