Teamwork

My immune system is paranoid and confused. It doesn't understand the concept of "this is oatmeal, oatmeal is a friend, we like oatmeal ..." No sir, if I eat oatmeal my immune system will attack it like it's a salmonella-bar. My immune system thinks this is funny. It will wink knowingly at me as I ingest a slice of key-lime pie (forgetting there is gluten in the graham cracker crust!) and then reject it like some poorly grafted gangrenous limb coming out of my shoulder. Oh, that immune system of mine ... The stories I could tell you. 

When I was a kid my parents took me to visit the homeland -- Greece, in all her sunny glory. To a kid from Queens, it was a dream come true. When we returned to NY I got sick, then I got sick again and I didn't get better … permanently sick. So the parents took me to some doctors and in the end they put this plastic box about the size of a hot dog -- whose push-down inner housing was lined with tiny needles dipped in potential toxins -- on my arm and pushed the needles down and guess what? 10 minutes later I had a rash. I was "allergic" to stuff like cat dander that lots of people are allergic to, but also things that are hard to avoid, like dust and leaves and tomatoes and corn and new world vegetation ... I had to take shots. On Saturdays I'd walk down to the doctor's office for my shot of stuff my immune system was confused about. Somehow they'd rendered irritants via injection "tolerable" and would slowly increase the dosage every few months. It reminded me of "mediation" sessions when I was a kid where they'd make you wipe cafeteria tables down (or re-arrange orchestra seats or rinse out frog bins in the science lab) with a kid you just had a fistfight with. You don't want to be their friend, you don't even like them, you were just in a fistfight with them for crying out loud! 

Anyway, what does this have to do with joint pain abatement during illness? Well, I've always wondered, what if my immune system was right all along? Some of this stuff that I'm allergic to has strange properties. Like wheat, which is like wood pulp, if you try to eat it. It tastes like plywood. If you have to grind something, powder it, mix it with far more palatable substances to create a blob of dough, induce fermentation and bloating in said blob, then bake it in a stone oven for hours just to make it edible. I mean, that’s an awful lot of trouble when you could just pick a grape. And why do we drink the milk of another species as adults of our own species? And cheese? Really? Do you know how cheese was invented?  Alcohol -- alcohol can clean paint off your hands – it comes in a bottle that’s been sitting around in a cellar for 12 years ... and you're going to drink that and cough and say stuff like "whew, smoooth." 

I guess I question the autoimmune “disorder” designation. It’s hard to pigeonhole broad genetic predispositions as favorable (or not) to current conditions. Where one’s immune system might be a pack of marauder cells attacking their own tissues for lack of external threat (the way the ancient Greeks would just fight among themselves if there weren't any Persians around) in one condition, it could prove beneficial in any number of other conditions, and conditions change. Hyper-vigilance is not necessarily a bad thing if you are being relentlessly attacked by invisible assailants ... that's what I always say.

Jeez I hope this doesn't turn into another desperate self-diagnosis blog. 

NeekerbreekersModifiedOnePunchManDesperateSelfDiagnosisJudoMets.Blog

Mets bullpen

A hidden gem?

LGM!