I don’t really remember what I wrote yesterday; I remember that I was angry, but it wasn’t really about anything solid or sharp, more just a general sense of frustration and despair.  I really felt and feel at a loss, with no sense of meaning or purpose or deep value.

I can’t claim to think that feeling is unreasonable; the world provides plenty of evidence for the pointlessness of all things.  I suspect that most people just try to avoid thinking about it.  They distract themselves with religions and other ideologies and with social interactions, whiling away their time until everything finally breaks down and they die.

Some surely die in a state of bewilderment and fear, never having accepted or even having truly contemplated their own mortality.  Some probably find comfort in the aforementioned religious ideas or just in community.  Having the love of family and friends, especially if such people are with them near the end, must help relieve at least some of the dread and pain as things wind down.

It must be at least some comfort if, when one is dying, one has loved ones nearby, helping to provide reassurance or at least just company.  If one has loved ones who willingly and lovingly attend to them while they are dying, or even just want to be there with them, one must at least be able to think that one has done something right in life.

Anyway, I’m on my way into the office, still rather sick but definitely improving.  I’m coughing, but not as badly, and the goo I’m bringing up is thinning out and looking less like some weird, opaque resin made from peas.  I’m still far from optimal, but then, I only started getting sick about six days ago.  If I’m substantially over it by, say, Friday, well that will have been a decently circumscribed illness, especially considering just how badly I’ve been feeling.

Somewhat ironically, my illness at least distracted me‒temporarily‒from the degree of my back, hip, ankle, and shoulder/arm pains, and those are becoming more prominent again as the illness recedes.  This leads me to wonder to what degree interferons or “tumor necrosis factors” and other aspects of the immune response can have beneficial effects on chronic pain, or if indeed they can do so at all.

It might be interesting to do a retrospective study involving, say, people who were treated with strong doses of interferon (with ribavirin) for Hepatitis C, or even for cancers such as melanomas, and who came out the other end healthy, then to try to learn whether any of them had chronic pain before starting treatment, and how the pain responded to the treatment.  We could compare them to age (and otherwise) matched cohorts who did not receive any such interferon treatments but who had similar amounts of chronic pain and see if their courses differed in a statistically significant way.

Of course, those high-dose interferon treatments for Hep C had their own serious complications and side-effects.  For instance, they could trigger serious depression even in people with no previously known disposition to have mood disorders.  These outcomes were generally worth the risk, if one could thereby eliminate chronic Hepatitis C, which is associated with significant morbidities and pathologies, not the least of which are potential liver cancer and sclerosis.

Still, if I could go through, say, a six week course of such treatment and thereby reduce (or eliminate) my chronic pain, I think it would probably be worth it.  I’m depressed and suicidal anyway.

Of course, we’re a long way from such a study outcome, even if we had unlimited funding and could start the study tomorrow.  Money can help make a lot of things easier to do, but as Kansas pointed out in Dust in the Wind, money has no effect on time*, and some things just take time.

I don’t expect to see such a study done, let alone to be able to benefit from the results, and honestly, I don’t have a high credence that it would show clinically useful effects.  After all, my own pain is not diminished now as I’m getting over my illness; it’s just changing back to baseline.  And, unfortunately, taking a vacation from one pain to another only to come back to the original one is probably not something anyone would really seek out***.

That’s enough for today.  I hope you all have a decent one‒do please try, at least.  Someone should, and it would be nice if most such people were reader-types who like blogs rather than wealthy assholes who don’t give much of a shit about anyone else, though those are the people who seem most likely to have happy days most often.

Not that wealth means someone is undeserving of happiness; that’s a non sequitur, really‒sour grapes projected onto the world by those who resent and envy the wealthy (sometimes with good reason, sometimes without).

Do your best.

*Okay, if you had enough money, all in one place**, you might form a massive enough object that it would measurably slow the local passage of time.  Heck, you could make a “money black hole” if you could get enough of it together and compress it enough, and at the event horizon, time would stop (to an outside observer, anyway).  Of course, according to GR, a black hole is a black hole is a black hole, with only mass, angular momentum, and charge differentiating one from another, so it wouldn’t matter if the black hole was made out of money.  Quantum mechanics demands otherwise, though, and thus we have the famous “black hole information paradox”, which isn’t really a paradox, anymore than is the “Fermi paradox” (When you come to an apparent paradox or contradiction, that’s just an alert, saying “something you’re doing here is incorrect or incomplete.”)

**Even if you’re just storing that money as information, with no bills or coins, there is still energy associated with the information, always.  So enough information about enough money could still have gravitational effects.

***Then again, there is the phenomenon of deliberate self-harm, and I can tell you from experience, it is sometimes a way of diverting oneself from a pre-existing, chronic pain to another pain, one deliberately and personally chosen.  Does that count as a pain vacation?