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My Neurologist and Me

Posted on July 1, 2009

I went to see my neurologist yesterday for my three-month follow up. I am still not used to saying I have a neurologist. It’s like when you first get married and it feels wildly foreign to refer out loud to your “husband.” But the strangeness comes with a hint of pride. I would rather have a neurologist than, say, a proctologist or a chiropodist. It somehow feels more glamorous, more high brow, more befitting of me. The corporeal mutiny of age inches forward—an extra chin here, an autoimmune attack there—but that one vestige of youth, my vanity, remains.

My check up was more of a check in. In fact, my neurologist would make a great shrink. He has mastered the therapist’s technique whereby the patient poses a burning question and the therapist manages to get the patient to answer it for herself through a deft combination of silence and answering a question with another question. The burning question of the appointment was what to do next: nothing or scan again. The latter option means I would be actively searching for evidence of new “activity” in the brain despite a lack of symptoms (the doctor dismissed the lazy arm that cause me a spasm of panic earlier in the month within the first two minutes of our appointment; it’s not a MS symptom). If the scan reveals symptom-free activity it is enough to get you an MS diagnosis, which is the trigger to start on meds. American doctors are generally pro-medicine of all kinds, so odds are if I was in the US a doctor would advocate a scan. Brits on the other hand opt for the wait and see approach at this stage. And in this matter I’ve decided to side with the country of which I’ve most recently become a citizen. I shall stick my head in the sand and enjoy the symptom-free life I’m experiencing now for as long as it lasts, hopefully for the next sixty years or so.

I pretty much knew this was my decision before I walked into the doctor’s office, but that didn’t stop me from subjecting him to a thirty minute interrogation. I was desperate for my symptom-free three months to mean something of statistical significance about reducing my chances of developing MS. It doesn’t. It means what it means which is that I’ve gone three months without any symptoms. And that is a good thing in and of itself. And that’s all. I was hoping there would at least be some sort of ceremony to present me with my “three months symptom-free” Alcoholics Anonymous style token, something I could carry around in my pocket and finger inconspicuously when I was feeling insecure. Something to hold onto.

The one bit of new information I did glean from my questioning was that more instances of MS occur the farther away from the equator you go in either direction. My neurologist slipped it into a response to a question I had about treatment in the US versus the UK, citing “the equator effect” in explanation for why he couldn’t give me an accurate answer.

“I’m sorry, I don’t know what you mean,” I asked, concerned that this man in front of me was actually a quack witch doctor masquerading as a neurologist. This would not be good for my frail ego — which as I’ve mentioned is dependent on having a neurologist—nevermind my health. Next he’s going to tell me cats can suck the air out of babies’ mouths. But instead he went on to explain the epidemiological phenomenon of MS and the equator, which I later confirmed on the Internet (a validation process which I am sure sends shudders up the spine of every doctor in the land). Unfortunately the relationship is not causal, which means I won’t be changing the name of this blog to An American in Quito anytime soon.

Cotswolds

Chuck-the-Wellie

Posted on June 21, 2009

The Great British Summer is officially here. Thousands marked the summer solstice by watching the sun rise at Stonehenge, but I took my cue from a more traditional kick-off to the summer calendar: Royal Ascot. While I did not attend this year, I did catch a glimpse on television and was struck by just how anachronous the whole spectacle appeared. A BBC commentator was interviewing the aged couple who owned the horse that had just won a race. He was stiff in his stove top hat and blunt cut morning coat, showing no hint of pleasure at his victory. She was excessively coordinated: shoes, bag, dress, jacket, and lampshade hat all in shades of black and white. Both were completely lacking in the sartorial ease that characterizes our fashionable neighbors across the channel. I daresay the addiction to matching coordinates exhibited by m’lady would be enough to make mademoiselle strangle herself with her Hermès scarf or gouge her eyes out with her Chanel ballerina flats.

Still I am smitten with all forms of British tradition, and yesterday we attended a more casual yet equally important event in the summer social calendar: the first fête of the season. We cycled over to Chedworth where the weather behaved as expected—wind, drizzle, sun, and clouds in alternating cycles of approximately fifteen minutes each—while the whole village defiantly carried on with the requisite fête activities of jumble sale, Tombola, barbecue, dog show, and chuck-the-wellie competition, with tea and cakes served in the village hall. There will be one of these every weekend day in a village somewhere in the Cotswolds from now until the end of August, including our own Charter Fair next Saturday. We are, somewhat distressingly for my romantic fantasy of my quaint rural life, a town rather than a village, owing to a charter granted by King Henry III in 1227 giving us rights to hold both a weekly market and an annual fair. Thus we have a fair rather than a fête.

As such, we have to make a bit more of an effort. Rustic amusements such as chuck-the-wellie would just seem out of place amongst the grandeur of a climbing wall and vintage chair-o-plane rides and, gasp, a fire engine. (The fire engine appears twice on the official programme of events. First, we pause for its entrance, then the band plays a bit more, and then, we have a designated time slot to admire it.) Faced with such excitement the wine bar has chosen to shut its doors for the day. The memories of last year’s deluge of punters asking to use their facilities and the unseemly smells wafting in from the cricket team’s barbecue stand were just too much.

Personally, I think they’re overreacting. It reminds me of the response of Notting Hill’s posher residents to that other great British summer event, the Notting Hill Carnival. Many West London home owners board up their stucco terraces and flee the city while the rest of London floods in for three days of food, floats, and Red Stripe induced fights. More than a few of these Notting Hill refugees will be heading for the retreat of their weekend homes in the Cotswolds where they may happen upon the quaint charms of a local fête. Should they arrive at our Charter Fair next weekend they will no doubt be disappointed to find such charms are not to be enjoyed over a glass of rosé .

Books Random

The Unreliable Narrator

Posted on June 16, 2009

The compelling inaugural read of the Wheatsheaf Inn book club was Ross Raisin’s God’s Own Country. Early on the narrator, Sam Marsdyke, tells us about the attempted rape allegation that prematurely ended his school career. In his version it was a mutually reciprocated teenage dalliance interrupted by a teacher with unfortunate timing. I believed him. Then, a few pages later, Sam dropkicks a chicken for no particular reason and the doubts set in. Sam’s descent into the realm of the unreliable narrator continues unabated from there.

Over the weekend husband had occasion to tell the story of his own “chicken dropkick” moment with a much more personal unreliable narrator, his mother, who suffered from undiagnosed schizophrenia for many years of husband’s childhood. When he was ten years old he decided to reverse engineer a record player and, in the process of disassembling the transformer, gave himself a nasty electric shock. The experience disturbed him and over the next few days he became convinced he had developed a lump in his chest caused by the shock. After a few more days he decided to confide his worries in his mother. He told her the whole story, then she asked him what he thought the lump could be.

“I think it might be cancer,” whispered husband.

His mother paused and thought this over before answering.

“Could be, son,” she replied. “Could be.”

Lately I too have been struggling with the reliability of some personal narration in my life. For the last few days my right arm has felt weak. I notice it most when I’m driving and want to drape it on the arm rest or lay it in my lap in an imaginary sling position to get relief. I’m worried it’s an MS-related symptom, but husband is convinced it’s nothing. He tells me I’m just getting old and feeling creaky is to be expected. The problem is he’s understandably invested in me not exhibiting MS symptoms, having no desire to ponder a future in which he gets to play nursemaid to someone with a chronic illness. The part of me that knows positive thinking matters in situations like these welcomes his optimism. But another part of me knows he’s a fundamentally unreliable narrator on this particular subject.

He has, however, made one very accurate observation of late. Ever since this whole health debacle started, my brain has gone into overdrive making me highly sensitive to any physical anomalies no matter how slight. No cramp, tinge or tingle goes unnoticed. It’s as if 24/7 surveillance has been installed in my central nervous system. The fundamental question, though, is how reliable is the person my brain has put on duty to monitor the surveillance? Is it an Agent Scully type in charge, smart and grounded even in the face of an alien attack on my neurons? I’d be happy if P.I. Precious Ramotswe was on the case, wise and warm and down to earth seeming somehow appropriate for the task at hand. But maybe my cerebellum has gone and hired an overzealous mall cop for the task and now he’s stirring up “symptoms” to justify his own inflated sense of self-importance.

Of course I am hopeful my brain has just made a poor hiring decision and my lazy right arm is all down to mall cop’s overactive imagination. After all, there’s no need for the warmth and wisdom of the Lady’s No.1 Detective if there’s nothing wrong. I’ll find out soon enough because my follow up appointment with the neurologist is booked for the end of the month. Until then I’m keeping my inner mall cop away from the phone.

Cotswolds

Tramp’s Pillow

Posted on June 2, 2009

Last weekend we went to lunch hosted by the local bon vivant, M. The blue and white check cloth-covered table was set out in the front garden against the wisteria draped stone of the house. Rambling flowers to the left belied the hours of care that had gone into them. To the right was the chicken coop that has supplied us many breakfasts and a kitchen garden with neat rows of lettuces and stick tepees awaiting their runner bean linings.

The weather was behaving impeccably and it was all straw hats and sunglasses and rosé served from an earthenware pitcher. A compliment on the jug prompted M. to confess the decanting was being done to conceal that the rosé was coming from a box in the fridge. This led to a discussion on the virtues of boxed wine, a subject about which I thoughtI knew something given I had a box o’Franzia pink in residence in my closet for all four years of college. There was, however, a piece of trivia that was new to even me. The bladder in a wine box is indestructible and therefore makes a handy pillow—a tramp’s pillow—in a pinch. M. always keeps one in Châteaux Peugeot (a.k.a. his white van) in case of (presumably wine-induced) emergency camping requirements. All this musing on boxes of wine and tramps sent M. into a tailspin of melancholy. His phone had been cut off a week ago because he hadn’t paid the bill. Head in hands, he informed us that this was not where he hoped to be at the age of fifty-six.

M’s purported dissatisfaction with his life got me thinking about the nature of happiness. I didn’t really believe he was unhappy most of the time, but rather pesky intrusions like an overdue phone bill were conspiring to make him believe he was depressed. It reminded me of the nocebo effect, which works like the opposite of the placebo effect, producing symptoms by creating negative expectations. Experts blame the proliferation of public health warnings and medical information on the web. I long ago imposed a self ban on Googling anything MS related, but ever since I was nominated for membership in the chronic illness sufferers club I’ve noticed MS all around me. It’s like when you’re pregnant or engaged and it suddenly seems like everyone else is also having a baby or getting married. Just this morning there was a news story about a woman with MS who has become a member of an assisted suicide clinic in Switzerland. After I hear something like this I invariably start to imagine symptoms. I have a heightened awareness of my middle spine or a tingling in my knee. It takes a few minutes to realize that’s just the belt on my wrap dress cinched a little too tight or to remember I walked through a patch of nettles earlier in the afternoon.

M.’s melancholy passed before we finished the roast chicken. By the time we were on the cheese he was busy discussing the 150+ strong guest list for his upcoming fifty-seventh birthday party which he plans to celebrate with Heinz 57 themed catering—beans on toast and boxed wine for everyone. I’ve already thought of the perfect birthday present for him: the biggest, fluffiest goose down pillow I can find.

Cotswolds

Ethel and George

Posted on May 31, 2009

I am an equal opportunity anthropomorphizer. Like most transplanted urbanites my targets include the predictable assortment of cows, horses, chickens, sheep, and dogs that litter my jogging route. But lately two trees have become the objects of my affection. They grace the crest of the hill as you come out of the village, standing close enough to each other to indicate coupledom, far enough apart to indicate it’s been a long marriage. I’ve even named them: Ethel and George.

I’ve been watching Ethel and George with some concern for the past couple of months. While the rest of the countryside was waking up in a spasm of green, Ethel and George stayed resolutely brown and brittle looking. I even worried they may be dead. Then, in the last week, great poofs of green sprung up on both of them, sticking every which way like a home perm gone wrong.

Things have gone less well for my other animal friends. Last week a fox got twenty of the hens that share a field with the chestnut coloured horse. I was worried the horse was feeling lonely without them (nevermind my depression over the egg drought) so I stopped and rubbed his nose for a little longer than usual today. I was also disappointed to find that the herd of dark chocolate cattle with yellow tag earrings that had been calling the field next door home for the past month have moved on without so much as a goodbye. The field has been mowed short and in place of the cows there are round, plastic covered bales of hay. Despite my success with Ethel and George I think even I might have trouble crafting an emotional life for hay.

Cotswolds

Revenge in Bloom

Posted on May 28, 2009

Husband and I have achieved another milestone in rural village life: we’ve made our first enemy. It happened on the cricket pitch, where we were watching our local team take on a village from Oxfordshire.

The sum total of my knowledge of cricket is that it bears a fleeting resemblance to baseball—not a remark that goes over well with cricket fans —and it sometimes takes days to finish a match. Also, the players wear cabled cream sweaters with their team colours around the neckline. As it happens our village team shares the green and gold colours of my high school mascot, The Mighty Green Wave. This and the fact that the sun was making its first extended appearance of the spring was all the reason I needed to stake my sling-back deck chair on the sidelines for the afternoon. It was a busy few hours, munching on strawberries washed down with rosé and catching up on all the latest gossip with R&R, who had joined us. Finally, though, our chatter wore down one of the more keen spectators. There was some pointing and whispering before an acquaintance of ours was dispatched as the diplomatic envoy on behalf of the grumpy chap in the maroon cardigan to ask us to keep it down. It was 6pm, we were four hours into the match, and with no end in sight we decided it best that we pack up and head for the wine bar to finish the evening.

I thought nothing of the incident until a few weeks later. Husband and I had volunteered in response to an email asking if any locals were interested in helping maintain the various flower tubs and baskets that dot the town as part of the Britain in Bloom competition, but I had yet to hear anything back. It turns out the man in the maroon cardigan is also in charge of the town flower pots. We were being snubbed, and I was outraged.

For the next week I thought long and hard about what to do with all my pent up community spirit that had been deprived of its natural geranium planting outlet. I briefly considered joining the WI—the Women’s Institute, the British equivalent of the Junior League—but decided I was being a bit rash. In the end I opted for my own private town beautification scheme in the form of two new hanging baskets of purple petunias to cheer up our little lane, which happens to be the only route to the cricket pitch. My cardigan-ed nemesis will have to walk right by them when he makes his way to the match next Saturday.

Cotswolds

Black Country Faggots

Posted on May 20, 2009

An unwitting and/or politically correct American could be forgiven for gasping aloud upon entering my local butcher shop. There on the counter a handsome wicker basket brimming with Black Country Pork Scratchin’s sits by the cash register, inviting you to indulge in an impulse purchase. In the case below faggots are also on offer. But this is not the most bigoted butcher shop in England. The Black Country is an area in the British Midlands named for its history of iron forging and coal-related industry. That it happens to have a brand association with fried lard and is credited with the invention of faggots—meatballs made of pig heart, liver, and belly fat—is just a coincidence.

R. the barman tells me these faggots are exceptional. (He also favors the deviled kidneys at the Wheatsheaf Inn.) Having a weakness for chicken liver mousse and sweetbreads myself, I suspect I too would find the faggots exceptional and plan to try them soon. The pork scratchin’s are less tempting. As much as I am a fan of lard, there is something just a little too disconcerting about the wild-eyed, red pig grinning at me from the label.

Even more upsetting is the fact that Black Country Pork Scratchin’s seem to be making in-roads at local pubs as the down-market bar snack of choice, edging out my two traditional favorites in this category, Scampi Fries and Cheese Flavoured Moments. These are without doubt the most processed food stuffs ever to have passed my lips, but there is something undeniably British and wonderful about a shrimp flavored cereal snack. Regardless, the Brits seem to have fallen out of love with this particular form of poison, leaving me with only crisped up pig fat or posh potato chips to choose from.

Like Black Country Pork Scratchin’s, the upscale potato chips make a virtue of their provenance. The primary color, block print design of Burt’s Hand Fried tells you they come from Devon, while Tyrrell’s of Herefordshire feature black and white pictures to make you feel like what you are eating is somehow old fashioned and wholesome. Scampi Fries and Cheese Flavoured Moments are more vague. Their packaging is similar to eachother, with one showing a picture of a boat through a window, the other a cow. Much like the snack, the taste of real seafood or real cheese is evoked rather than delivered. Call me an overly sensitive American, but I think there’s a lesson in subtlety here for the Black Country Pork Scratchin’s marketing department.

Europe

Malibu with Cows

Posted on May 14, 2009

Help. Someone has kidnapped me (husband, I suspect), and I don’t know where I am. I feel no evidence of tranquilizers or jet lag, and yet I am pretty sure we could be in L.A. It’s sunny, there’s an ocean view, and the woman at the table next to us is wearing pink designer sweatpants and sipping matching pink champagne. Then I notice the lighthouse in the distance and the white clapboard house on the cliff above, and suddenly it’s all seeming a bit more Cape Cod. A Victorian hotel catches my eye, and the thought crosses my mind that this could in fact be Sydney. The Amalfi Coast? Cannes? I’m looking at the clapboard house again, which I see is flying a black flag with a white cross. The waiter informs me this is the Cornish standard, and I realize we are in deepest, sunniest England, a mere four hours from the Cotswolds.

Since our arrival in the tropical pastoral of Cornwall my brain has been issuing a constant “does not compute” message. I recognize the hedgerows and narrow lanes, rolling hills and grazing cows, all familiar enough from Gloucestershire. But as we edge in and out from the coast on the winding seaside road, the familiar periodically gives way to sheer cliffs and scrub vegetation. It’s Malibu with cows.

The names of Cornish villages are as alien as the landscape. My favorite English village names (pre-Cornwall) read like the cast of characters in a traditional farce, with my dream panto production starring Somersal Herbert, Old Sodbury, and the Cold Slag. Cornwall adds two new roles: Goon Gumpas and Goonbell. There is also scandal to be found in these parts: try Watergate Bay, Ventongimps, or just plain old Cocks. And to balance out all this tawdriness, England’s southernmost county hosts a bounty of lost saints: St. Ives, St. Agnes, and St. Tudy among them. (What miracle, I wonder, is St. Tudy known for? Is it as bubbly as her name and did she moonlight in an eighties sitcom called The Facts of Life?)

I never made it to St. Tudy, but St. Ives was the site of our geographically perplexing lunch and the revelatory white clapboard house. While admiring the house’s Cornish pennant, I couldn’t help noticing its glassed in patio decorated with flea market chic precision (straw hats and antique portraits in oils). A woman sat at the desk in the center of the patio overlooking the Atlantic, no doubt putting the finishing touches on her eighty-seventh best selling novel. At that moment I decided I’d have to kill her and take over her life.

This is a phase I seem to go through every year with a woman whose life I decide is highly covetable. My last target was the proprietress of the Cotswold Ice Cream Co., whose life of dairy creativity on a hilltop farm seems pretty near perfect to me. Now I coveted Cornish. Luckily for the lady from St. Ives I subsequently found the house from St. Agnes. It is perched atop a cliff overlooking Trevaunance Cove, and when I climbed the path to take a closer look through its mullioned windows I noticed a sign advertising the house for holiday rental. This is a house where even I might be inspired to write a book. It’s also an excellent excuse to return to Cornwall soon, not to mention St. Tudy.

Cotswolds

Requiem for Colour

Posted on May 8, 2009

Desperate to escape the bleak winter months, the English have adopted a notional date of March the first as the start of spring. Astronomers argue for the vernal equinox, around the twentieth of March. But spring in the Costwolds didn’t happen until a Thursday in the middle of April, the day when green finally tipped the balance. I drove into work through a dun coloured landscape and drove back with an escort of mint green, deep-pile carpet lining the country lanes. The grass rose into pea soup hedgerows then the brown lattice work of trees still bare except for pinched-face buds. Over the next two weeks these unwound into a canopy of chartreuse lace, accompanied by sprouting fields and set off by dark evergreens. If you looked closely there were bluebells too. They are not blue, but neither are they lavender or lilac or violet. They are plain purple, the one you get in the Crayola eight-pack.

Rapeseed happened next. Nothing changes the landscape of the Cotswolds more drastically or quickly than the en masse bloom of this flower. It is the colour of Ronald McDonald’s pants or the cheap mustard you get in a plastic packet with your corndog at the beach; it is not a colour that should occur in nature and yet it does. Lacking the good taste daffodils demonstrate by sprouting up in modest clumps, rapeseed appears in swathes that render the hills a crude patchwork of yellow and green. Its dominance is as unnatural as its colour, motivated by government subsidies to grow it for biodiesel production, and it drives half the population crazy with its hay fever provoking scent. Despite all this, I love it. I love everything about this brash landscape of unrepentant lime greens and artificial food colouring yellows, which is why I am already starting to feel anxious about its imminent demise. Just this morning I noticed white May blossom and peachy cones of horse chestnut blooms sneaking onto the perimeter, silently upstaging their raucous counterparts with their understated elegance. The Cotswolds by Gauguin is slipping into the diffused light of The Cotswolds by Monet, and I cannot watch. Tomorrow I leave for three nights in Cornwall to seek solace by the sea.

Cotswolds

War Stories

Posted on May 6, 2009

Friday night we went to see Saving Private Ryan at the local country house hotel cinema. I had not seen it before and watched mesmerized throughout. It was not the only war story we heard over the weekend. The second one came on Saturday night at the wine bar, as these things do, from a local who moved into the converted chapel a few years ago. On his first night in residence he stopped in the wine bar where he was introduced to town elder Harold. Harold promptly recounted how a German plane was shot down over our town during World War II and the bodies of the pilots were laid out in the chapel until they could be buried some days later in the main churchyard. The new resident didn’t get much sleep on his first night thinking about his ghostly roommates.

Our new acquaintance also provided the best line of the evening when, after listening to husband and I bicker for some minutes, he enquired if we were “a Will and Grace thing.” This was followed by laughter, a whispered explanation in his ear, a beat, then “oh my god, they’re married.” Clearly this is a man who’s easily spooked.