"You're losing blood." - Jack Bauer, 24

Houston on a winter morning. No steam was harmed in the making of this blog.

For the past several months, I’ve been nearly in constant pain, and not all of it from the thought of the Spears’ genome being propagated across the planet.

It seems (or so the doctor tells me) that human beings are filled with squishy stuff, sort of like Jell-O® in a skin-colored plastic bag. The doctor looked very somber when he told me it wasn’t even good Jell-O©, but rather the Jell-O™ your grandma made that had bits of fruit cocktail in it. Those, he explained, were organs. Then he snickered.

He further went on to explain that bones were, well, like bones, but they were connected by pieces of spaghetti called “nerves”. These nerves, apparently transmit a signal just like a wireless router, except there is no Internet in my elbow. Something about FCC regulations.

After all this hopelessly technical stuff, the doctor gave me several prescriptions. He also said, “You ever hear the joke about the guy who goes to the doctor and says, ‘Hey, Doc, it hurts when I do this’?”*

“Yeah,” I replied.

“Well, this pain is your punishment for bad humor.”

Most of my ailments come from either blunt force trauma (being smacked by something) or my allergy to stainless steel blades being embedded in my fingers. Makes ‘em swell up and bleed. Consequently, I rarely go to the doctor without some appendage being swaddled in a towel, and The Mrs. looking at me to see if I’ve lost 10 or 15 pints of blood.

This time, it was just pain. The Mrs. kept telling me that I should go see a doctor, since she gets tired of listening to me whine for three months.

I generally believe that my body self-repairs most things, and the things it won’t self repair, well, the medical community isn’t really all that good at fixing most of them. Call me a cynic, I’m just not at all sold on medicine being much more scientific than a music video. Consider stuff I’ve heard on salt during my lifetime:

“Salt Good For You”
“Salt, America’s Silent, Salty Killer”
“Salt, Cure for Cancer”
“Salt, Reason for First Gulf War”
“Salt, Does a Body Good”

Etc.

Me? I think that if medicine can’t invent a contraception gun that we can use to go and shoot anyone who has ever been near anyone with the last name of “Spears” or “Hilton” then the whole field may be overrated. Except for the part of the field that made the pain pills I just took.

Those guys are okay.

*The actual punchline is that the doctor replies, “Well, then don’t do that.” This was the actual advice I got from the Doc. I think I like this doctor.