Friday 15 October 2004

Pic of the day: For some reason, playing Sim families with several kids sometimes makes me feel better when I am moderately sick. I won't try to explain that one.

Sick and tired

I got sick at work today. Not horribly sick, just enough to worry a bit. It seems like bacteria have agreed to make an invasion on several fronts. A coalition army of bacteria perhaps? First my digestion ran wild, and then I got a bad cough. I could smell the bacteria in my throat, I have had those before. The green ones, they have a special smell and taste that is not easy to forget. They were back.

I guess the lack of sleep has not helped. Each night now, I am wide awake from an hour before midnight and for the next four hours or so. No matter how sleepy I am through the day, when midnight approaches I wake up. Even when my eyes are full of sand and my ears are ringing, my brain is still wide awake. Funny thing.

The shaking from imaginary frost and the running guts stopped eventually, and even the cough has subsided. But I am still not able to eat more than a few spoonfuls at most, not even when I feel hungry. This is only a problem if it is a symptom of something greater, though. I don't need to eat a lot, I have extra fat for a few weeks. So unless something more dramatic happens, I'll just let it slide for a while. I have a doctor appointment on the 5th of November, I could take it up there if it hasn't changed till then. I don't think that is very likely, though! It will surely either get better or get worse.

I want to record this, in case it somehow proves important later.

***

Today and yesterday before lunch I have taken a tablet of a food supplement called MSM. I doubt this is related in any way to my symptoms, but the fact remains that I did this thing and want it recorded. It was recommended on the NaNoWriMo boards by several people who suffer from writing pains. I did not expect it to work as a painkiller, and it didn't. After all, a quick search on Google showed that MSM is unanimously hailed as a wonder product ... and always by people who try to sell it, or sell literature about it. But being this widespread (to the point that it has even come to Kristiansand) it is a good bet it is not acutely toxic in moderate quantities.

Even so, I'm not touching the stuff for a while, even if I survive. It is the rat effect: When a rat gets sick, it will avoid anything new it ate in the last day or more before the event. This is why rat poison either works or doesn't: The rats will not come back for more. I guess it is fitting to contemplate that I react in the same way.

(Of course, if you said the same, I would not be amused...)

***

It feels like a general system breakdown of my body, but I realize that it might well be my soul. It is hopeless to say where one ends and the other begins. That is why quack medicine such as MSM works in the first place, after all, and often it is why ordinary medicine works also. But Placebo is not the only power. There is also Nocebo, its evil twin. In primitive societies, so we are told, people who are cursed by a powerful shaman (or by the tribe collectively) will sicken and die in a matter of days or sometimes even hours. A powerful tool; I am sure many politicians would have liked to to this to their opposition. But perhaps it takes more subtle forms these days. For instance, many people report side effects from placebo medicine.

This need not be what happens to me now, though. It is just one possible option. It could be God's judgment because I have allowed myself to make plans for the future (most notably November). Now you may argue that almost all people spend lots of time on plans, some of which are substantially more evil than writing a novel, and God does not strike them down in their tracks. In fact, God doesn't seem very reactive in everyday life.

But you people, and those people, have other legs to stand on. They don't depend on God alone, but have family, friends, enemies. They live in the human world with their soul as well as their body. But I do not. The so-called real world is to me only partly substantial, as if I were already a ghost. I have told you this before. I compared it to a necromancer who has a zombie do his bidding. My body is the zombie, and I depend on it to interact with the world, but I don't feel like it is me. In the unlikely case that my soul was transferred somewhere else, it would not look at my body and think: "There am I!" but rather "There is my body!". Suspended this way between Heaven and Earth, I am vulnerable to them both.

And I don't think there is anything particularly spiritual about this attitude, either. It is my firm impression that Jesus was more present in the world than I was. That makes a kind of sense too, since he was to save the world. But I cannot even save myself. All I can do right now is whine. A whiny soul in a sick body... But I'll still do what I can to keep the two together!