That Time I Almost Died Part VII

December 2008 (I think this string of blogs was titled “The Apotheosis of Payne”)

My body and psyche have capitulated, so when I return to the U.S. for Christmas, I will be remaining there for at least a few months while I seek First World care. The hope is that a diagnosis and treatment plan will be reached quickly, and that I’ll be back to reasonable health and London town by the spring. 

Back to business: Dec. 11th return trip to the hematologist: Not only was PMR ruled out, but another theory, B-12 deficiency, was checked off the list. In fact, my B-12 reading was one of the only indicators that was slightly high.

The hematologist showed me a computer screen clustered with bloodwork jargon that was supposed to illuminate us both. Evidently, nothing kooky dared show itself, which brought the doc to a new theory: hepatitis c. I felt like saying, "I’m flattered you think I’m happening enough for hepatitis C (the C stands for cool), but let’s face it, I’m not that outgoing.”

Instead I said something about how square my life had been, making hep C astronomically unlikely. I could see by the doubting smirk on her face she didn’t believe me. I protested, citing all the important stats of my boring life. With each word, her face became ever more scrunched and skeptical. This is the only time I’ve ever had trouble convincing a woman I don’t get laid much.

We went back and forth on this point, then she began to speculate wildly about tapeworms and rare liver diseases. Once I half-convinced the hematologist that hep c was a long shot, she offered a very unappealing Plan B; a bone marrow biopsy. My reaction must have said a lot, because she tried to backpedal a bit by saying: “I don’t think you’re as sick as you look."

The word biopsy is a downer at 89. When you’re 29, it leaves you vegetative. Maybe I'm just accustomed to the diagnosis roller coaster, because some of the initial shock value was lost on me. What replaced it was a very specific kind of resentment. Age 30 is just around the bend for me, and I couldn't help but think of how I spent my 20s: loitering in comedy clubs with comedians I mostly disliked. Comedians are a twisted and often very unamusing bunch. If you like people who take a Type A approach to annoying everyone around them, hang around comedians. If you want to be around a bunch of wannabe peacocks who think saying they have a fancy tail and actually having a fancy tail are the same thing, find your way to a comedy green room. If you like people with more tics than a woman who has been sexually trafficked, visit an open-mic.

The comics I started with also became great friends. Unfortunately, they were a small minority of...oh...let's just say single digits. The majority of comedians I’ve met do nothing but put several exclamation marks on a business that can only be described as heinous.  Don’t get me started on the bookers.

I spent my 20s in such company, all because of a delusion about “making it" in comedy (I can't even write it without cringing!). A poor choice on my part. But hey, any chump who bunny hops toward a mirage deserves what he gets.

I guess I should say a few words about the idea of public, socialized healthcare. Go to any scandalous online newsstory about healthcare, and you’ll find a spate of comments like, “Yeah, what do you expect from for-profit healthcare?” This statement states nothing whatsoever, but by blending vague cynicism with what sounds like industry jargon, it lets its author play the role of informed commentator. All that’s lacking is a misused Latin phrase. Referring to “empirical evidence” while providing no actual evidence or even demonstrating that you know what empirical means is another winsome tactic.

Hard not to laugh at Americans cheering on government conscripted medicine. Given how abominably government performs in all its other functions, why would anyone trust, let alone insist, that we turn over healthcare to government officials? A giant government system is a giant government system. It doesn’t matter if it’s the military or medicine, stealth bombers or stethoscopes, the results from plus-sized government are the same; lethal and inept. The same process (and underlying assumptions) that strands you in Iraq enables medical bureaucrats to hit the snooze button on your cancer treatment. Government healthcare is the collateral damage do-gooders have deemed acceptable. Health redistribution doesn’t work any better than wealth redistribution.

Yes, I’ve had wacky healthcare experiences in America. At age 12, during a family vacation in North Carolina, we stopped somewhere to eat BBQ ribs. I managed to get a splinter of rib caught in my throat. I wasn’t choking; it was just a scratchy obstruction. We were near Cherokee, North Carolina, an area which comes complete with live Cherokees. We pulled up to the first hospital we saw. Turns out, it was for Cherokees only, and I was turned away (had it been an emergency, I believe they would have been compelled to treat me).

Don't know where my comedy goes from here. Do know I need to get funny again. Hope I'm haven't become permanently pretentious. If I have, hopefully I'll recognize it and quit jokes forever. I'm not cut out for confessional folk comedy, and neither are crowds.

That Time I Almost Died Part V

We take you back to 2008...


It was a rough, teeter-totter week leading up to Monday’s neurology appointment. My mind has been teetering between regret about things not done and tottering toward vows to do things differently if my health ever improves. Luckily I’ve had some new symptoms to keep me company; painful spasming in my legs, feet, and toes, along with episodes of slurred speech. One day at lunch I reached for some pepper packets, and realized I couldn't seem to grip them. I watched in awed terror as they slipped through my suddenly useless fingers.

The neurologist’s facility was in Whitechapel; home of Jack the Ripper. I don’t want to say Whitechapel has changed since the murders, but let’s just say if Saucy Jack were around today, he wouldn’t be slicing up any pork.

Once inside the building, I was batted around like a loitering fly until I was eventually routed to neurology. The first thing I learned was that the person doing the examination wasn't the person I'd been told I was supposed to see. The second thing I learned was that their computer system had been down for several days, so the neurologist wasn't sure if he even had my charts. The third thing I learned was that there wasn’t going to be an MRI that day.

The neuro guy and I went through a Q&A similar to the one I’d been through with the hospital doctors. He seemed mostly unworried about my complaints, and didn’t seem to grasp (at least not openly) how weak and generally diminished I’ve become. This seems odd to me now, since his first observation was that I had limped my way into his office.

He indicated I had a few “borderline” results in my bloodwork, but nothing that really stood out. My blood platelets, iron, and calcium were “borderline,” but not exactly abnormal and nothing to be alarmed about. He kept alluding to hematologists, and seemed convinced almost from the get-go that my decline was more of a blood issue. The only time an MRI came up was when I brought it up.

He wondered aloud if I had caught some sort of exotic viral infection that had ravaged my immune system. I can’t even recall a stiff bout of sniffles over the last 5 months, so to me this sounds unlikely.

Dr. Feelnothing all but rolled his eyes when I repeated the MS theory, which is obviously a good thing. The last thing you want to h ear when you mention a hopeless diagnosis is, “MS, thank you! That’s the disease I was thinking of! Couldn’t remember the name.”

While I’m very happy he didn’t detect anything MS-like, given his overall demeanor, part of me worries that has as much to do with lazy investigation as it has with the chance that MS is the culprit.

Before sending me off to get milked for several more tubes of blood, the neurologist said in 2-3 weeks I would receive letters updating me on when I could see the necessary specialists. In other words, I have to wait 2-3 weeks to find out how long I’ll have to wait to see someone again. If the tortoise and the hare had raced in the UK, the tortoise also would have stopped off for a nap.

I haven’t even mentioned yet what an ordeal it was just to get this fruitless appointment. If you remember, my NHS (“universal healthcare”) GP let me go last week with the assurance I’d get a call from the neurologist. That call never came. I had to leave five increasingly frantic messages with multiple people over the course of the week before finally hearing back last Friday afternoon. And remember, this was after the GP felt it necessary to explicitly consider MS; so presumably, the MS theory was forwarded to the neurology folks. I gather then that possibly having a condition debilitating enough to headline its own telethon still doesn’t make you a priority. with NHS ("not for profit healthcare").

I booked another emergency appt. with my NHS GP for this afternoon. My plan was to bellow until her ears rang with a plan for getting me faster treatment. Her response: “There’s nothing I can do to speed up the process. I am sympathetic to their not considering it urgent. Your systems are very vague. First it was the shoulder, then orthopedic, now the dizziness and the weight loss…”

So I because I have a lot of symptoms that continue to grow in number and severity, this actually makes me less of a candidate for priority treatment. Wouldn’t you think it’d be the opposite? Wouldn’t you think a patient whose condition keeps deteriorating in unconventional ways would be sent to specialists faster in hopes of preventing the appearance of yet more symptoms? “There’s nothing I can do,” says my GP. Had I just walked in from the beginning and attributed everything to Planter’s Wart, perhaps I would have glided through the system.

I am really afraid of dying in London. Not just because of the whole death part, but because I’m afraid not even death will work properly in this soggy and unknowingly backward dystopia. I’m afraid I’ll die and instead of heading towards the light I’ll hear an announcement saying, “Due to improvement works, there are severe delays on the River Styx."

That Time I Almost Died Part III

In 2008...


When your general wellbeing is in freefall, it's amazing how quickly you just adapt to the latest symptoms. Ailments you shouldn't be adapting to you shrug off simply because you've forgotten what it's like to feel normal. For instance, I never used to mind cold weather. In fact, I was hot all the time and was the type who wore gloves maybe twice a year. But since October, I've been unable to keep warm. 55 degrees and I'm bundled up in a winter coat, gloves, scarf...and I'm still frozen.

People are like, "Mike, what's with the outfit? Going on a ski trip?" 

"Nope, just picking up my dry-cleaning."

It's quite dangerous, because you cease recognizing the gravity of symptoms you should be taking seriously. Instead of sprinting to the doctor, now when some new and sinister wrinkle materializes, I react the way you do when you find out someone's cousin is  from your hometown. "Really? Hmmm. How 'bout that? [Cue nondescript nodding]."

Probably the worst example of this is my recent weight loss. When I moved to London, I weighed about 130 lbs., a weight I've maintained since I was 18. I'm now down to about 114; a level I haven't seen since I was 14 and 4' 10". Strangely, this wasting away of my body didn't really alarm me that way it should have. Again, I just adjusted. Belts that droop to my crotch, suits that look more filled out on the hanger than on me...no problemo. Who made the rule that says undershirts have to be tight?

I mentioned I'd been having dizzy spells. Well, things came to a head the weekend of Nov. 7th;
I'd booked a weekend trip to Budapest. I was supposed to leave on a Friday, but on the train ride home the night before, I was having a hard keeping my balance. Immediately, I began picturing how this would fly in an unfamiliar city with an unfamiliar tongue. I opted to can the vacation, eat the losses, and do some touristy stuff around London instead.

On my day off I decided to hit the National Gallery. While there I suddenly felt faint and wobbly and had to flop onto to one of the Gallery's couches to get my bearings. I tried to make it look like I was just overwhelmed by the unfinished Michelangelo I'd been viewing.

The Monday following my museum episode, I had a bloodtest appointment with NHS ("universal healthcare"). It had taken weeks to secure, and fortunately, happened to be scheduled for when I needed it most. My appt. was at 10:52 Monday morning, so as per my GP's counsel, I consumed no food or water after 12:00 the night before.

I had the blood drawn, and was told the results would take 7-10 days and that I would either have to drop by the clinic or make an appt. to get them. Inconvenient yes, but thanks to my weekend wipeout, I was at least able to secure an emergency GP appt. for the next day.

The next day--Tuesday--I went to the GP's office determined to make it clear my health was in real jeopardy, and that I needed speedier care. I recounted the semi-collapse and everything leading up to it with as much animation and pantomime as my creaky physique would allow. The last time I had tried this all my GP had in the way of a response was, "Slow down." 

I begged her not to take her own advice.

Miraculously, my "7-10 day" blood results were already in. They seemed to rule out anemia, which was the leading initial theory for the dizziness sector of my maladies. Everything else they for tested for also came up negative; kidney/liver disease, diabetes, etc. In fact, the only thing my GP noted was that my blood showed I was a little dehydrated. I reminded her that the reason I was dehydrated was because she had specifically ordered me not to hydrate myself after midnight the night before. Had I not been given medical instruction to avoid hydration, I would have generously hydrated myself. This revelation failed to resonate. She repeated: "You were slightly dehydrated." I replied again that it had been HER IDEA that I that avoid fluids ahead of the test, and that it wasn't a habit of mine to arbitrarily deprive myself of precious fluids. We agreed to disagree.

She felt the next step was to test my thyroid function, so she wanted to draw some more blood. She said she didn't have a tourniquet, so she would just use a rubber glove to tie me off. Mind you, the room we were in was JUST ACROSS THE LOBBY FROM THE ROOM WHERE I'D HAD MY BLOOD DRAWN NOT 24 HOURS EARLY. WE'RE TALKING ABOUT AN EPIC WALK OF ABOUT 20 METERS WITHIN THE SAME BUILDING. THERE WERE NO DRAWBRIDGES OR FIREBREATHING DRAGONS TO WORRY ABOUT. Follow me on this: which sounds like the more sensible route for a doctor to take; a 20 meter walk and a precise blood draw, or staying put and playing it fast and loose with the old needle and vein? As it turned out, my GP was a risk taker. Apparently GP can also mean Gambling Practitioner.

She tied off my right arm with a common rubber glove (not a joke). Given my emaciated state, my veins were feeling a bit shy. Rather than recognize the error of her ways, she stayed the course and began swatting at my arm piñata-style. As you might have guessed, she failed to draw to any blood, though she did succeed in making my right arm look like a gopher-sacked golf course. Then, and only then, did it dawn on her to make that 20 meter walk across the clinic to fetch the proper supplies. The same nurse who drew my blood the day before wound up doing the honors. My GP said if I didn't hear from her, I was to assume the thyroid tests hadn't revealed anything.

I then requested the results of my first round of tests so I could take them to a private specialist. She told me I would have to make an appointment.

"Can't I just get a printout now?"

"You can, but I'm really behind today, so you'll have to wait in the lobby for 30 minutes."

What could I do? I waited in the lobby for half an hour before a receptionist, not the GP herself, performed the arduous duty of moving her mouse slightly, clicking File, moving the cursor down to print, left clicking, and letting those sweet documents rip.

That was Tuesday. Wednesday passed without incident. I even did a comedy show Wednesday night, my first in a while. I was slightly out of it and blanked a bit on some lines, but managed to have a respectable set. It's really too bad I've been too unable to hit the circuit hard. Given my hideous (read: memorable) new look and obvious frailty, I would now have the all-important POINT OF VIEW.

"Come see Mikey Malaise. You'd be bitter too if the only movement you could count on was falling flat on your face!"

I guarantee if I performed under that banner with the exact same act I've always done, rather than being deemed too dark, bookers would trumpet my act as a "brave learning experience."

Thursday afternoon and evening were kind of ugly, with a recurrence of right arm numbness and dizziness/disorientation. Friday morning I woke up with some light tingling, dizziness, and the occasional star shower in my field of vision. All were short lived.

Then lunchtime hit, and the dizziness came out swinging. I walked out of the office for a brisk stroll in the sunlight, hoping it would restore my equilibrium. No luck. I returned to the office, and now noticed that the ceiling lights were starting to get very dim. I changed floors to make sure it was me and not the lighting. It was me. I went back to my desk and attempted to will away the fuzziness.

Everything faded and I felt myself falling--

That Time I Almost Died Part II

Written sometime in 2008...


Anyone remember when I was funny? Neither do I.

I finally managed to see my NHS ("universal healthcare") GP. After hearing my boxset of symptoms, she nonchalantly told me it would still take 46 days to see a specialist. That her referral was riddled with spelling errors didn't make me feel any rosier about my prospects of fast, adequate treatment through NHS.

By this time I was beginning to get desperate. I was becoming less and less mobile, to the point where I had to start weighing the pros and cons of every single daily task; carrying groceries, tying my shoes, taking things out of the oven, reaching for my shower head, you name it. One false move in any of these tasks would often keep me frozen for hours if not days on end.

Given the bureaucracy and delays I was facing with NHS (“universal healthcare”) and my private insurer, I decided I would try to rehab myself by swimming. I hadn't been in a pool in 16 years, and it showed. I used the Slow Lane at my gym's pool, which still turned out to be too speedy for me. It is never inspiring when decrepit grannies with the Reaper's reflection in their eyes are outshining you in a physical activity. I guess the lane I really needed was the one for amputees. Or maybe I should have looked for the lane marked Hearse Speed.

Unfortunately, even swimming soon became a tightrope walk for me, with random pain and weakness sometimes appearing after just a few laps. How do you injure yourself swimming? Swimming is what they prescribe for people who’ve injured themselves playing OTHER SPORTS. No one ever says, “Oh, you hurt yourself with the breaststroke? Yeah, just go play rugby for a few weeks.” Somehow, I’d managed to become too fragile for a default sport.

So we come to the end of August, or about the two month mark. Still haven't been cleared for treatment by my private insurer and NHS is moving slower than Mike Payne in the 400 meter butterfly. The early healing novelty of swimming also started wearing off, and my decline picked up steam. By the end of August, I could no longer sit at my kitchen table. Within 30 seconds of plopping down on one of my kitchen chairs, back pain would force me to my feet. Since then, I've had to eat all of my meals standing at my kitchen counter.

This was the time when I really began what I call "bargaining with my body." Every physical activity required I make a sacrifice somewhere else. My thought process devolved to this: If I mop the floor, I won’t be able to carry groceries back from the store. If I clean the fridge, I won't be able to take my clothes out of the dryer. If I do __, I can't __. Eventually, you just quit doing most things altogether. By now the floors of my flat no longer need a mop. They need a Zamboni.

Anyway, “summer” ends and the temperature starts to drop. I didn't bring much warm clothing to London, so I tried to do some shopping. As it is with everything when you're in a state of total decline, you start planning around your deficiency. For example, I went to buy a pullover, but then found that "pull" was an unfortunate verb for someone with my shoulder and back problems. What I needed was more of a drape-over. Actually, the ideal solution would have been for me to just grow a layer of fur, which at the very least would have secured me a spot on the catwalk (told you I wasn't funny anymore).

I gave up trying to hang up my clothes. I couldn't lift them to the hangers anymore, so I just started piling them up on the kitchen table.

I also had to stop working on my laptop for more than a few minutes at a time, as I couldn't find a comfortable position to sit with it, and could hardly risk moving its whopping 8 lb. mass. This and the fact that typing itself sparked pain and tingling canceled most of my writing plans.

My weekends became marked by panic as I spent them in constant fear of calamity. Remember, I live alone, and don't know anyone in London. I don't have a wife, girlfriend, or a roommate. No one is around to offer assistance, and the London medical system isn't one you would accuse of being overresponsive. When you're dependent entirely on yourself and functioning below 50%, successfully eating and showering each day become the foremost things on your to-do list.

One Sunday in mid-September, I awoke and was more or less unable to move. No seriously, I kept sending signals to my limbs, and they kept giving me the old line item veto. I wound up wasting a sunny weekend afternoon staring at the ceiling. When I did finally convince my body to move (and inch by inch process), I basically had to get up and eat what was on the counter. Luckily, I had some tuna cans and bananas within reach (bourgeois, I know). Even lifting a plastic cup of water to my mouth required two hands.

That little flirtation with paralysis triggered me to give up on insurance and NHS and begin going to a private physiotherapist outside of the system. Initially, it was marginally beneficial for pain relief, although I didn’t really feel stronger. Such mixed signals made the mindgames and bargaining even worse, because I’d have a few days of progress and would start saying to myself, "Ahh, the road back!" Then one morning I’d be taking the lid off the mouthwash and the pain would be so swift and brutal I’d see stars and go flying backward like a man tossed off a treadmill.

Soon after I asked a neighbor to pull down my Murphy bed for me. He eyed me with more than a degree of bewilderment, probably thinking he was about to land a starring role in a snuff film. Fortunately, he agreed to help, and once he brought the bed down, I had to leave it down, which meant the doorway to my bathroom was blocked (my flat is a studio), which forced me to crawl/roll over the bed each time I needed to get in. This caused its own kind of pain, but it was better than the pain of slumbering on the sofa. Another piece of bargaining.

The sheer randomness of the pain in my back and shoulders was the worst part. It made planning close to impossible. I never knew when or where the anguish was going to land, only that at some point it would hit...kind of like a V2 rocket. By late Sept. I became hesitant to leave my flat except when absolutely necessary, because like I said, if/when something went wrong, I had no one to call, and no immediate remedies. On the plus side, this has caused me to drink less coffee, since I have very little reason to be awake.

Comedy was a big reason for my move here, but as you might have guessed, I'm not doing many shows. I don't know anyone and can't exactly network from home. It's just as well, as I haven't been doing much writing. I'm not really thinking of jokes anymore. What bounces through my brain these days are heavy quotes from literature ("The weakest kind of fruit drops earliest to the ground"). Melodramatic? OH YEAH!

That Time I Almost Died Part I

No decent man talks of his maladies.

--Turgenev, The Diary of a Superfluous Man

I'm dying, and at the point of death I really think one may be excused a desire to find out what sort of a queer fish one really was after all.

--Turgenev, The Diary of a Superfluous Man


I posted two old blogs on here about my June 2008 move to London. While there, I wrote some MySpace blogs about all the nonsense that was slapping me upside the head. During my time in Blighty (funny, when I moved away I expected it to be permanent) I became mysteriously and seriously ill, so the blog switched from wacky ranting to a kind of deathwatch. I have been going through the bits of it I could find, and have decided to post what I didn't delete. Some of it is mawkish, but whatever, it was a reflection of my frame of mind, and anyway, the majority of it still strikes me as entertaining. I have done some slight editing, and have clipped some parts that couldn't possibly be of interest. I hope you will also find it entertaining (clears throat)... 

Sometime in 2008...

There’s no doubt I came to London with reluctance. But still, there was an undercurrent of excitement to the move. New surroundings, new start; all the trappings of a soft rock hit without the synthesized sax solo. Quite soon however, I came crashing down like a dropped crowd surfer.

Just before journeying to the land of drizzle and drunks, I was diagnosed with a disc bulge in my lower back. It was painful, but the pain wasn’t constant and wasn’t interfering with my life. I was still going to the gym and doing most of the things I normally do. But immediately after arriving in my new digs, the pain began to escalate.

For the first few days, it was just random attacks of pain; just enough to freeze me in my tracks, but not enough to keep me there for any length of time. Within a week, the pain had not only gone into overdrive; it had oozed to my right shoulder. As with my back, in the early goings, the right shoulder suffered intermittent blips of pain, sometimes acute, but not crippling. Had it remained at that level, you would be reading the thoughts of a much different man.

By about week three in London, I could no longer lift my right arm about the shoulder, and my left arm was getting in on the action. The left was stiff and weak, but because it was still fairly fluid, it became my default limb (I doubt the left arm problems were helped by my favoring it so much). As month one concluded, my right arm was frozen to the point where I could barely use it to shave or brush my teeth.

Sometime in July, I put up my pulldown bed, only to discover I couldn’t lower it again. I simply couldn’t get either arm to perform the task. This left me with two options; hard floor or hard leather loveseat. Picky thing that I am, I went with the loveseat. As it wasn’t even long enough for a dainty sapling like me, you can imagine the kind of contortion act I was doing in my sleep each night. Perfect for someone with hellish aches and pains!

Coinciding with my back/shoulder agonies was another ticklish matter; the unpredictable dizzy spells that accompanied my relocation to London. Initially, I figured it was due to the change in climate, timezone, and food (eating eggs that taste like Satan’s earwax has been known to cause all kinds of problems. Whoever decided the English were going to be known for their breakfasts was either a sadist or the world’s first prop comic). I decided to up my fruit-veggie intake to seven servings a day. No effect. The dizziness continued.

Let’s make sure we're on the same page. Monstrous back pain, a right arm mostly immobile above shoulder level, and a left arm that was rapidly weakening and donating plenty of its own pain to the cause. Obviously, an upper body weak in all the wrong places wasn’t exactly well equipped to deal with the literal fall out of a dizzy, swimming head. Steps, or rather not falling down them, soon became an issue. For those who don’t follow the latest medical developments, using barely functioning shoulders to catch yourself on cement steps is so 1773!

What about treatment? Well, it took about six weeks to establish my NHS ("universal healthcare") GP. My London colleagues were surprised by the expediency. In the meantime, a coworker recommended I hit a private GP she knew who worked with my firm’s private insurance company and supposedly knew how to get things done. "They just refer you to this physio place, backdate it, and the insurance company eventually pays it." Multiple people I consulted seemed to be using this private GP for that reason, so I figured, WHEN IN ROME...

I went to see him and was mostly just told, "Hopefully, you don't have to have surgery." There were no tests and not much advice, but he did refer me to a physical therapist. I visited the clinic he recommended. Turns out, they don't participate with my insurance or anyone else’s, and it's about $116 per session. I was already there, so I figured "Who knows when I'll be able to see someone again, so let me at least get this guy's thoughts."

He didn't seem to have any. He had me touch my toes and gave me a stretch or two to try. That was it. His general advice was along the lines of "Try not to lift any safes for a few months." I went to the suggestion box and suggested they rename the clinic The Apathy and the Atrophy.