Wanna buy some steroids?

Let's try to fittingly describe the decent into hell that is the prescription of steroids. Coming as they do with a reputation you'd expect some sparks, truth is they deliver all and more than their reputation promises. That there are folk out there who would ingest them for pleasure is beyond belief. The experience you see is cumulative. First day marked only by an energy boost mid afternoon and an unmistakeable alertness at bed time.

Second day brings no energy boost despite your aware anticipation and is calmed at bedtime with a glass or more of wine. Third brings no pleasure either, instead you note feelings of nausea and an amplification of that ever present tinnitus. Day four , the shortest in the working week Passes reasonably but only due to the success of the sleeping tablet you took last night.

That evening is obliterated in booze along with the subsequent day on which you celebrated, very successful, your family day. No warnings have been provided regarding the mixture of these drugs with alcohol so I'm forced to take the default position that it's OK. Meanwhile the condition for which they have been prescribed is to all observable intents and purposes cured but you haven't an appointment for another week.

Back to work and off the booze for a terrible week. Nausea, headache, sleeplessness it's like a wasp nest inside your head, tinnitus is blaring at eighty decibels and recent false teeth are like the worst alien invader Dream Works special effects could dream up. By Sunday I rationalised that I was cured and ceasing steroids, hopefully forever.

On Tuesday came the bad news from the doc; you don't just stop steroids, you must wean of them, half a tab for five days, quarter for five more. After Tuesdays nausea and all night headache is it any wonder I opted for a Wednesday sickie. Now the new rule has it that for even one sickie you must present with a certificate.

No great burden to sit around in the doctor's office with all those snivelling sick for an hour or two but when you get there you'd be a fool to settle for only one day and I'm no fool even if I'm the only one of that opinion. "A certificate till Saturday Doc and if you need convincing well listen up" I'm rationalising that I can always make a big man of myself presenting back at work with a doctors opinion that I should be home in bed but it's amazing how a cynical attitude to irresponsible low paid work and many accumulated sick leave hours can turn the head of even one so righteous as I.

Yes I took all four days and they have only themselves to blame with their petty one day one certificate rule.

Doesn't sound like Aunty,

Must be Robert

In case you hadn't noticed ; winter beauty

This vast claypan at Tempe, the only remaining from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when from here to Newtown was a continuous brick kiln is soon to become, for our salvation, the largest Ikea in the southern hemisphere.


Meanwhile I have discovered this model to pose for me. I admit he's somewhat flat, yes some would say dead and when he opens his mouth disgusting, but maybe with time.....

Something we should Disgust

You know I take no pleasure from this but some things have got to be said. You will recall that about a year ago I was struggling with an affliction that came to be known as Ulcerative Colitis. At that time I was prescribed by Dr. Gok, my gastroenterologist, with enema treatment that brought the condition under control in good time for my European holiday with Alice. I was warned by Gok at that time that the condition would almost certainly return and around Easter this year it did. Back onto the enemas which Gok prefers for their ironic 'non invasive nature' and lack of side effects but alas not this time successful. Now after what has seemed like months of explosive blood and corruption letting when it seemed there would not be enough forests to maintain the toilet tissue I have embarked under Gok's guidance on a new drug regime.

Side effects, well I have heard that Steroids (one a day) can have side effects but so far at the expense only of some sleep and ginger tummy turns I have managed not to pop any of my Bunnings clients. Sulfasalazine ec tablets (two twice a day with food) contain sulphur which so far has not brought me out in a rash that Gok warned it could. Main effects, well in less than a week I'm having almost normal once a day, admittedly in the form of a three act play with curtain calls sometimes as early as four am, movements. No more explosions, minimal blood, one pair of underpants per day and forests saved for future generations.

Now serendipitously a few weeks back, May 29-30 to be less than exact, I happened on an essay in Spectrum by Elisabeth Farrelly, (always worth a read) on the topic Disgust as the antithesis of Desire. Commencing with a narrative of sausages in her back lane which neither rot nor are consumed by scavenging animals or insects and a happy meal left on a shelf unprotected for a year which but for settled dust looking almost as good as new. She conjectured that this failure to rot or attract vermin was possibly more disgusting than natural purification. There is too much to this essay to review here but allow me to quote just this much, "The food writer Michael Pollan advises: never eat anything that doesn't rot. Aesthetically, too, this is good advice; never wear, hang, sail or build anything that wont rot. Perhaps even morally: never love anything that wont rot. Our affection for the organic makes a family of all creatures for whom tempus fugit; rot distinguishes us from rocks. At this level, rot defines life."

You see by now I was hooked by this line of thought and relating it to the conversations I had been having with Gok. I accept that most of the illness and disease we discuss with our medical practitioner involves some sort of mucid pustulience and rot but for me somehow the graphic pictorial description of defecations necessary to communicate with your gastroenterologist goes that step too far and is very difficult. Even more confronting is to discuss it in front of the pretty young intern he asked to include in one of our discussions. Finding this article up front in the weekend news would have bolstered me enough even without the next gem I was to find embedded within.

Speaking of the children who go through life never eating dirt and the mothers who spray them with Mortien before school she strays to the potential benefits of parasites. She tells the tale of Yahoo executive Jasper Lawrence, so debilitated by adult onset asthma that he went to Cameroon and deliberately infected himself with hookworm by walking barefoot around public latrines. Lawrence who now considers himself cured runs a Tijuana clinic that offers helminthic therapy (inoculation with hookworm or whipworm) for the treatment of chronic conditions including asthma, autism, psoriasis, lupus, inflammatory bowel diseases (such as Crohn's disease and (Woo-Hoo) colitis) and even multiple sclerosis.

Imagine that, for the cost of the airfare and accommodation in Cameroon or airfare and clinic time in Tijuana, whichever was cheaper, I could not only be cured but could set up the underground rail link to import said worms for the treatment of this disease. Not convinced, then I should point out that colitis is not understood by Gok or his Royal College of Gastroenterologists to any greater degree than that it is genetic. Yes it runs in families if you'll forgive the pun.

Now you see that this is not merely one of those me-me rants you would usually expect on these pages. I see it (and I know that 'I' is only an exaggeration of 'me') as a reaching out to help mankind or at the least familykind. Closing in as I am on the twilight years of my life this seems like the opportunity to marshal learned skills to a cause not unlike that of Dickens character Carton from A Tale of Two Cities, I quote "It's a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it's a far, far better rest I go to than I have ever known."

Well; Aunty of course






Maybe with a yellow crevat I can get a job with the Galway chamber of commerce

Unbenounced to Hugh and Jack, John casts out Pats deamons


Mary Boyle owes a lot to MAD comics Spy V Spy for her fashion sense

World Cup fever

The Soccer world cup kicks off this month and England is getting very excited. You won't believe what I'm living with.... such a chav! xx Kel

Question answered

No Kell, it doesn't mean that I give up walking around with the tooth brush in my gob. Doing that is just as important, indeed it is probably even more important now that scientists have learnt that dental hygiene, specifically tooth brushing is instrumental in maintaining good blood pressure and hence overall health. Notwithstanding this the new teeth and their structural components commonly known as plate provide a myriad of new crevices and hide holes for chewed food to store for future nourishment. Similar to a cow chewing its cud I can enjoy breakfast muesli right through to lunch. It's preferable however to remove and rinse the denture, rinse the mouth, pry loose with a brush the pieces of food jammed between remaining teeth and massage gums in general paying particular attention to those gums now in direct contact with the denture. You see as this strange gum disease progresses the gum bone erodes for want of a better word, the gums clinging to the retreating bone recede leaving much of the root tooth exposed providing excellent storage areas for food particles. When for whatever reason a tooth is removed remaining teeth once crowded together relax and move like my waistline does into the space provided by loose bracered trousers, into the vacated space. This movement creates even more nooks and crannies, gaps big enough for a curious though eyeless tongue to sometimes finds itself trapped. Truly just as Christopher learned when he once climbed into a cream can, you must remember the way you came in and reverse the process to extract. No, getting around with a tooth brush in my gob is just as important as ever and not just for me. Aren't you glad you asked this question?

Whilst warmed to this subject I should answer a few as yet unasked questions I for one always wanted to ask. Yes it is still very strange to have this what feels from inside like a very large foreign object in my mouth. Strangest is the hardness and unfeeling nature of the hard palate. It's somewhat bionic really. Hot foods and drinks no longer blister this as they once could. The teeth themselves and I suppose gums must have been able to feel and taste for now there is an obvious lack of both. Tasting is now a very stranger mechanism. Any chance I had to become a professional wine taster is shot. The first mouthful of food doesn't start to taste until the chewing is well under way. This has had the unusual and probably healthy result of encouraging me to chew my food for much longer.

Another noticed effect is the tendency to constantly suck on the plate extracting air from between it and the hard palate. I'm trying to train myself not to do this as it has the effect as the day wears on of making the plate taste bad, not at all unlike the taste of stale chewing gum which of course you can spit out. Ar! yes, Spit! I have always prided myself on my expertise at this. Patent illustration of my failure ever to have grown up. Now this skill is lost and I'm doubtful that there is enough time left to re learn. The ball of gob which once I hoiked from the roof of my mouth so expertly gets caught on the back edge of the plate and mostly winds up between it and the real roof of my mouth. Even with the plate out, the absence of the four front teeth has left me a child like novice at this once Olympic level skill.

R

Pretty Eh!
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Gabby with both her favorite handbags at her mini family day




That day the world didn't end