Digest 20

Potpourri

Time to lighten up. Herein, a collection of unrelated, random thoughts. A potpourri, if you will.

So, there is a website called “How many of me?” Couldn’t resist typing in my unusual name: Shorey Chapman. The immediate response: zero, as in not any. OMG! Existential crisis! Took a quick look in the mirror—I seem to be here, but who really knows? The wonderful worldwide web doesn’t think so. Maybe it’s a kind of reverse solipsism, the belief that all of you are just my imagination. On reflection, the answer is actually “inadequate data base.”

As it happens, I seem to be unusual in more than just my (apparently) unique name. To begin at the beginning, I was born in 1939 on a tiny lsland off the southern coast of Nova Scotia. As I have mentioned elsewhere, my parents were American citizens, temporarily residing in Canada, so I am also a citizen of America, by right of blood (jus sanguines). Renewing my passport a few years ago was not easy, since I have only copies of the papers my parents originally filed with the American Embassy, and it took several months for the State Department to dig up the original documents in Washington D.C.

We were on that dot of an island because my parents had just graduated from a Fundamentalist bible school, my father having just been ordained as minister, and his first parsonage was in West Head, serving five fisherman families. My mother was just 18 and lonely during her pregnancy, as my father was never around. Too soon, she discovered him in a compromising situation with another man. That’s right: a closeted gay Fundamentalist minister, in 1940, in the Dark Ages, when divorce was not an option.

Some years ago, in Science magazine, there appeared an article about a study of German cities that were carpet-bombed by the Allies. This study found that a surge of left-handers had been born in the months after the bombings, and the conclusion was that maternal stress had inhibited development of the left side of the babies’ brains, thus requiring the right side of their brains to assume all functions normally controlled by the left. I knew immediately that my mother had been similarly stressed, thus explaining my left-handedness, in a large family of right-handers.
Much later, when we were discussing all this, my mother admitted that she had been crying while nursing me, that her tears were falling on my nearly bald head, and that I had looked up to her as if to ask, “What have I done wrong?”

Fast-forwarding to the late 1970’s: I was a patient at the San Francisco VA Hospital, being treated by a pioneer in Biofeedback (Amy Wisniewski) for what they called General Anxiety Syndrome (repeated attacks for no apparent reason). At first, the treatment involved hooking me up to an EEG device that showed the results on a couple of displays, while I talked about emotive subjects. When the device was attached to the right side of my brain I soon became able to identify the level of activity (there are four) and eventually to move from one level to another with ease. That, after all, is the goal of Biofeedback—it turns out that we have a lot of faith in the output of mechanical devices.

On the other hand (or side, as the case may be) when the EEG was attached to the right side of my brain, it stayed stuck in the third lowest level of activity, no matter what I said or did, and I was never able to change that level. I was reminded then of the study I wrote about above, the fact that my right foot is a size smaller than my left, my right leg shorter than my left, and that I had once noted while walking on the beach in Pacifica that my left foot was digging a deep hole in the sand, while the other foot left only a faint impression. I began trying to train my right foot to share in the battle with gravity, to no avail, I also have an artificial right knee, a damaged right knee (about which, more later) and my right shoulder is severely arthritic. The arch in my right foot has fallen completely, which is not surprising given that it has carried the gravity load of a 190-pound man for more than 80 years. To sum up: I have an asymmetric brain, atop an asymetric body.

A couple of additional facts: I was also connected to a GSR (galvanic skin responder) and another that measured my pulse rate. This technique is used in lie detectors. After several weeks, the responses leveled off, and, subsequently my symptoms disappeared. I later learned that L. Ron Hubbard used the same devices to “clear” his Scientology subjects.

I also found a book, “Kudalini: Psychosis or Transcendence,” which described the exact symptoms that had been diagnosed as General Anxiety Syndrome, and I remembered that I had earlier attended a demonstration of Kundalini by Swami Muktananda in San Francisco. Coincidence? I think not.

As for the right hip, I’ve been an enthusiastic bowler most of my life, not least because bowling was the only sport at which I ever excelled (see issue #12), and more recently I bowled weekly in a Senior Handicap League. I began to notice significant pain in my right hip. I had been told for years that I had serious arthritis in that hip. Kaiser prescribed a series of increasingly powerful cortisone shots, while advising me that exercise was the best treatment, and that I should continue bowling. Eventually, I requested and received an MRI of the hip (X-rays showed only the arthritis), and was told that I had a “tear” in the gluteus medius, the muscle that provides lateral support to the hip. I was referred to a surgeon at Kaiser who specialized in arthroscopic repairs to that muscle.

This surgeon simply shook his head sadly, and said, “Too many tears in the muscle, too many tears in the tendon that attaches that muscle to the hip, nothing I can do.” Months later, the tendon detached completely and my pain was dramatically reduced, though, unknown to me, the support it had been providing was also dramatically reduced. Soon after, while returning to my bed from a late-night bathroom visit, I fell, heavily, had to call 911, and subsequently was in the operating room at Kaiser, receiving a titanium extension to my right femur (to replace about six inches that had been snapped off by my fall). While I was “opened up,” this surgeon made one last try to reattach the gluteus medius, which then held only for a few days. I was told by an Orthopedic P/A that the muscle was completely shredded and that I would need a cane for the rest of my life.

My only (foolish) hope is that modern medicine will eventually learn to transplant a pig muscle (they are now raising pigs specifically to transplant their organs into humans), though this would require the services of an orthopedist willing to bear the risk of possible failure in order to be among the first to accomplish the feat.

Final note: while searching online for info on my condition I found the following:

“Conclusion: In most cases, chronic injuries are much more common than acute tears. Because of the nonspecific and slowly progressive symptoms, patients are often misdiagnosed with osteoarthritis.or trochanteric bursitis. Patients typicllay present with an insidious onset of dull pain over the lateral hip…To our knowledge, our report is only the third case of acute traumatic tear of the gluteus medius…reported in the literature.”

Three other cases in the entire literature? I know I’m unusual, but, really…..