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If I had just one word to describe the members of our house this week, it would be “sick.” It started last week when Garrison (patient zero) brought home another day care plague. This led to not only another set of ear infections for him, it also opened the door for bacterial conjunctivitis (a.k.a. pink eye). Of course, his pink eye didn’t manifest until we were already out the door on a trip to Minnesota. After telephone consultation with our doctor’s office, we decided to wait until we got back to Madison on Monday to seek treatment.

On Monday, both his infections were diagnosed and he started on antibiotics. That same day, I went to work, but locked myself in an office to avoid my co-workers because I wasn’t sick enough to stay home, but I was sick enough to infect them.

Tuesday, I stayed home with Garrison because he wasn’t welcome at day care with pink eye and I was getting sicker.

Today, Wednesday, both Sarah and I were home sick, sick, sick. We’re both hoping for a better tomorrow.

On the upside, Dalla’s mysterious sickness, which prompted her to wake Sarah three times in the middle of the night on Sunday night, appears to have passed.

As mentioned above, we went to Minnesota last weekend to visit some of my relatives. They have a farm west of Rochester that is conveniently located roughly half-way between Madison and Watertown (where my Mom lives). She drove out and met us at the farm, so we shared Mothers Day with her and my relatives.

As we travel, we’re slowly discovering Garrison’s tolerance for trips of various lengths. A driving trip of about four hours is pretty much the limit of what he’ll tolerate before melting down. We flew to Cleveland in April to visit Sarah’s family and for flights, anything over 1.5 hours is tough on everyone.

When we visited Cleveland, Garrison came down with an ear infection on the day we flew out there. Sarah had him checked for an ear infection the day prior to leaving. The doctor saw nothing wrong with his ears. The morning of our departure, Garrison became inconsolable shortly before we needed to leave for the airport. While Sarah put him down for a nap, I pushed back our flight by five hours (and paid a change fee). We eventually arrived in Cleveland, only to suffer through a sleepless night. A trip to urgent care showed both of his ears to be infected and back on antibiotics he went.

It’s become a given that if we travel, Garrison is going to come down with a previously undiagnosed ear infection as we’re walking out the door. Supposedly, the ear infections diminish radically when kids get to be about two years old. That can’t come soon enough.

For dinner last night we had stuffed turkey cutlets on the grill. At the time, they seemed like nothing special.Once I went to bed, however, the turkey cutlets struck with a vengence. I was up all night either preparing to vomit, vomiting, or recovering from vomiting. When I was in bed I couldn’t sleep because my guts were roiling and I was shivering uncontrollably. It was not fun.

Sarah was lucky enough to be generally unaffected.

Today, I stayed home from work because I still had fairly strong nausea and a wicked headache. Of course, I couldn’t eat much beyond a few crackers and some liquids which meant that I had the energy and activity level of a comatose sloth.

No more turkey cutlets. Ever.

Sarah and I were talking about scars last night and I started lamenting that I don’t have any interesting scars.There are people who have scars that tell an interesting story:

• “That’s the scar I got while part of the Navy’s Underwater Demolitions Team…”
• “I got that scar while hiking barefoot up Mount Everest…”
• “That scar marks the spot where the tiger’s jaws closed around my arm…”

Instead, all of my scars are from really mundane, boring events and accidents:

• The scar on my elbow is from falling off my bicycle at an extremely low speed while trying to make a tight corner right in front of the house.
• The scar on my finger is from a cut that I got while fixing a bicycle.
• The scar on my leg is the result of a cut I got while hiking.
• The scar near my eye is from the time another kid hit me in the head with a tennis racket when I was just a little kid.

I guess I’ll just have to start doing more interesting things if I want to get more interesting scars.

I’ve always hated going to see the eye doctor. Invariably, the madman would put dilation drops in my eyes sometime in the afternoon, and I would remain dilated not just into the evening, but often until the next morning as well. Of course, this prolonged dilation was nearly always accompanied by a splitting headache that only a dark room and sleep could cure.

As it turns out, all of those previous visits could have ended much more happily had I just possessed a bit of knowledge about eye dilation, the chemicals that drive the process, and the eye itself.The purpose of eye dilation in adults is to allow the doctor to easily look inside the pupil at the retina (back and sides of the eye). Normally, the pupil would slam shut when a bright light is shined directly into it. Dilation medicine forces the pupil to stay wide open even as painfully bright lights are repeatedly shined into and through it (causing the eyes to tear up, the eye lids to slam down, and the doctor to wonder out loud why being repeatedly blinded is such an uncomfortable procedure). That all makes a perverse sort of sense.

In children, who apparently have wildly active eyes, eye dilation also allows the doctor to more accurately assess the state of the eye’s lens since the dilation solution also temporarily paralyzes the muscle that manipulates the lens. This paralysis is also why dilated adult eyes cannot focus since the lens cannot be manipulated to clearly view objects at a variety of distances.

Like most people in most professions, eye doctors operate on a least-common denominator paradigm. That is, if something works well for 95% of the population, and it works well enough for the remaining 5%, that process, procedure, or medicine is what eye doctors will use. When it comes to eye dilation solutions most doctors will direct their techs to use just one solution on all their patients. They do so regardless of the fact that eye dilation solutions come in a variety of strengths and chemical formulations.

Where this paradigm breaks down is that people are neither numbers nor machines and the least-common denominator solution is not always the best choice. The eyes of different people react differently to various eye dilation solutions.

The key variable is the amount of pigmentation present in the iris. Brown eyes have more pigment in the iris while blue and green eyes contain less pigment. The pigment (melanin) acts as a physical filter to slow and obstruct the dilation medicine from reaching the muscles responsible for pupil dilation. Brown eyes posess more melanin and therefore filter out more of the dilation chemicals and slow the transfer of the remaining chemicals to the muscles responsible for pupil contraction. If you have light eyes (small amounts of melanin) you possess a relatively weak filter that is easily overcome by the chemicals present in the dilation solution. In blue eyes the dilation medicine not only reaches the muscles faster, but it also reaches them in significantly higher quantities due to the reduced filtering done by the melanin. These higher quantities then lead to prolonged periods of eye dilation.

Eye doctors can afford to use just one solution for the most part because having one’s eyes dilated for a prolonged period of time may be inconvenient, but it is hardly life threatening. If you possess blue eyes and if you call the eye doctor the next morning to complain about the fact that you’re still dilated, he or she will essentially give you a version of the football “Walk it off!” speech dressed up in some medical-feel-good mumbo-jumbo.

I have light blue eyes; my current eye doctor has repeatedly commented on how lightly pigmented they are. That means I need less dilation solution to achieve the same results as a darker eyed person. But that’s not what I was getting all these years. Because I didn’t know, and because I didn’t understand, I got the least common denominator solution. I was getting the same solution as a dark brown eyed person. It’s no wonder that I was often dilated for periods of 16 hours or more and that I suffered some pretty awful headaches. That was something like asking a non-smoker to chain smoke two packs of unfiltered Lucky Strikes and then wondering why they were all fucked up by the experience.

Now when I go to the eye doctor, I know to direct the tech to check with the eye doctor before dilating my eyes. The doctor can then recommend a dilation solution appropriate for my level of pigmentation.

As it turns out a solution half the strength of the least-common denominator solution is still a bit too powerful. My eyes were dilated at roughly 15:00 yesterday with the half-strength solution and they were still ever so slightly dilated when I finally got tired of the whole mess and went to bed at 23:00.

The moral of the story is that if you have light blue eyes or green eyes, make the tech check with the doctor before dilating your eyes. As GI Joe says, “Knowing is half the battle.”

If you woke up this morning and found yourself wondering, “Just where can I see disturbing medical imagery taken by amateur photographers of their onw wounds?”, you’re in luck. To those needy souls I recommend Show Me Your Wound.

Perhaps you remember the big, expensive, confusing Medicare reform bill of the not too distant past. The bill that added a prescription drug benefit to Medicare? The one that was just a big give-away to the pharmaceutical industry?

Even though the bill only recently took affect, the government has all but conceeded that it doesn’t do nearly enough to help those on Medicare, and it doesn’t do a damn thing for those of us who aren’t on Medicare (thankfully).On Tuesday, Tommy Thompson (the head of Health and Human Services) acknowledged that it was just a matter of time until the US allows importation of drugs from Canada and other nations and that he would press GeeDubya not to stand in the the way of such actions.

By doing so, Thompson all but acknowledged that the much bally-hooed Medicare drug benefit was a worthless broken down cart-horse already. Thanks, Tommy. That was a great multi-million dollar give-away to the pharmaceutical industry.

So, people using the almighty Medicare drug discount cards still can’t afford their medications. Those of us fortunate (unfortunate?) enough not to have Medicare coverage also suffer from obscenely high drug costs. Of course, the drug industry always claims that high drug costs are necessary to support continued R&D into new, exciting (and expensive) drugs. If drug prices were to fall, the industry titans proclaim, the pharmaceutical industry could no longer afford to persue fabulous numbers of new drugs and treatments and everyone would suffer.

This, of course, is a huge load of big business horse-shit.

First of all, as anyone with a chronic medical condition will tell you, the drug companies have zero interest in curing chronic conditions. Diabetics, people with high blood pressure, or those with chronic pain, for instance, are much more profitable customers for the drug companies when they are simply taking medication to control their diseases. If the drug companies were to cure these folks somehow, they would no longer be steady, reliable sources of income.

The drug companies will gladly try to find cures for cancer (at least the cancers that affect many, many people) because dead people can’t possibly buy drugs from drug companies. So, by finding ways to keep cancer patients alive longer drug companies benefit because they can sell more drugs.

Of course, it goes without saying that most drug companies are only interested in treating the most common diseases. If a disaease affects something like 1000 people per year in the US, most drug companies have little or no interest in developing, testing, and bringing to market a drug to treat those people. The cost of doing so, most drug companies will tell you, would make such a drug unaffordable for 999 of the 1000 afflicted people.

So, drug companies will develop drugs to treat (not cure) chronic conditions. They will develop drugs to cure common deadly conditions. But, they only do this to make a profit, not out of the good of their heart.

What hope do those of us with chronic medical conditions or with unusual medical conditions have for finding a cure? Well, those hopes lie with those folks conducting research in universities and medical research labs.

Unfortunately, many of these labs are growing more and more dependant on funding from drug companies as government funding for basic science is cut time and time again. So, even these labs are forced to spend more and more of their time doing work for the drug companies on the drug companies’ agendas, rather than research that might benefit the public directly.

What would be the net effect of lowering drug prices across the board by government mandate? Well, Americans would spend less on prescription drugs. Since Americans would spend less on prescription drugs, more money would be available in the economy to fund independant research at universities and medical labs. So, the amount of money spent on drug research might not change, but Americans would get more control and accountability over how drug research dollars are spent.

If those working in labs and universities were able to conduct research without the harness of industry directing them in particular directions, we might see some truly amazing breakthroughs in drug research.

Of course, there would be some side effects (can anyone talk about drugs without a side effects disclaimer? See my ad in Men’s Health magazine for more information.) to lower drug prices and smaller drug companies.

Doctors would no longer get to take drug industry sponsored vacations. Sorry doc, you’ll have to dig deep into your six-figure salary to go to Bora Bora this year.

Golf courses would have to find other customers to pay their midday greens fees as drug companies would no longer have the money to take doctors out on the golf course for eighteen holes of golf and six drinks on the nineteenth hole.

Doctors would no longer be all but paid outright to prescribe particular medications for their patients.

Sure, there would be some side effects, but I’m sure that Bora Bora, golf courses, and doctors would muddle through somehow.