I sat down to a meal with my family, and the inevitable topic of personal health came up. With a vocal minority of health professionals, one has to take care around my family when bringing up any subject that could be remotely tied in with the medical field. Charred foods evoke carcinogens in food, outsourcing IT jobs turns to the booming medical tourism in India, the cotton in my t-shirt ends up in a conversation about weight loss, and weight loss dovetails (without fail) into weight loss surgery.
Mom’s lot in life is working in an inner-city county hospital. In recent years, she’s noticed a shrinking amount of heart-surgeries in favor for “preventative” gastric bypass or stomach banding procedures, and increased cases of strokes an brain aneurysms.
“Get your headaches checked out. If there’s a clot and they can’t *coil that, you don’t have long to live.” — Mom.
She says this as I stuff another piece of chinese roast pork belly in my mouth, increasing the cholesterol that latches onto the walls of my blood vessels, thereby creating a perfect net to catch a blood clot. Mom then passed her hand over my head, just barely grazing my hair as if to show me where the deadly blood clot will burst in my brain. This disturbing move is just like the time when she gently traced my ear to show where cancer would form if you talked on a cell phone for hours on end.
“I’ve seen young kids… with cancer right along here.” –Mom
Just as I get over mom’s spooky prophecy:
- I developed a headache yesterday which continues today. [I’m writing this with the concern that I don’t keep aspirin in my desk as an emergency blood thinner that will sustain me in case I need to be rushed to the hospital]
- Someone forwarded me a chain e-mail of how to identify if someone is having a stroke.
- My iTunes playlist played a podcast interview with Jill Bolte Taylor about how she, as a brain scientist, experienced her stroke.
My take away: the universe is agreeing with my mom, and I’m going to have a stroke… or it’s all in my head.
* coil = coil embolization