ARTS & FARCES internet

I’ve renamed the weblog to better reflect my state of mind and intentions. [ed. note: The weblog articles have since been integrated to the site as a whole.] If you’ve never listened to Hunter’s song, give it a listen. It’s one of the best pieces of American music ever. When I meditate on this lyric it takes me lots of places I’ve never been.

A few weeks ago, one of my nephrologists decided it would be a Good Idea to give me a drug— iohexol (Omnipaque)—to test my kidney function. Here’s a clue: I have very little and I’d like very much to keep what I’ve got, thanks. I also have (or had) a good deal of urine output. The problem is that I don’t fit into their medical model. I shouldn’t have any function or output at all, but I have a little and I’m working on the impossible: to gain enough function to live well without dialysis or transplant. This, of course, is heresy in the western medical model. But I’ve been on dialysis now for about 7 months and my kidney disease isn’t progressing “normally.”

So the wheel keeps turning.

As it turns out the iohexol has possibly caused my urine output to drop drastically—less than half what it was. The doctors, of course, say it’s impossible that the drug caused any such problems. These would be the same doctors that say it’s impossible for me to have the kidney function I still have as well.

I found at least one study that indicates Iohexol isn’t a good thing at all for kidney patients, and could in fact have caused my output problems, but it’s impossible to tell. It’s impossible because the same time the nephrologist was prescribing the Iohexol she also dinked around with my blood pressure medicine and asked me to try a new one: clonidine.

Clonidine works on the brain to dilate blood vessels and lower blood pressure caused by kidney failure. Unfortunately for me, it also makes me stupid. I don’t mean conveniently dumb, I mean drooling stupor in meetings stupid. So, that one’s out.

I immediately went to see my Chinese medicine man (he’s western, but studied extensively in China) and he immediately recognized that I was holding a lot of anger (duh) and knew that it would accumulate in my liver. He instructed me to eat a lot of guacamole and burnt rye toast with peanut butter for the next week or so. The carbon on the rye toast and peanut butter will bind with the bad stuff in my liver and get flushed out. I forgot what the guacamole is for. Steve also gave me a sensitive new-age mantra to use to prevent being what he called “snaked” in the future. It’s probably supposed to be secret, but I’ll let you in on it: “Fuck them Fuck them Fuck them.”

“If the thunder don’t get you
then the lightning will.”

Hey, I think it’s starting to work.