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."

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