Didn't I already say this?

February sucks, even for healthy people, in this climate. Well, it sucks for those of us who have to stay indoors most of the time.

To dispense with Beast news first of all. We seem to be at a draw. This will delight my PCP when I next see her, and also spare me more drugs...I hope.

To reach the stasis I've achieved, one must a) remain indoors most of the time b) be wrapped up beyond anything an Inuit would consider normal when outside c) take many, many pills. Mind, this doesn't cure anything. It does change the character of Beastly assaults, so that I get several days off between episodes. During all the time I've had TN, I had been puzzled by the comparison of the sensations to electric shock. I've had electric shocks, and I didn't see the analogy. I thought it was more like someone rapidly firing nails into my head.

I understand it better, now that things have changed. I get the electricity, but at longish intervals. However, let's put aside the thought that the quiet days will have to be paid for. We take what we can get.

I've been making good use of those days off with good reading. My default literature has been Mark Twain's autobiography, a delightful Christmas gift. It's structure is such that one can read portions at a time, put it down, then pick it up some days later.

The other thief of my time has been Abraham Verghese’s Cutting for Stone. Although this novel, by a physician, has a good deal that engages those of us with some clinical training, I'm finding it is as much of a page-turner for laypeople. Most of it is set in Ethiopia, and I bring more than a casual interest to that country. I came within a hairs' breadth of going there in the Navy, to Eritrea actually, at a moment when neither side exactly welcomed US presence. The context I struggled to understand 40 years ago is somewhat clearer now.
I'm an inveterate repeat reader, so I'll be going through this again.

There's work, too, but I'm holding to my policy of staying off that subject in the blogosphere.

Anyway, here I am.

Chiefly for me

These pages sometimes function as a pain diary: something an involved patient keeps for the guidance of his/her clinician. That's today's purpose. The interested are welcome.

The trigeminal neuralgia has been approaching differently this year. In past autumns, there have been occasional sharp twinges that only qualify by their location, which have gone on for two or three months without interfering with much of anything. This is called precursor pain. Then the Beast arrives suddenly, with full force.

This year, there has been an observable escalation over the past four to six weeks. Using the Mankoski pain scale, the trigeminal sensations have been rising from the usual Level 2 or 3 of precursor pain to levels around 5. The duration of the pain has steadily increased from a sudden, intermittent stab to the persistent "trip hammer effect" characteristic of my TN. Even those haven't lasted very long...20 minutes at most.

The Beast—a full-blown TN episode—arrived this morning after I went out and ran the snow blower for about 40 minutes in piercing cold wind, despite wearing a balaclava, a hoodie, a flapped fur hat and hooded parka. As usual, onset was very sudden—within two minutes—and escalated to the trip hammer effect at Level 6 to 7. Being at home, I took 1 mg Klonopin immediately and was down for two hours. I was able to eat some lunch, then was down again, mostly in pain hangover mode, for another hour and a half.

So welcome back to another lovely winter. I used to love winter, and it seems especially bad karma to have that pleasure taken away.

Fuck this.

Unchristmas, and a shuffle with the idiots

In the end, we worked out our own unchristmas. First, the early show at Loew's on Tremont in Boston (The King's Speech, which I recommend even if you're not a Brit). Then, instead of Chinese, we did Middle Eastern at the Black Seed, which is up the street and a steady favourite of mine. Home again, holiday nap, chat with the daughter and a French-Canadian film (betcha didn't know there were such things, eh?) Les Doights Croches.

Since my spouse was working today, last week I began to plan a Boxing Day dinner. Nothing remarkable, except that we don't cook a lot of whole chickens around here. On Thursday, it was clear there wouldn't be room in our modest fridge for the chicken and everything else, so I decided to put off buying some of the ingredients until today.

This wasn't a good idea. Although there was snow on the horizon Thursday, the weather media panic machine had yet to work itself up to a berserk frenzy. By the time they hit that level of stridency, it was already christmas day and finding a roaster in these parts would have to wait.

For a moment, I considered running over to Stop and Shop, where you get the vintage sort of panic disaster shopper. These are the people who go as a couple and fill two shopping carts: one has twenty bags of potato chips and one bag of ice-melt. The other has two dozen two litre bottles of soft drink, a snow shovel, and three pounds of deli meat. For whatever reason, I thought I'd have better luck at our local, regional-type market.

Things were probably worse at Stop and Shop, but only because they have more floor space. I can't say this is true of all affluent towns, since I've only lived in this one, but the Stop and Shoppers with the soft drinks and chips were one up on the average person in this scrum: they had a clue what they were about. It was clear, from the various overheard conversations, that most of these people hadn't seen the inside of a grocery since the last weekend disaster: hmm, that would be the water thingy back at the end of April. That one was simple, because all they had to buy was water. This one required them to make choices. The line moved along all the same, and it was enlivened by the utter helplessness of so many of these people. It probably didn't occur to them that they already had all that they needed in their homes: they would need the help to explain that to them.

Each winter's first serious snow has always been good for some unintended comedy, but it used to be out on the roads. The winter storm disaster culture has ensured us hilarity indoors and out.

We passed a milestone this week

Really. As of Tuesday, the sunset began to come a little bit later each day. Depending on what time of day you're on the move, you may not have noticed, because the sunrise will also be getting a little bit later every day for another three weeks before it changes it a more positive direction.

This is one more in the eye for deities, who should certainly have arranged things so that at the winter solstice, everythings hits minimum at once and then gets better. but noo: first the sunsets get better, then the sunrises, and meantime the really cold weather hasn't even shown up yet.

At any rate, this, tiny increment of positive change shows that summer will come back...eventually.

Happy Festivus!

55 inches of snow...so?

ABC News is all agog about the 55 inch snowfall since, I think, New Years Day in Fulton, NY. The inhabitants are playing up to the cameras, and we're getting lots of (ahem) "shocking*" pictures of five-foot tall people standing chin-deep in their driveways and busily shoveling in front of their houses.

The point is, you can see the houses.

Fulton, Oswego, and environs are Ground Zero for lake effect snow. The whole county makes Buffalo look like Palm Springs. Fifty-five inches of snow is bupkis in a region that frequently sees four feet of snow in 24 hours. In February, 2007, parts of Oswego County had ten feet of snow from one storm, over a similar period. Whole houses disappeared and people were clearing their roofs with snowblowers.

I don't know whether this week's story originated with some Oswego County opportunist, or with a New York City producer who said "go get me a snow story." Either way, it's a good illustration of the value of context. Or, putting it another way, of the old adage about not letting facts get in the way of a good story.

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* Speaking of facts. Journalism classes regularly mock adjectives that the news overuses, and "shocking" generally heads the list. Should we consider it shocking that most journalism graduates forget the lessons immediately upon graduating? Stay tuned.

I think I have a cause

Nice thing about blogs, as in any other form of writing, is you get to put pretty packaging on your obsessions and call them causes. I think mocking New England weather broadcasts is becoming my cause. It's less contentious than political blogging, where even your friends rip you. Even meterologists ridicule weather forecasts.

We are in, oh, hour 37 of the current weather broadcasting overreaction to last week's weather broadcasting overreaction. In this case, the most populous parts of New England may just possibly see an inch or two of snow by this time tomorrow (it's raining right now). Since the temp will also be at or above freezing most of that time, and since there is more than an inch of salt on most paved public ways in Massachusetts, the chances of an accumulation of anything but raw hype are minimal.

At the present rate, the hysteria will begin shortly after July 4, skipping right through hurricane season to begin warning people of the need to maintain their shovels while they are still trying to maintain inflatable water toys.

Links and pictures soon, I promise.

Street Smarts

Boston's Channel 7 news is nearly always good for a laugh. Today's dose of unintended comedy came when they interviewed an earnest young urban dweller of the female persuasion. She was upset that she had parked in an East Boston street space someone else had cleared, and came back the next morning to find all four of her tyres slashed. This young person seems to be a slow learner. Some months earlier, she said, she had parked in what may have been someone's personal space, was double-parked in, called the cops, and found her windscreen smashed soon after.

Rewind about 30 years, to days when I worked in the pre-gentry North End. Despite having a job with certain local privileges, I learned early to shrug and go to a parking lot when there was snow on the ground. There's a good deal of hard work that goes with those spaces, and the possessiveness is understandable. As for the tyres and windscreen, working-class Bostonians have a refreshing directness about their objections to inappropriate conduct. The young person in question is merely being told to shovel her own fricken parking space, which will then be left alone.

Before Channel 7 was done with its story, they were politely (I'm sure) told that they too were parked in someone else's space. They moved.