Eight Feet Deep

Do you remem­ber the song “Dem Bones?”

It is an old spir­i­tual allegedly used to teach chil­dren basic anatomy even though the song is anatom­i­cally incor­rect, all accord­ing to Wikipedia. Though there is no doubt of the con­nec­tion between the song and the verse from “Ezekiel 37:1–14″ where the profit pays a visit to the Val­ley of Dry Bones and through God’s com­mand causes the bones to come alive.

Anatom­i­cally cor­rect or not, the song in its sim­ple way speaks to the con­nec­tion and one­ness of the human body. The body is such an intri­cate mech­a­nism, like in many ways a fine auto­mo­bile or space ship or air­craft. Often when one part of the body has a prob­lem it can cause a glitch in another loca­tion that even some­times seems silly to the mind not trained in at least a bit of gross anatomy.

Physi­cians are trained in more than a bit of gross anatomy and they know, or should know, much more than the rest of the pop­u­la­tion of these intri­cate inter­re­la­tion­ships within the body which can cause some­thing some­where to go wrong and make a body mis­er­able elsewhere.

I known my physi­cians, who work for the Depart­ment of Vet­er­ans Affairs, know all that. How­ever, I don’t know if they are too hur­ried or har­ried or caught up in some kind of mind­set that so often find them­selves unable to see the for­est of the body for the tree trunks.

 As I men­tioned here last week after my MRI at the Hous­ton VA, three dif­fer­ent pos­si­ble causes emerged for the painful periph­eral neu­ropa­thy I have suf­fered in my feet and legs since the sum­mer. One rea­son is Type II dia­betes, which was promptly diag­nosed after a lot of talk about it. Another rea­son was a type of fatty tis­sue caus­ing steno­sis of my lum­bar spine and the other rea­son being an untreat­able and pos­si­bly debil­i­tat­ing inflam­ma­tion of one of the spine’s membranes.

So which con­di­tion does my spe­cial­ist pick on which to focus? Why dia­betes, of course. And I’ll be bru­tally frank, if the VA wants me to be treated for dia­betes, they sure are pick­ing a funny way to do it. Here is this glu­come­ter and an instruc­tion book. Good luck with your dia­betes. Oh, we will fit you with some spe­cial shoes, but we can’t mail them to you. You’ll have to come back to Hous­ton for them. No instruc­tion on the diet and lifestyle that is needed to lose weight and pills to help com­bat the high blood sugar lev­els. That is the VA’s other answer for all that ails you: meds.

I find myself in a vicious med­ical cir­cle in which none of my med­ical pro­fes­sion­als have seemed to fig­ure a way out for me. I bal­looned in weight. My blood sugar went up at a mar­ginal rate. I devel­oped periph­eral neu­ropa­thy — a con­di­tion very often caused by dia­betes but also caused by per­haps more than 100 other rea­sons as well — the pain cut down on my walk­ing for exer­cise to almost noth­ing. My weight bal­looned even more. My blood sugar got higher. In the mean­time, a MRI finds other prob­lems not related to dia­betes that are caus­ing sim­i­lar symp­toms which include neu­ropa­thy. I also suf­fer from often severe back pain as well as shoot­ing pain in my hip and leg. Oh, and let’s not for­get that I devel­oped a hand tremor two years ago. Just a coin­ci­dence I guess, huh?

So my spe­cial­ist in Hous­ton says lose weight and lower your blood sugar. We’ll attack the dia­betes. Why? Well, my weight and blood sugar both needs to decrease. But also, dia­betes is the eas­ier, or per­haps, the only one of the three that can be treated. Good luck. See you in a month.

I don’t under­stand why the body can’t be seen as a whole, a sys­tem? That’s what it is. It’s true, all I can treat is the dia­betes as far as I know. But one of the con­di­tions I have been diag­nosed with has sim­i­lar symp­toms as dia­betes, includ­ing weight gain, and it can poten­tially par­a­lyze or kill you.

Once again, for how­ever many times, the VA has taken me out into the woods and left me to find my way home by myself. I have, at least for the unfore­see­able future or per­haps the rest of my life, chronic pain that can’t be treated. It can’t even be treated by the methadone I take for pain at the oppo­site end of the spine from this prob­lem. Yet, I have to some­how get up in the morn­ing, work, live, keep going. My body might break down along the way, it might not.

I am not plead­ing for sym­pa­thy. There is no need for it. Like they said in olden times: “It ain’t nothin’ but a thang.” I am, instead, just talk­ing out loud. Pretty loud at that. I am kind of going through what the late Dr. Elis­a­beth Kubler-Ross described as the “Five Stages of Grief” in her acclaimed book “On Death and Dying.” Those stages are denial, anger, bar­gain­ing, depres­sion, and accep­tance, although not all of those stages are reached and not nec­es­sar­ily in any order.

Right now I am in denial and anger over being diag­nosed as dia­betic. I am angry that, at least my spe­cial­ist thinks, noth­ing can done about my most recent chronic pain. I am also depressed. I haven’t reached the bar­gain­ing and accep­tance stage.

If noth­ing else, these stages present a way to look at the process of work­ing out a sig­nif­i­cant prob­lem. If my mem­ory from classes that I took while attain­ing a minor in soci­ol­ogy — includ­ing a course on death and dying — serves me right the whole grief thing works on roman­tic breakups and var­i­ous other trau­mas. It’s funny. The last “roman­tic” breakup I had a cou­ple of years ago revealed only, perh­pas, the accep­tance stage and none of the other five. I sup­pose that could be like the exchange method of diet­ing, I could exchange two of glee for one of depression.

Leave ‘em laugh­ing. Sorry, I am just talk­ing to myself.