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Wednesday, March 23, 2011

Eric and the Hypochondria III


I’m writing this post immediately after finishing the last one so you should definitely read it first(and probably part one as well if you even care a little about this craziness making any sense, and even then it probably won’t).
So yesterday I wake up and my head hurts in the same spot it did before only worse and I’m freaking out.  Could it be my teeth, or even my jaw, could it be an ear infection(my ears did hurt a little bit, and my balance has been off for a while).  I’ve got all these questions and I’m growing more concerned by the second(all of this thinking and worrying is happening in the shower by the way, quiet time is the enemy).  I get out of the shower and go into the living room where I sit down to check to see what the almighty Google knows about my problem.  Then the right side of my face gets really hot like I’m close to a fire or heater.  This does not help the freaking out.  What the hell is wrong with me?  My right eye also seems a little blurry while the left one is working fine.  Also the head pain is on the right side so maybe that’s affecting my vision. I don’t know.
I get to work and start googling some more(only on my breaks, of course[my boss reads this]).  I knew a guy who recently died of a very rare disease call Creutzfeld-Jakob disease(CJD, pronounced KROITS-felt YA-kob).  He’s actually one of the founders of the company I work for and he was an awesome dude, the smartest person I’ve ever known.  The disease is not known to be contagious but it’s so rare how can they know for sure, right.  So I look up the symptoms and, as is usually the case with the diseases I look up,  I have at least 5 of the symptoms.  Depression. Check. Memory loss. Check. Personality changes. Check. Speech impairement. Sort of.  Balance and coordination dysfunction. Check.  So I don’t have dementia, seizures, or hallucination…yet.  Obviously, I don’t want this disease(because it’s fatal in like 6 months or something) and I know I’m being paranoid because I know someone who had it.  I’ve tried to think about what I did Monday that’s different than any other day but is the same as what I was doing 3 weeks ago.  This morning in the shower something came to me
This is just a theory and it will sound crazy but here goes.  I was eating quinoa for breakfast every day for like 2 weeks( all during the time when the head pain was the worst).  Then I quit and started eating oatmeal because I was worried about my cholesterol(200).  That’s when the head pain went down to a 1 from a 4 or 5.  Monday night we ate quinoa for dinner(the first time I’ve had it since I quit eating it for breakfast).   So as best I can figure the only thing I did differently was eat something everyone says is the greatest, most healthy food ever made.  What? Ok, maybe it’s like pomegranate juice, that stuff makes me feel nauseous every time I drink it but I keep doing it because it is awesome and allegedly awesome for me.  My theory on the pomegranate juice has always been, maybe the juice is killing something bad in my and it doesn’t like it so it makes me sick.  If I apply this same theory to the ever-present head pain then I can assume that the head pain is being irritated by whatever is in the quinoa and it doesn’t like it.  Now I realize that the head pain is just a symptom and not the actual problem so it doesn’t make sense that everyone keeps telling me just to stop eating quinoa if I want the pain to go away.  I don’t want the pain to go away, I want the cause of the pain to go away.
Today my head is back to the 1 again and I still don’t know what else to do.  I quit the Prilosec so the heartburn is back and worse than before.  I’m going to try eating garlic cloves and drinking apple cider vinegar and baking soda(read it on the internet).   Have a nice day

Eric Anderson

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