Category Archives: my health

Personal health challenge

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I have got a doctor appointment for June 10. I expect this to be only the beginning.

Since January or early February my bladder has been shrinking. As late as last year, I could sleep as long as I wanted on weekends. Now, even though I go to the bathroom last thing before sleep, I can rarely sleep 7 hours before I have to get up and urinate again. Sometimes closer to 5 hours. This is not natural. It is like I have aged two decades in five months.

So yeah, I have to assume I have my first cancer. I suppose it could be some kind of hernia putting pressure on the bladder. One thing I am pretty sure it is not, diabetes. I don’t urinate significantly more, or I would have noticed it. Will still check blood sugar too, just to eliminate.
If it is prostate cancer, it should be fairly easy to diagnose and the prognosis is generally good. I don’t have typical prostate symptoms though. The pressure is less than in my youth, but it is far from stop & go. It really seems more like some outside pressure on the bladder itself.

Or I may just be more sensitive, possibly. I can’t say I have seen any general symptoms of cancer spreading, like unnatural weight loss or fatigue. So it seems too early to panic. I will make sure to inform you of any panic if it becomes relevant.

In any case, I should probably not enter into any new long term commitments, financial or otherwise, until this is checked out.

Loving bread too much

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My current definition of love is “liking so much that you are willing to sacrifice for”. Not perfect, but it covers the range from God to sex, drugs and rock n’roll. The more you love something or someone, the greater the sacrifices you are willing to make.

In the case of me and bread, the sacrifice (beyond the small expense) tends to be gut pain and having to stay within running distance from the bathroom for a while.

I don’t have gluten allergy: Pasta and wheat noodles are part of my near daily diet. I think what happens is that my digestion becomes upset when there is a large, sudden change in diet. The helpful gut bacteria have adapted to the usual food, and suddenly there is something else instead, so they leave in protest.

And modern bread is so good, it is hard to not go all out when I have it in house. Seriously, what happened to bread? It used to be boring, the same plain slice day after day, year after year. Now there are three or even five types of grain in a single bread, and often sesame, sunflower or flax seeds as well. Despite this complex recipe, the firmness and texture is nearly perfect, and stays that way for several days. Behold the great power of science! And not just behold it, I can actually taste it.

So it is all too easy to eat bread four times a day, and plenty of it. I suppose if I kept doing that, my body would get used to it. But then I might forget how good it really is. Now it is like food honeymoon each time…

Sick

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We interrupt our metaphysical reflections to announce that I am sick. I became queasy during the night, but was too sleepy to act on it, and kept sleeping and dreaming queasy dreams until the alarm woke me at 7.

As usual with my nausea, I was unable to actually throw up, as my gag reflex is very poorly developed. Besides, what would it have helped? My stomach was surely empty after 10 hours without eating. Still, I tried, just to see if there was any blood.  I gave up though.

I had to skip work again.  I had only been there two days since the flu. Poor job! -_-  It does not have any economic consequences for me, since I live in Norway, but I feel bad about not being able to do anything at all.  I don’t think I could have worked even if I had brought the work laptop home, truth to tell. I was pretty foggy.

Over the next hours, the problems gradually moved further down the digestive tract. Around noon I was able to lie down without much pain, and slept for more than four hours. I woke from a long dream about two young women who were friends, one of them was a suicide bomber on her way to blow herself up in a church on Christmas, but after meeting her friend outside, she ran away and managed to reach a deserted place before her timed bomb went off. I did not feel like staying in bed after that.

I still did not feel like I wanted to eat or drink ever again, but that did not last. Over the course of the evening, I refilled my stomach, with no apparent ill effects. Of course, there were no apparent ill effects last night when I went to bed either, so let’s wait and see.  One thing I avoided today was bread. There can go months without bread (although I eat pasta), but lately I have eaten bread for almost every meal.  I have a delicious oats-mixed bread at home, and one with sunflower seeds at work.  I have been eating them with jam and thoroughly enjoying it. It’s been so long, after all.

Perhaps I should try to be more gradual when I change my diet. Or perhaps it was some kind of freak accident. Or perhaps something I don’t yet know. There are bound to be such things. I am still only 52, after all. How much can I possibly understand about human life?  I just recently came to this world.

The flu, or something

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I got up early today, wanting to take the early commute bus. But I did not feel quite sure about it:  I had a low-grade head cold lately, moving to the throat, but last night it settled in the bronchi. It stayed there through the night, so I had to wake up a few times to cough to clear them. My coworker had been sneezing a lot so I assumed I had gotten his cold. Well, it may be a bit more than that. I now officially have a fever, although still a moderate one. The headache and the pain in muscles and joints are very flu-like. There is a B influenza going the rounds, generally considered a weaker strain but one many of us don’t have immunity toward. Or so say the news.

As it happened, I got a box from Amazon.com in the mail yesterday. It contained two books by James V. Schall, and are somewhat ironically named “Liberal Learning” and “Another Sort of Learning“.  Actually none of them is Liberal in the political sense of the word: Schall is actually a Jesuit, and his idea of a liberal education is a synthesis of the classical Greco-Roman culture and the great philosophers of Christianity, such as St Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas. Oh, and P.G. Wodehouse.

The small book, or even pamphlet, Liberal Learning, is also available online if you don’t want to support the printing of such books, or simply want to reduce your carbon footprint without eating less, traveling less, or in any other way restraining your greed. ^_^

So when I found myself staying home from work today, I thought this was a great opportunity to read some Schall. But as my temperature went up, my brainpower went down. So perhaps not the most ideal conditions to be introduced to stacks of heavy tomes…

Right now, I have 39.3C (102.7F) in fever. This should be pretty much ideal for the body, although I do have a headache now. Unfortunately the temperature is still rising, although very slowly.  It may not be a good idea to sleep for 8 hours while my fever is still rising:  By the time my normal sleep is over, I may have too much fever to wake up.  So I’ll try to sleep in shorter durations, so I can cool myself off if I get too weak.

Of course, it is far from certain that the temperature will continue to rise. We’ll just have to wait and see.

An unsteady heart

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The road I walked. It was a really nice walk apart from this small detail.

First for the physical heart. I have generally had a relaxed relationship to this, compared to the average human, because I hail from a family where heart problems are exceedingly rare before the age of 70 if at all. But occasionally there have been unexplained speed changes, perhaps once a year on average. I know the first summer after I stopped eating fat, when I took long walks it happened at least twice that my heart started running much faster than was normal for such an activity, and kept doing so for a while. It passed when I sat down for a while. I have had a couple more dramatic episodes where the heart just ran as fast as it could for a while, and I’ve seen a doctor for that a couple times.

Today was in the first category. I took a walk to the grocery shop, because unexpectedly the weather had turned mild, several degrees above freezing. It was like spring, for real. Lovely. But unfortunately by the time I had reached the shop, my heart was racing. Not at full speed, I would say, but about as hard and as fast as when mowing grass with the manual lawnmower, is my estimate. And it continued like that while I stayed there, about a quarter of an hour or more. I had picked some groceries but put them back, not wanting to exert myself the least more than necessary. Besides, I considered that if it grew worse and I had to go to the emergency room, it would be inconvenient to have a bag of food with me. And if I died, I would definitely not need the food. So unless I suddenly got better, it was probably better to not buy anything.

I got better, but only when I came home, another half hour’s walk. I felt a bit weak afterwards, but otherwise it seems to have not hurt me at all. That is to be expected, I guess: It was not max pulse, I think, and it lasted less than an hour, and I am still not old. So in itself it is barely worth mentioning. I do so anyway because later one can go back and see that ah, that happened then, and find a pattern in it.

On that note, this morning my heart was actually abnormally slow for a while after I woke up. I don’t know if there is a connection, but perhaps I (or someone else) will know in the future.

***

And that was that! Now to the other heart, so to speak. One thing I considered as I walked home was this: It did not seem to be a panic attack, because I did not panic. In the past, I thought, I would probably have done that more easily. That is because in the past, I was convinced deep down that I was going to hell. Now I am not so sure. I mean, it could happen I guess, but it is not a sure thing. There was a resentment inside me that is not there anymore, and there is just more light in my life now. I know that I can look back on my life and say it was a good life, in the sense that it grew brighter and brighter. I think of life with gratitude now. I realize that my problem all the way was myself, my arrogance and lack of self-reflection. That problem is much diminished, I am happy to say.

That said, the heart is a treacherous thing. Despite all this, I have spent most of the day playing City of Heroes. There are new alignment missions now, that you can do up to 5 a day of, to verify your morality. So I’ve been doing a bunch of these, on a bunch of my characters, instead of anything useful or really edifying. I mean, being an imaginary hero is not the worst you can do, but it is a kind of moral self-satisfaction really. It does not help make the world on Earth a better place to live. I wonder how I shall do that. It will take both of my hearts for a long time, I suspect.

A mistake

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Resisting the temptation to eat fat is a lot easier if you have to go through the outskirts of purgatory each time you do it.  That has been the case with me since Easter 2005. But human nature is not that easily erased…

To err is human. But this error is likely to cost me, unless there is a divine intervention or some such.

It is a fairly long time since I have had a bad attack of fat poisoning. And so, distracted by an online game, I grabbed a serving of ice cream and ate it relatively short time after I had eaten noodles.  (Both of them typical gaming food, since they require little preparation.)

Now, either of these meals alone should not contain enough fat to trigger a poisoning. Together?  As I said, without divine intervention I am going to be horrifyingly sick. I did not die in the first weeks after I got this illness and before I found out what triggered it, so I don’t expect this to kill me either. But it will most likely feel like it.

The fat poisoning is a mysterious illness. I have had the same set of symptoms occasionally through my adult life, increasing in frequency, but it only became a regular feature after the horror Easter of 2005, when some kind of virus seems to have hit my liver. The doctor thought it was a virus at least, and the involvement of the liver we deduced from the utter lack of bile for more than a week.  After this, even normal amounts of fat will trigger an attack.

The only thing I know of that can reduce the severity of the attack is heat. It seems to begin with my body temperature falling, for some unknown reason, below a point where my brain thermostat realizes that I am in trouble, and it sets off a panic sequence.  I start feeling cold as if I were out in a snowstorm, and shiver and shake violently.  My muscles are at this point already so tense that I cannot heat myself by working out, only by the uncontrolled shivering. Worse than my skeletal musculature is that my internal muscles also go into overdrive. Queasiness ensues as my stomach starts contracting. The peristaltic motion of the intestines is replaced by spasms. These may cause extremely strong bowel movements, or conversely send material from the lower intestines upward, messing up the gut flora for days to come.

The most inexplicable effects are on the brain, or mind. Panic usually ensues (although a few times I have been spared this). It is a physical fear, an automatic reaction that is hard to contain. I suppose it is not entirely irrational when you get a sudden illness, but even though I have been through it many times, I just can’t squash it, just barely contain it. Part of the problem is that my IQ seems to be about halved. I am not sure what the cause of that is, but it happens toward the end of the attack. I am unable to concentrate, if I write I cannot spell normally or write coherently for more than a few words. Basically I go from genius to mentally challenged. The final step of the attack is a sleepiness that cannot be resisted. Even if I sit in a chair, I will fall into deep dreamless sleep. So far I have woke up every time and the attack was over.  I can only hope that I will wake up this time too.

If I knew when it came, I would try to warm up and exercise before it starts, thereby raising my core temperature.  But it depends on the speed of my digestion, probably, for it can be anything from one day to a bit over two days.  I cannot exercise for 24 hours. So that escape hatch is closed. And in the winter, even supplying enough external heat to mitigate the attack will be hard.

So, divine intervention remains an option. A prayer would be nice. I can’t think of anything else that will save me from at least a taste of purgatory.

A soul in a sick body

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Living in the world, under the Light.

Thanks to years of journaling, I had at least a theoretical warning. I have noted through the years that I usually get sick the night or at most the day after I return from a trip. Whether it has lasted two days or a week, the symptoms are still the same: Queasiness and loose bowels to border on diarrhea, and a generic feeling of malaise.  I thought for a while that the train ride home had something to do with it, but I had pretty much given up that idea already. So I was not surprised that it happened tonight too, despite traveling with bus and not very far (although further again than to work).

My current theory is that the body is flushing the unusual stuff I have eaten, so it is ready to return to the usual diet now that I have returned home. In this case, two days of cafeteria and hotel food, plus some snacks, but the snacks are actually the most normal part of it.  I doubt either the cafeteria or the hotel would serve anything that would give us food poisoning. Sure, it happens, even in Norway, but it is bad PR so commercial establishments go out of their way to avoid it.

Nor did I eat any meat, although I took a quarter of an egg for lunch today. Over the last few years I have been eating less and less meat, not because my religion specifically forbids it, I just find it distasteful. I feel that dining on the corpses of dead animals is something that should be reserved for dire emergency. If this was a moral standpoint, I wouldn’t be eating milk products either, since modern agriculture does not retire cows in a dignified manner, much less their calves. As I said, I just find meat distasteful, and to a slightly lesser degree fish.

In reality, milk makes up a fairly large part of my diet in various forms. Come to think of it, not eating yogurt at all when I usually eat it at least daily was probably a bad idea. The gut flora would naturally go wild. The strange part is that it did not do it until I came back. Now, this time it was just two days, but I have been away for up to a week in the past (when spending Christmas with my friends) and while I did have some agitation of the bowels, it was very rarely on the scale I experienced once I got home.  Honestly, my best guess is that the deeper parts of my brain recognize that I am home and tell my digestive tract to get rid of the weird stuff so I can go back to a normal diet with a fresh start.

Being mentally prepared, I have felt somewhat less panicky than I usually do during the onset of a sickness.  Still, I am giving some thought to the benefits and malefits of continued life in the body.

***

Of course, in real life God has a lot of other things to think about too, like how my life or death would impact other people or the carbon dioxide content in the atmosphere and a host of things I cannot even begin to imagine. It is not all about me, except up here in my small deluded head. But that’s where I report from…

And in my head, living for several more decades would be good for my soul even if I continued to play computer games, read blogs and work at a job I am not very good at. Why? Because this life is mostly harmless, and the more harmless decades I can put between me and my childhood and youth of fear, anger and hate, the better.

Much of my time then was filled with a horrifying darkness that is, in essence, a kind of hell. Buddhists seem to call this the “hell of strife”, in which people wander in fear and hate, attacking each other and with each confrontation becoming more certain of the others’ evil, without noticing their own. This was how it was with me.  Even if I had been good, I would probably still have been attacked, but I was not good. Quite the opposite. Sticks and stones may break my bones, but my words hurt other people, and I either did not think about it or enjoyed it immensely, depending on whom. I considered myself a lily among thorns or something. A saint among demons.

I may wish that I had been told the Truth at a much earlier age, but realistically, I would probably not have been ready for it. And meeting it before I was ready, I would probably have become immunized to it, in whole or in part, excusing myself and locking it away as something I had already met and rejected. And so I would have been stuck in the dark, for who knows how long.  But as it was, the Light eventually came to me at a time when I was open enough for it, around the age of 15, in my grandfather’s rocking chair, while reading a small tract by Elias Aslaksen.

For years after this, the harvest of those years threw a dark shadow over my life.  Even in my 20es, my dreams were routinely filled with fear and hate and murder. I dreamed about killing innumerable nameless men. And not in any kind of meaningful context, like saving my country or protecting the innocent. It was fear and rage, mostly fear from what I remember. Kill them before they could kill me. With guns, ax, knife, stones, even my bare hands.  Night after night sometimes, certainly it seems very often now that I look back.

Not satisfied with ruling my nights, the darkness sometimes shot into the day, suddenly and unexpectedly. Some small event might trigger it, even just a thought, but sometimes it would just burst into my consciousness for no reason that I can remember: A sudden vision of myself opening fire on bystanders, driving a car into a crowd, stabbing someone over and over, kicking their head against the concrete until it broke.  Thoughts like that, sudden, nightmarish, almost insane.  Then moments later I would catch myself and shudder at the hellish visions.  And I learned to not trust myself, as I had already learned to not trust others.

Things have changed. I still set bullies on fire, in City of Heroes, but I no longer have the same feelings I used to have. Rather, my recent characters of that type are wreathed in a white, purifying soulfire that burns away the darkness in my enemies, or that is how I perceive it. The actual game mechanics have not changed, but my way of seeing it has, and the graphics and play style corresponds to that. I fight not for revenge, but to protect the innocent and purify the guilty.  ^_^

Be that as it may, there may be limits to how long I am going to enjoy even that game, though I know not exactly by now.  But I have noticed that for each passing season, I find it harder to return to Age of Conan, a game that is a masterpiece of lifelike graphics (it was at least for a time the only game with a separate butt size slider, albeit limited in scope). Unfortunately the atmosphere of the game is very dark, and very much like the aforementioned Hell of Strife.

Described in few words, the basic gameplay is the same as in City of Heroes: Defeat enemies, either on your own or preferably together with others. But Age of Conan is, as befits the novels from which it is derived, a dark and treacherous place. One man’s hero is another man’s villain. There is a delight in destruction, blood splattering from severed heads to rain on the inside of your screen, and many of the classes either consorting with demons or gaining strength from acts of destruction, stuff like that.  It is hard to point out each detail, but there is a subtle aura of darkness and treacherous magic that pervades the game world. I find it repellent now. The current me, whose eyes are set on the Realm of Light, find such an atmosphere harder and harder to bear with each passing season.

I read a book last week, after the glowing recommendation of my online friend Alistair Young, a.k.a the Cerebrate. (Unlike me, his official name is not unique in the world. Really, does it cost that much to add a name to become unique? I would happily have done it, but unless one of my relatives does something crazy, there is and will only be one Magnus Itland in the world. And the world is probably quite happy with that.

Be that as it may, the book was a work of fiction, the first in the Dresden Files series of supernatural detective stories. Wizard Private Investigator more exactly.  When Mr Young loves something, I have found that I usually like it, admire it or at the very least respect it. This also came to pass. I did not like the book, but I found it very well written.  The reason why I did not go right ahead and buy the next was this: It was a dark world, with copious amounts of fear and death. Sure, so is real life for some people, especially in countries with war or civil war.  But that is not entertainment. It is not something we immerse ourselves in for our enjoyment.  The book did indeed remind me of Age of Conan, although somewhat less so.

And that is when I realized that I have begun to change further than I did simply by the passing of the years and the fading of the memories. That some kind of anchor for my soul has gone ahead of me, a possible future self perhaps, beckoning to me from the brightness of the Realm of Light, a barely audible song about coming home.

“But I’m not ready yet” to quote Chris de Burgh in his song Living in the World.  (Lyrics and temporary streaming for my friends).  I am pretty sure de Burgh also has his home in the Realm of Light at the least, as can be glimpsed in the sheer wingspan of his soul. But for him, as for me, it is still a question of whether we will return there. And I’m not ready yet. Probably.

I am still shakeable. My light still flickers when my body is darkened by illness. I want it to shine brightly even then, but I know there are still limits to how much I can take.  I want to live in the world with my anchor in the Light. I want to keep reading the saints and sages of the past and present, I want to work, and play, and share, and watch my life grow like a plant until it can bear fruit for those who will survive me. Until my white light can burn more brightly when the lamp that carries it cracks and start breaking up.  But I am fairly sure I am not ready yet.

Work angels and Gaming Jesus

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Various occupations indeed. I actually thought of this picture, as it pretty much shows how I felt. I am not the kind of person who actually does SEE luminous beings though. I would probably have run screaming!

I am not alone in my head. Neither is anyone else, or at least not any normal person, but most are not aware of it, or only very dimly.  I sometimes jokingly write about “the voices in my head”, but they are not actually voices, more like independent thoughts. Today, they helped me at work.

After noon, I ran into two different cases which I could not solve. In one case, others had already tried to solve it too but given up. But while I was talking with the client, I received what I can only call a revelation. In fact, I said so out loud the first time, it was so out of the blue.  I cannot give any details about it, of course, my work being mostly non-disclosure. But it was computer software related.

I trust I have mentioned that for a while I developed software on my spare time for a friend, creating a big database system that let a number of workers register and access information regarding debt collection, and the system would follow up and print various documents and so on. It was really far too complex for a single person to keep in his head, but what happened was that I frequently received sudden insights, as if someone from outside projected into my mind how to do a task, complete and ready to just key it into the computer, or very nearly so.

Today was somewhat similar, only less extreme. I did not follow any logical train of thought. It was more like intuition, or even more than intuition. Jumping to conclusions, but in a good way. And it worked. Of course, perhaps. I mean, either of course because these things do that every time, or of course because I would not have written about it otherwise, given my good relationship with the “silent voices”.

***

The other part of today’s subject header is a bit different. I have mentioned a couple times in the past where I have bought a computer game acting on impulse, and how I had been warned in advanced by the “voice in my head” to not buy it. Each time it turned out to be wasted money. I may have referred to this warning as coming from “Gaming Jesus”, an expression I picked up from the now long gone web comic “Shawn Island”. In this comic there was a vaguely Jesus-like amnesiac who spent much of his time playing computer games and believed he was Jesus, thus he got the nickname “Gaming Jesus”. The phrase must have stuck with me, because I thought of this after I had been warned (in vain) a couple times about bad games.  I defended this idea by saying that perhaps people were saying “Good Lord what a terrible game” or “Jesus, this game sucks!” so obviously the Lord would have heard a lot of these comments already before I came to the shop. ^_^

No actual blasphemy is intended. There could be any number of reason why an independent thought process in my subconscious would know that a game was bad even though it had not heard it or read it until later.  Reasons like, uhm, reasons, I guess. Wait! Like, if it had been that good, I would have heard of it elsewhere?

Anyway, I heard about Civilization V yesterday, though not in a positive way. An online friend said he was not going to buy it.  But the non-voice in my head did not warn me against it. I checked it out a bit online and realized that it would probably be fun.  I don’t really have time to play much, but I used to love the Civilization series from the very start and have spent many happy hours on it. I certainly wish Sid Meier to become (or stay) rich and famous. So I bought it today in my late lunch break.

There was no protest by independent thought processes this time.

I actually forgot about it until a ways into the evening, at which point I installed it and played until it suddenly was close to midnight. It is like the original, and at least most of the sequels: Just a little more!  I remember when I had just got the original game – it may have been the first evening actually – I suddenly noticed that there was a strange light on the curtains. Cautiously I checked out what it was… it was the dawn. I had thought it was still evening. Not quite as bad this time, but I should probably be careful. Life is short enough. While I have gained a kind of perspective and time dilation from playing various games, I have other things to do now that are competing for the time.

Since I did not get any warning against the game, I assume it is not the reason why I got a sunburn.  What? It is October, in Norway, and it has been overcast for about a week, almost year record in this part of the country. But I really have a red triangle in the area where my topmost shirt button has been open. It looks like a redneck sunburn alright. Huh.

I also began freezing and shivering even though it was not particularly cold. It reminded me of a fat poisoning, though I don’t remember eating enough fat for that. It seems to be fading now, after spending time in outdoors winter clothes in a warm room, and before that some physical activity in front of a space heater.  It’s too late to go to bed early in any case, and I will wait a bit longer to see what happens next.

I have no idea whether there is a connection between the shivering and the fake sunburn, much less a connection to Civ5.  But I assume that if it was something bad that was happening to me, the silent voice in my head would have warned me.  OK, so I more or less stole that one from Socrates, but why not. If the independent actors in (or through) my subconscious can help me solve problems at work and be a better judge of computer games than I am, who knows what else they might do.

But if they tell me to kill random people, I’m opting out.

(Seriously, why do some people have voices that tell them to kill their neighbors, while I have the ones who tell me to stop playing games and take the pasta off the stove before it gets burned? It certainly does not go by merit, I can tell you that much.)

Another doctor visit

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Fetched from my LiveJournal, because I am that lazy!

The last two nights, whenever I laid down on my left side, I had a crushing pain in the center of my chest, with some of the pain protruding toward my back. I normally sleep on my left side, although I move to other positions briefly during the night. When I slept on my back, propped up with a couple pillows, I had no pain.

Yesterday after I came home I did not eat for the rest of the day, to make sure it was not that. (But usually problems with a full stomach only show up when I sleep on my right side. Acid reflux, and not in the good way.)

At work today, I was plagued with bouts of shivering and extreme tiredness. I called my regular physician center (local clinic) and when I mentioned the nightly chest pain, they asked me to come in at once for a check. I only had time to throw on my jacket and tie my shoelaces before hurrying to the bus.

Of course, when I laid down on the observation bench, trying my best to emulate the position I sleep at night, there was no pain at all. I noticed that the bench was a lot harder. If the pain returns, I may try to find a harder surface and see. Though I am not sure that will fix the sleepiness during daytime, at least for the first couple weeks…

There was as usual nothing wrong with my heart. I told the doctor as much. My familiy is basically immune to heart problems, except for a certain slowness of the heart as we grow older. (Then again, my family is prone to age-related diabetes, and I have so far not the faintest hint of it, so perhaps I should not rely entirely on genotype…)

The doctor thought it must be something muscular that bothered me. That’s pretty vague. It is certainly unlike any of the back pains I have had from lifting badly or sleeping weirdly or playing roughly. Then again my legs and arms and back have been stiff ever since I bought the latest book, just before this problem set on, so who knows.

She ordered a bunch of blood tests that would, she said, reveal whether my internal organs worked as they should. I expressed amazement that I lived in an age where you could find out such things just from a blood test. I did not voice my suspicion that doctors use blood tests much like their predecessors used leeches, to make people feel better by having blood drawn from them. It worked for generations, so why not? Seriously though, I thought that was still 10 years in the future, to check up on liver and pancreas and the gang just with a couple vials of blood. I must have missed a couple issues of Science Illustrated.

The doctor was an intern, I think you call them in English. (American?) They have taken their exams but have to work with some supervision for a while at various locations. She looked underage. Am I really old enough to think that about my doctors? Oh well, at least she should be updated with the newest science (and without some of the old mistakes).

It is kind of embarrassing if it turns out to have been nothing dramatic this time either, but it beats the alternative. I want to work till I am 75 or 80 after all, like my ancestors!

Antichronicity

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Den Gode Kraften (The Good Force), autobiography by Joralf Gjerstad.

Yesterday I received a book in the mail. This is in itself noteworthy, for I do not habitually buy books, especially not physical books. If I do, it is usually because they are of a religious nature and so I expect to read them several times over the years to come. But this book was exceptional in that it was written in Norwegian. I cannot tell how many years it has been since last I bought a Norwegian book. Even in the rare case when I buy a book by a Norwegian author, I usually buy the English translation, since it is considerably cheaper. After all, the total number of Norwegian speakers in the world is less than a single large city in the USA, so economy of scale comes into play. In addition, Norwegians generally have lots of money and are used to paying prices that would shock people from most other nations. So this book, admittedly in hardcover, set me back approximately $60.

The book is an autobiography by a Norwegian psychic and healer. Actually, it is his second autobiography. He has always done his psychic readings and healings for free, so I don’t begrudge him if he gets a dollar from the price. I have heard about him occasionally through the last few years, but what caused me to order the book was a newspaper headline where he was said to chastise the Norwegian Princess who offers to teach people (for a price) to communicate with the dead. “SnÃ¥samannen”, as he’s usually called, said this was impossible and dangerous to try.

The man says that the power comes from God, the Creator, and not from himself. According to those who know him, he has fed himself and his family through ordinary work for all these years (he is now quite old) while healing and helping people on his free time. He is, from what I can see, a fairly mainstream Christian. So this should be pretty edifying literature, or at least mostly harmless.

My work commute is where I do most of my book reading these days. So today I brought the book, and read it for the duration of the trip, approximately 45 min. When I got off the bus, I noticed that my legs were stiff. Actually, my arms were stiff as well, and I felt cold and a little dizzy and sleepy. This continued to varying degrees through the workday. I also had some gut pains, but that is not uncommon. Overall, I have felt half-sick throughout the entire workday and am still not entirely well now that I have come home.

Carl Gustaf Jung used the phrase “synchronicity” about “meaningful coincidences”.  I am looking for a word for the opposite. Not just meaningless coincidences, which many people seem to have lots of, but coincidences that seem opposite to what one would expect.  Because it is a remarkable coincidence indeed to feel like the onset of a bad flu after 45 minutes of reading about a humble healer belonging to (supposedly) one’s own religion. I did not notice anything in the morning as I got up or when I hurried to the bus.

I am not drawing any conclusions from this. Moses specifically forbids taking omens from the things around us, which is what most people use “synchronicity” for. But it is certainly a story I want to write down for the future, if any.