“And so I wake in the morning
And I step outside
And I take a deep breath and I get real high
And I scream from the top of my lungs
What’s going on?”
I may have done that once or twice in the mountains of Alaska. :)
(P!nk also does a nice cover of this song.)
“When individuals are too self-centered, they tend to be prone to fear, suspicion, anxiety and anger. Compassion and restraining from harming others act as an antidote to this.”
~ the Dalai Lama
MastCellAware.com is a very well written and presented website about mast cell diseases. This image shows one section of this web page.
Two of the most important sentences for me are: “These mediators can cause a variety of unpredictable symptoms in both children and adults, including skin rashes, flushing, abdominal pain, bloating, nausea, vomiting, headache, bone pain and skeletal lesions, and anaphylaxis. Triggers can be heat, cold, stress (physical or emotional), perfumes or odors, medications, insect stings, and foods.”
I don’t know about everything shown on this image, but for the last few months I have noticed that I have “raccoon eyes” at times, meaning that I develop really dark areas under my eyes. As the image shows, this is probably from allergies and/or food intolerances, which — thanks to MCAS — I can now confirm.
(I found this image on this Pinterest page.)
A friend bought me some of these USB-powered Christmas lights, and I like using them in the winter months, especially on days when it’s snowing, like today. They’d also be a nice “under $20” gift for one of those White Elephant Christmas gift exchange parties.
My favorite Midsomer Murders episode is ... one that nobody else has ever seen. It keeps coming to me in a recurring dream. There’s something to do with a warm swimming pool, then Ben Jones is undercover, with a beard, dark/dirty skin, and unkempt hair. Then a group of people get in the back of a large car, including Jones, Tom Barnaby, and me. (It’s nice to be in the middle of an episode). It must be something like the back of a limousine, because there are five or six of us sitting in two rows, looking at each other and talking.
A little later there’s something about an oriental woman and some gold. Near the end of the episode Tom starts singing, and he sounds really good, but the group can’t get funding for what they’re doing, presumably putting on some kind of show, but a famous woman helps them out, something to do with a commercial. Cully is involved around this time, and there’s also a black bear named William Hanks (I don’t know where that came from). Joyce is involved at several points, especially the end, and fortunately she doesn’t cook anything. :)
At the end of the episode Tom is sitting in a chair, and I’m standing on his left and Joyce is standing on his right. I say to them, “This is the best episode ever, it’s much more of a movie than an episode.” Joyce agrees, and Tom doesn’t say anything, but sits there with a satisfied smile.
I’ve had this dream at least twice so far, and I look forward to seeing it again the next time it’s on. :)
Per Wikipedia, Kounis syndrome, also referred to as allergic angina, is “a group of symptoms that manifests as unstable vasospastic, nonvasospastic angina, or acute myocardial infarction and is triggered by the release of inflammatory mediators following an allergic insult.”
Lisa Klimas adds this: “The phenomenon we now called Kounis Syndrome has previously been called by names like morphologic cardiac reactions, acute carditis and lesions with basic characteristics of rheumatic carditis. It is sometimes still referred to as allergic angina or allergic myocardial infarction/heart attack depending upon the presentation. Allergic angina, which affected patients as microvascular angina, was first noted to progress to allergic heart attack in 1991.”
From my perspective as someone just learning about mast cell activation disease, it’s interesting to see that this was known in 1991, but mast cell activation diseases weren’t really recognized until 2007 to 2010.
Until yesterday I only knew a little about a song called Alice’s Restaurant ... the end of it is the only part I remember. But yesterday I learned that it’s a story about some events that started on Thanksgiving Day, 1965. (You can find the story here on Wikipedia.)
It’s a long song — more of a funny story than a song — but here you go, Alice’s Restaurant, by Arlo Guthrie:
A friend introduced me to the movie Home for the Holidays many years ago, and it’s still the best Thanksgiving movie I know.
The more I thought about it, the more I thought that the word pericarditis sounded familiar, so I searched an electronic diary I used to keep and found this entry from January 3, 2008:
“I don’t remember the whole dream, just the very end, where I woke up with the word ‘pericardium’ in my brain. There’s nothing too peculiar about this except for one detail: I don’t remember ever hearing that word before in my life.”
“Later in the morning I looked it up online to see if I made it up, and it is indeed a real word. Even cooler is that it’s related to the chest/heart, where my niece hit me. Wikipedia says it is ‘a double-walled sac that contains the heart and the roots of the great vessels.’”
“I'm not saying that I've never heard this word before, only that I can't consciously recall hearing it before, and I had to try several spellings before I got it right. What I’m saying is that my conscious mind didn’t know the word, but my dreaming mind did.”
The dreaming mind and subconscious in general fascinates me.
On Sunday, November 3, 2019, I had just finished lunch, looked at the clock, and saw that I could fit in about an hour of work before the Broncos game started. I was looking forward to see how Broncos’ quarterback Brandon Allen would do in his first career start.
A minute later I had severe chest pain. At first I thought I was having an allergic reaction to lunch — Wolfgang Puck’s potato soup, which I’ll never eat again — but I quickly realized it was something heart-related.
So I eventually got myself to the hospital. Because of the way the pain instantly came on I was guessing blood clot, but the doctors think it’s something called Pericarditis, as explained in this image.
(The last song I heard before going into the hospital was Someone Saved My Life Tonight, and while the lyrics don’t fit the event, I was hoping the title would be a good match.)
This is one of my favorite road signs in the world, the sign that points you to Los Alamos, New Mexico. For whatever reason, being in New Mexico is one of the things in life that makes me happy.
Back in 2014 my family took a vacation together. We spent thousands of dollars doing all sorts of different things, but in the end, my favorite part was sitting on a couch one evening in Santa Fe with my niece and watching cooking shows. In small part this was because my sisters were angry with each other, and it was nice to get away from that tension and just relax with a nice person who had no agenda.
When I saw this image last night it reminded me not of the negatives of that vacation, but of the positives of spending time with people who have no agendas other than the wonder of the universe, and of how I’d like to spend the time I have here on Earth.
From this people.com story:
When Mary Steenburgen woke up from minor arm surgery in 2007, her brain was “only music,” an odd result that lead her to a new songwriting career — and one that may earn her another Oscar.
The actress, 66, said that her brain felt out of control immediately after surgery.
“I felt strange as soon as the anesthesia started to wear off,” she told IndieWire. “The best way I can describe it is that it just felt like my brain was only music, and that everything anybody said to me became musical. All of my thoughts became musical. Every street sign became musical. I couldn’t get my mind into any other mode.”
(In a slightly related story, Scientific American has an article titled, The Hidden Dangers of Going Under.)
This is the view you get when you go to the bathroom at the top of Rocky Mountain National Park, and you come out and everyone else is gone (and your camera lens is scratched).
“Honest, hopelessly romantic old-fashioned gentleman seeks lady friend who enjoys elegant dining, dancing and the slow bloom of affection.”
~ Claire Cook, Must Love Dogs (a favorite movie, and I’ll read the book this winter)
“It’s a bit of a riddle, but other people in your life have to be who they are so you can be(come) who you are.”
~ me, November 21, 2015
I became a fan of Mike Barr’s paintings back in 2016. This one is called Autumn Rain, but I actually like his darker, evening paintings even more.
From a story of how an 82-year-old woman with dementia improved significantly by changing her diet:
“A change in diet, which was comprised of high amounts of blueberries and walnuts, has proven to have had a strong impact on Sylvia’s condition that her recipes are now being shared by the Alzheimer’s Society ... Sylvia also began incorporating other health foods, including broccoli, kale, spinach, sunflower seeds, green tea, oats, sweet potatoes and even dark chocolate with a high percentage of cacao. All of these foods are known to be beneficial for brain health.”
“Mark and Sylvia devised to diet together after deciding that the medication on it’s own was not enough, they looked into the research showing that rates of dementia are much lower in Mediterranean countries and copied a lot of their eating habits.”
“Anything beautiful is worth getting hurt for.”
~ Prince (on New Girl)
