Coconuts

In my browsing for cures for chronic fatigue type of illnesses, I came across some information touting coconut oil as having anti-microbial properties, including against the herpes family of viruses, as well as other health benefits. Supposedly people in tropical cultures, who probably eat a lot of coconut, don't have as many of the modern Western chronic illnesses.

This reminded me of another place I had seen coconut used for some interesting purposes. Sometime last year, when I could still do my own grocery shopping, while waiting for a pizza to cook at Whole Foods Market, I would browse the aisles for interesting things. Being concerned about waste and the environment, I found the natural cleaning products to be interesting. While "organic" food is going Walmart, natural cleaning products still appears to be fringe and somewhat questionable. Seventh Generation appears to be the best-looking brand. The main ingredient in the dishwashing products appeared to be coconut of some form. I wondered how coconut was going to clean my dishes, especially the germs.

But maybe it can, who knows....

I also wonder how many of the world's dishes can be cleaned by the world's coconut supply.

Ticks on the Brain

How is it that doctors in California say that you can't get Lyme disease in California, or that it is so rare that it doesn't need to be thought of, while veterinarians in California are very aware that dogs get Lyme disease?

Check out some state and county data:

Dogs and Ticks 101: Interactive Maps

If any of those doctors are dog-owners, and if they vaccinate their dogs for Lyme disease, I really wonder how their brains work.

***

CDC's Tularemia FAQ

Apparently, tularemia can be gotten from handling "infected sick animals". And "Francisella tularensis is highly infectious. A small number of bacteria (10-50 organisms) can cause disease." Yet they also claim that "People have not been known to transmit the infection to others, so infected persons do not need to be isolated."

Last time I checked, humans are animals.

Pain in the Butt

That's what penicillin injections are.

Strange moments of the day.

My boss was trying to talk to me on the phone about the Bible, and I was starting to have mental and physical fatigue, and then my arm wigs out. Hm, haven't had one of those in a long time. Which leads me to suspect...

that possibly seizures are a side-effect of certain antibiotics, or made worse by them:

Seizure complications of antibacterial treatment

***

Things that make you go hmm, when said by a doctor, or probably anyone:

"Oh, there are a lot of things I'd like to do to your sister." Followed by, "She's so cute."

***

A few days ago, I managed to drive to my condo, picking up a coworker and his girlfriend from work nearby along the way, so that he could help me do a "laptop transfer" across the bay. He asked what things I had besides fatigue. I started describing how several months ago, I needed to cross the street to get to a doctor's office, and I was stuck figuring out when to cross the street, because I couldn't think what the crosswalk signals and red and green traffic signals meant, so I waited two or three cycles.

I realized I was driving, so I quickly said, "Uh, that's gotten better!" Mostly. That portion of the drive was only two minutes long anyways....

To Everything There Is A Season

This song has been appearing in my head the last couple of days. Maybe partly because of the "turn turn turn" I have up there, going through my old posts, and thinking about my own situation. But maybe more because of the amazing series of posts Lara is writing this week.

I actually didn't know until a couple months ago that the song lyrics are taken from the Bible, Ecclesiastes.

3:1 To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven;
3:2 A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;
3:3 A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;
3:4 A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
3:5 A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
3:6 A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away;
3:7 A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
3:8 A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.

Thinking Bloggers

I'm a little behind on catching on to blog memes and tagging and I don't know if this has a name, but Lara recently awarded me a Thinking Blogger Award. I'm surprised people actually read my blog, especially people who are writers. Reading the other blogs that she hilighted made me aware that there are some very good writers out there, not only thinking-wise but stylistically. I know I think a lot, but my writing style is more like *splat*.

I think I'm supposed to nominate five of my own selections. However, I don't think I'm even reading five blogs regularly right now.

Life: The Ongoing Education
I'm nominating Lara back. She and I both started having some tough times at around the same time, and also spent a week in the hospital. While mine seems to be a physical illness, and hers a psychological struggle, we've found that there is considerable overlap. She writes openly and honestly about difficult topics such as cutting, and makes me care about it too. Although I've danced in the same room with her weekly for the past couple of years, I don't think we would have had these "conversations" if it weren't for blogging. And as strange as it might sound, sometimes reading her blog was almost the only thing I could do.

monoceros blogs
The first stranger's blog that I was impressed enough by to keep reading. I came across her blog on a search of "Vienna Teng", found some wonderful poems (by others), beautiful writing, and deep thoughts and feelings about life. The poems that she selects to share are accessible even to non-English majors like me. One of the first poems I read made it easier for me to imagine what it's like for the many friends I met in graduate school and at work, who live between two countries. Reading her blog was also one of the first times I was aware of appreciating the way it was written, the use of language, sentence structure, etc. (in that Singaporean sort of way).

Vienna Teng's scrapbook
I mentioned her above. If you don't already know, she's a singer and songwriter, also a former computer science geek and Stanford graduate. My sister mentioned that not only does she make wonderful music, but she's also wise and makes people think, as can be seen by what she says she values most in life.

To Be Determined
As I said, I'm not reading enough blogs to have five selections.

Poems
So I'll cheat and share with you, not a blog, but some of my best friend's published poetry. She's been making me think for about seventeen years.
Three Poems
Is torn alike. I sometimes touched my aim,

Smiling

One of my coworkers used to come around to my cube every once in a while and remark, "You're too happy." This comment first struck me as a little puzzling and amusing. I never thought of myself as being exceptionally happy. So if I was so unusual, did that mean that other people were not so happy? I'd smile through staff meetings. Another coworker also told me that I was always smiling, and it makes other people feel good.

Once during an exceptionally hot 100 degree weather Waltz Week, after everybody was sweating and exhausted from learning the Russian Mazurka Quadrille, suddenly RP spun around and pointed directly at me, announcing to the entire class, "She's still smiling!" I probably smiled back with wide eyes.

I took a lot of the beginning and intermediate dance classes many times over. Half the fun came from just smiling at each new partner, some of whom were quite flustered and apologetic, but smiling always seemed to make them more relieved. And I really find it fun to dance with beginners, sometimes.

One of my former boyfriends asked me why I smiled when I'm napping or going to sleep. Again, these sorts of questions were puzzling. Why not? Sleeping is comfortable and fun. At least, I thought so....

I didn't realize that smiling was so unusual. But apparently unusual enough when just walking around that I attracted multiple stalkers while using public transportation when I did an internship in the city one summer. One of the train yard workers tried to engage me in conversation every day, and hit on me, and said something to the effect of my having such a nice smile unlike all the people walking around with serious scowls on their faces. The other stalker was totally creepy. I learned to walk really fast with five foot long strides.

After turning in a paper at the History Corner after an all-nighter, I suddenly found myself smack face to face with Chelsea Clinton and secret service agents behind her. I must have been a frightful sight, with raccoon eyes, glasses, disheveled, rained-on, and disoriented from lack of sleep. To top it off, there was no hiding the wide-eyed surprised look in my face. I didn't know what else to do but smile, and she smiled genuinely back at me.

When we were little, my uncle used to pick me up by the feet to turn my smile upside-down. Of course, that just brought out more laughter.

My mom says I was always smiling when I was a baby...

Well, this was to remind myself of myself, because until recently, my neutral state was always to have a smile on my face and feel that way, and it's really weird to feel like a different person.

***

Speaking of dancing, I get all the dance e-mails about performances and events, and wish I could be a part of it. I'm so curious what this Friday's special gig will be like, I almost want to drag myself there.

Hello to the Year of the Pig

For this new year's post, I'm going to try to take a little break from talking about the stuff I've been blogging about in every post since October.

First, a note to self. I'm going to have to start using less cryptic titles because even I have no idea what my previous posts are about from the titles I choose.

Vacuuming my room a couple of times in the last half year has been the most exertion I've done. Afterwards I get a really strange shaking in my right arm as if I've done a thousand times the work. I made sure to vacuum before New Year's day:

Superstitions during the New Year period

I'm wearing my red pajamas, and I'm not washing my hair today. But I don't think I can keep this going for the entire fifteen day New Year period.

For New Year's Eve dinner yesterday, we had lotus root soup, steamed catfish, chicken with ginger and green onions, the vegetarian dish with rice noodles and fungus stuff, and fried pork. I figure I need to remind myself what kind of Chinese food we eat.

Here are some somewhat fitting horoscopes for the Pig year. At least the ones I checked, for Dragon and Pig:

Chinese Horoscopes for 2007

Goodbye to the Year of the Dog

Six months is long enough to almost forget what it's like to be the real me. But who is the real me, if this is reality? The real me didn't seem to know any limits, physically or mentally.

You don't normally think too much about the fact that you don't have to think about doing things. When you need to go grocery shopping, you just hop in the car and go do your shopping. When you need to eat, you just chomp away and enjoy your food. When you want to read something, you read. There's no thought or effort involved. When you need to work, you do it. When your friends want to hang out, you go enjoy.

I had a difficult time imagining how I would handle work and kids in the future, but that's a sort of easy difficulty, where you're still capable of handling it both physically and mentally. How can I think about these things when I can't even take care of myself? (Unless someone is willing to date me while I'm in my pajamas in bed....)

If you had an illness that might make you unable to care for your children, would you still have children?

***

Goodbye to the year of the dog. Hopefully it's a good thing. This year of the dog was supposed to be a bad year for dragons. I guess dogs and dragons are on opposite sides of the twelve year cycle. How well do dragons and pigs get along?

Random Babble

However hard it is to get through the day, every day, I have to thank God that it's not worse.

My mom has so much wisdom, I don't think I can remember a fraction of it. And Chinese sayings sound so much wiser and poetic than things I hear in English. Too bad I don't understand them or remember them.

Something about heroes not seeing white hair.

Something about if the heavens want a person to do great things, it has to first torture the person.

Something about Wang Jingwei, who was considered a traitor during the Chinese-Japanese War, after the war naming his two granddaughters something-lun and something-sou, because the words lun and sou are from a saying often quoted during the war, about the sky becoming blue and mountains becoming green again. That he was actually doing it for his country, and afterwards there really was less suffering.

***

The life line on my right hand (for females) is pretty strong and curved but not as much as my mom's. Mine has a split right in the middle, which my mom said is the trouble I'm encountering now.

While we're on the subject... my head line is strong, long, and straight (not good for girls...), and my heart line is very straight and runs into my head line. I guess no romancey-schmancy stuff for me....

My aunt ended up in the ER because of a kidney stone. My mom diagnoses things better than the doctors can. They ruled out a kidney stone. My mom said it's a kidney stone, from the history and type and location of pain. She was right. Doctors have a lot of education and training, but a lot of them leave their brains behind.

My mom said we shouldn't have sold my aunt's old house, because when everything is good, don't change anything. It has good feng shui. Good things happened after they bought that house. Right after the house was sold, apparently, the rash appeared on my leg. Maybe I should have taken the house as we had been considering.

AIDS and Syphilis

The briefest description I could come up with to describe this illness is a cross between AIDS and syphilis. Not that I really have any idea what those diseases are like. In fact, my primary care doctor must have thought my symptoms were so suggestive of AIDS and syphilis that he had me tested for those diseases. I suppose, with the fatigue, history of a rash, psychiatric symptoms, and other weird things. Sometime, I kind of want to ask him, um... how likely is it for a person who hasn't um... you know... to get syphilis? Since primary care doctors get that kind of information in the first five minutes of a patient meeting them. So he thought it could have been an infectious disease, until the couple of tests he ordered came back negative. Hm... is that the extent of possibility? There's always a time in history before the cause of a disease is identified.

Slightly more descriptively, mentally, it's kind of like being a little bit retarded, a little bit autistic, a little bit schizo, depressed, bipolar, with attention-deficit disorder, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder coming out of nowhere, and a little bit epileptic. Add in a little movement disorder. And the fatigue is kind of like running a marathon and then climbing Mount Everest while having a bad flu. And the fibromyalgia symptoms, hard to describe, but chronic pain is worse than any cut, bruise, cramp, sprain, headache I've ever had.

***

So there are AIDS conspiracy theories, actually they're more like accident theories. They're actually quite plausible, like contaminated vaccine programs in Africa. What is difficult for people to wrap their minds around is that it's possible to be responsible for such huge disasters. There are people who deny the Holocaust occurred, or that global warming is really a danger.

I was contemplating the plausibility of such accident theories, and then this graph from Wikipedia popped in my head:

Who knows how much of that is really due to AIDS or how accurate it is, but the graph is quite impressive. I think it takes an even wilder imagination to imagine that AIDS suddenly appeared out of nowhere across multiple countries in Africa on such a large scale. They must have had a whole lot of monkey-hunting accidents, and be sleeping around on some order of magnitude beyond imagination to make it spread that quickly to such a large percentage of the population.

Believing

I was sitting in the kitchen eating dinner yesterday and thinking about how my doctor had just called and spent twenty minutes on the phone with me. He doesn't seem to be put off by my uncensored blurtings of things like, "So what do you *really* think about all of this...?", among other things. Although he doesn't really answer the question and says it's my decision. Well, that wasn't the question. If I had been a doctor with a new patient like me dropping in and suddenly dropping mysteriously ill and talking about weird things, I'd have probably thought she were crazy and not have the patience. But who knows, maybe he's just doing his job.

Anyway, what I was getting to, is that I felt like I wished he could believe me, believe in the possibility of things without evidence so far, and take on faith the things I describe that can't be understood without experiencing them oneself. Because he's a pretty nice guy, seems to be a good person, and wants to help. It would be even better if that kind of person were able to believe and trust people.

But I do know what it's like to not be able to believe things I can't understand. So, being frustrated with him talking to me yet not quite believing me, gave me some sort of revelation.

Can't Even Imagine

Although this past week, my mind has been too blank and tired to even write in my blog, I managed to watch some television tonight.

A PBS film about the United States biological weapons program in the mid-twentieth century:

The Living Weapon

You just want to cover your ears, hide your eyes, and pretend that such a dark side of humanity doesn't exist, and that our governments don't commit such crimes.

I have been reading about conspiracy theories that cover all sorts of diseases from AIDS to chronic fatigue syndrome to Gulf War Illness, mostly all being related by (possibly genetically engineered) mycoplasma infections. It is too hard to believe that our government could engage in such secrecy and cover-ups, at the cost of human suffering even of its own civilians.

But a PBS film is a reliable source. Although the film was brief, it stated plainly such things as, accidental deaths from working in the biological weapons labs would be covered up in secrecy, human volunteers were not told the real reasons for the research, and they sprayed deadly stuff over the ocean and "simulants" over cities and in buildings. Imagine the possible information that hasn't been declassified.

Before getting sick myself, I probably would have totally dismissed all the stuff I've read on the Web as quack material. I don't think this illness has warped my mind that much. It's just that when you get sick yourself, you have a reason to care, and you know the diseases are real and serious. Then you start to read, and the stuff, maybe not all, but enough, really does make sense and isn't that crazy. If more people cared, it wouldn't be relegated to the stuff of quack research.

Unfortunately, the nature of these illnesses is that the people who are sick are so disabled that they can't help themselves, speak out, or do research. And it takes about three people to take care of one sick person. (And that is pretty much the idea behind biological weapons that disable rather than kill.) All the people who know and care are bogged down. So these are silent illnesses to society. Nobody hears about or thinks much about Gulf War Illness, chronic fatigue syndrome, or Lyme disease ever, until you yourself or a loved one gets sick, then it becomes your entire life.

Who knew that getting bitten by a stupid tick would do this, enter into a political medical war, and also the possibility of covert government operations.

Maybe I shouldn't be thinking about these things, and just think about how to treat the disease and get better. But reading about how to treat such diseases inevitably leads to this information.