its not as late as i thought

[Guest guest]

I was telling Scha about this today...

Some part of the feeling of gleaming-kleen first-world modernity, is

striding around invulnerable to any infection with terrible

consequences, other than HIV or really severe herpes. It goes right

along with shiny metal skyscrapers. Sure there are still terrible

ailments, but the fact that they are supposedly not caused by microbes

is part of what separates us from the pre-WWII era. Imagine someone in

the US getting tuberculosis and not being able to do a hell of alot

about it, year after year, and maybe dying in a hospital aflame with

bacilli - its just so foreign, lies across a great divide. Germs cant

get across; you might become sick but it will be like the malfunction

of a car, not the capture of your person by enemy life as befell the

people of history.

That divide is kinda bridged when you look across the doctors waiting

room at someone with a way swollen joint and ponder how vastly much of

contemporary sickness from mental illness to lupus to MS could be

caused by cryptic infections we cant treat so well, except in a lucky

percentage. All of a sudden 2005 doesnt feel so futuristic anymore,

and you could almost be sitting in a TB sanatorium where people tried

to control their infections using therapies of limited power, in a

time only older people of today can personally attest. Tho I dont

know what chance those treatments gave those people, so the analogy

may be only approximate.

Hopefully one day todays idiopathic inflammations will be as curable

as TB is now, and our travails will in turn be part of what flavors

this period as before-I-was-born to someone of the future. Meanwhile

2005 really looks slightly quainter and dustier to me since

considering its probable " tuberculousness " ; out of the corner of my

eye I seem to notice a glassiness familiar from TV footage from the

60s, or a lilt of the spectrum like in an aged photograph - in low

light, maybe even a pervading tint of sepia. The genomic era of

medicine seems less of a tangible era, at least to date, as fine and

eventually maybe useful as it is to know that the HLA-DR*0-whatever

allele is a 1.7x risk factor for RA in Scandanavians, and one zillion

similar findings. Its a bold new era thats yet to produce any great

new pills to mark it. Meanwhile the electron microscope may yet

disclose further revelations to shake medicine, despite being a hoary

old invention that can reminisce about the pre-antibiotic age. Perhaps

someday soon, in a perfect sequel, it will once again disclose the

nanometers of certain beasts even as chemotherapy learns to burn them

out of human flesh - events which roughly coincided when they happened

last century. I wonder if my grandparents knew anyone messed up with

TB when they were kids in the 30s... well its been a few years and now

they know me, messed up with something of debatable pathology that

doxy and tini and ceftriaxone may or may not finish off. Maybe I

should like, read The Magic Mountain or something. Bah.

What it must have been like to get unexpectedly cured of TB in 6

months after years of greuling suffering - if indeed the development

of effective tx combos was precipitous enough for it to happen like

that. Imagine the continuous soaked-clothes chill and chap of these

cytokines drying up. Im surprised a joy so immense isnt more

prominently proclaimed in literature and culture, with more

elaboration and subjectivity than just the succinct image of Jesus

cleansing the leper. Muir profoundly re-aimed his life after 10

terrible days of thinking hed never get back his sight, which he did.

Ten days blindness is just the kind of 60-volt kick in the ass

everyone in the world should only be so lucky to get. Twenty days

might even be better. A year tho, thats really pushing it past

optimum... by then the soul will see its moments of imploring fate all

too wretchedly, reducedly, trampled as should not be... thats the

experience of someone sick a mere 1.5 years. Well, here comes at least

some more of the same... thru which I lust like a boar for the ecstacy

of restoration, something towards which we all pay heartbreaking sums

with zero assurance of ever getting it. So we certainly have to live

on the way for something more solid than that inevaluable hope of

cure, tho for me that hope will always have to be first and last.