Pigeon Droppings

Trying to delineate, systemically, the impact of a single complex compound across a vast web of interfaces in the body’s metabolic pathway system, becomes, especially in it’s more diffuse trace reaches,  almost impossible to demonstrate in broad comprehensible terms. There may simply be too many variables and too much variability over time. You might be able to if you could conduct a study across a really big and diverse sample with really controlled and specific dietary guidelines with almost constant blood-work, but good luck finding volunteers. Touching one spot on a web, targeting it and blocking it the way statins block cholesterol, doesn’t preclude that reaction from having other chains of effects in other pathways -- and to a remarkable degree individuals can be remarkably different in these pathways. I’d wager we are as individual in our body chemistry as we are in our fingerprints.

So summer comes around and it is now a year and a half ago. We took a vacation to South Dakota. Climbed Bear Butte with my son. I ran out of my statin medication and by the time I finally got more a month had gone by. I was also diagnosed with Sarcoidosis, which is a bummer because no one seems to know what it is or what causes it. Maybe mold? Spores? Alien radio transmissions? With my latest batch of rib fractures they noticed nodules in my lungs, an inordinate number of them. They are scar tissue caused, usually, by “irritants.” Maybe whiny youtube gamer videos? Also during this time they scheduled me for a CT scan with contrast dye which they pumped … into my blood.  What the fuck … This stuff gives me a Paris Island CS gas chamber flashback bigtime, snot everywhere. They had to "monitor" me.

The Judo (indirectly) reinvigorated by the trip to South Dakota, found another weakness – the sarcoidosis, more indication that I am allergic to A LOT of stuff. Bird droppings maybe … there was the war (and eventual sad departure) of the pigeons. But that’s definitely another blog entry. It may have something to do with a fungus that lives a few inches under the earth's surface in the great plains. So sarcoidosis can sometimes kill you or it can just go away. It's like Kafka's The Trial only instead of some nebulous charges brought by a secretive government bureaucracy it's nondescript scarring on your lungs where some unkown irritant met with your raving lunatic immune system ... Symptoms which, like bill collectors or Kafka's inquisitors, can leave and never return. Go figure.

Long story short, they finally refilled my Statin prescription. 

I was feeling pretty good, surprisingly so considering I had lungs full of nodules, but I chalked it up to it being summer and having just returned from South Dakota. Boy was I wrong. I started taking the statin again ... and wouldn't you know it I reacted to it. At first I thought I had the flu, then I realized ... the joint pain, the aches, the muscle weakness, this was winter me ... and it dawned on me, without the statin it was all gone, poof. More significantly I noticed my hand injuries (a constant annoyance in Judo) were healing in almost half the time. So I told my doctor, we tried another statin which was even worse then he advised a trial without any medication. 

Over the past two years I've dropped 65 pounds but half of that is since I came off statins. I’m running 3 miles in mid 24 minute range, I'm doing 1 punch man once a week, got my yellow belt, oy. I've gotten better at avoiding getting my ass kicked and avoiding pain. Wife came home ... Made it through a Minnesota winter depression free.

My therapist keeps asking me how I did it. 

My response? 

I don't really know. 

Matts(Modified)OnePunchManDesperateToFigureOutWhatWentRightSelfDiagnosisMetsJudoBlog