Yesterday was not a banner health day for the extended Roth-Gates family.

Kris' grandmother has been fading for some time. Her cancer has been consuming her, and her mind has collapsed into senility (she can't even remember she has cancer, she doesn't remember who she's talking to, she thinks she's in New York, etc.). Yesterday her kidneys failed and, for a time, it seemed as if the end were nigh. (The end is night, but now it's being measured in days instead of hours.) Kris will be flying down to California next week to spend time with her family.

Tiffany, Kris' sister, was in an automobile accident yesterday, rear-ending another vehicle on city streets. She's fine. I'm not sure how extensive the damage was to her car, but the accident sounded relatively minor.

Tony's wife, Kamie, was also in an automobile accident yesterday, though hers was not as minor. Kamie was traveling south on I-5 and came upon the scene of an earlier accident. Traffic had slowed (or stopped). She braked, but the car's momentum carried Kamie (and Michael and Alex in the back seat) into the rear of the Ford F150 in front of her. Despite the force of impact, the airbag did not deploy.

The boys are fine, but Kamie is laid up with back pain and the doctors want her to stay down for several days. They're also concerned that she may have hit her head during the accident. She's having trouble remembering the events of the crash, and she has some head pain and nausea.

Meanwhile…

Yesterday I relented and went to see a doctor about my knee. I never get to see the same doctor twice in Oregon City, so I switched to a small clinic in Canby, much closer to home (and just across the street from the photolab!).

The nurse (or nursing student) who escorted me to the examining room looked eerily familiar, but I could not place her, and I did not ask her name. It's been bugging me ever since: where have I seen her before? Do I know her? Should I remember her from someplace?

While I waited, I leafed through Runner's World and Eating Well and other typical health-oriented magazines you'd expect to find in a doctor's office.

Presently my new doctor, who shall remain nameless, poured into the room: a massive man, over six feet tall and grossly obese. His greasy hair possessed no discernable order. His shirt may have been tucked. Or untucked. It was difficult to tell. His beard was bushy, his glasses dirty, his manner nonchalant. In many ways, he was The Comic Book Guy incarnate!

He oozed into his chair (dwarfed beneath his bag of flesh), and we chatted about my injury. He nodded as he listened to me, and he seemed to look me in the eyes as we spoke, but after a moment of eye contact, he'd roll his eyes up into his head so that only the whites were visible before completely averting his gaze. It was freaky!

We discussed the possible sources of my knee pain. He surmised that I probably have some torn cartilage in my right knee.

"Ah," I said, "Cartilage connects the muscle to the bone, right?"

He sighed deeply, drawing upon every ounce of patience he could muster. "No," he said, as if to a dull child. "Cartilage does not connect the muscle to the bone." And he spent the next five minutes explaining cartilage.

In order to determine whether or not there is a tear in the cartilage, he'd like for me to have an MRI.. I asked a couple of questions about the procedure and this led to a five minute history of MRI followed by — get this — a five minute dissertation on how the tricorders in the original Star Trek series were basically handheld MRI scanners. This caused me consternation, offended my inner geek, and I told him so. Tricorders were omnipurpose instruments. Since when can you analyze the contents of an atmosphere with an MRI? Since when can an MRI do thermal imaging? Etc. The tricorder, I told him, was a deux ex machina of sorts (yes, I used that term) that the Star Trek writers used as a crutch and which merely foreshadowed the technical woes that would beset the current Star Trek franchise.

He seemed impressed with my response.

He then started explaining, in detail, the development of MRI scanners and X-ray machines and other such technologies. He explained that researches knew in the 1920s how an MRI could be achieved, but they hadn't the technology to actually perform one. This somehow led to a discussion of Marconi and vaccum tubes and we spent a couple of minutes trying to puzzle when the first radio broadcasts were made. Neither of us could recall, but we decided that the technology must have come to prominence during World War I (or just a little later).

The whole time we talked, he continued to roll his eyes up so that only the whites were visible. When he wished to emphasize a point, he scribbled on a piece of paper, writing upside-down (less well than he probably believed he was doing), and drawing diagrams with little or no meaning. (His diagram of cartilage around the knee-cap was especially useless.)

Then he noticed the clock.

"Oh," he said. And he surged up, pulled one beefy hand through his greasy hair, and he excused himself to see his next patient.

This guy is too good to be true. He's my doctor for life!

On this day at foldedspace.org

2004 — Eternal Sunshine of the Spglmffft   It has been a strange year at the movies for me. Today was yet another chapter in that strangeness.

2002 — Strange Bedfellows   Of all the Middle Eastern Islamic countries, the U.S. has allied itself most closely with Saudi Arabia, by all accounts (not just Brooks') the most repressive of Islamic nations.

2001 — Important American Musical Works   I just found NPR's list of the one hundred most important American musical works of the Twentieth Century. It's a good list with representative songs from various genres, but it is flawed.