So, now my other knee is showing the same symptoms as the first one. I now have two malfunctioning knees. First the left, now the right. Isn’t that just dandy?

Just like when I first started have problems with the left, the right knee now feels very hot to me, especially after moving, and when I palpate the knee (aka give it a squeeze), it feels squishy and puffy, like there is fluid under the skin.

So, you know… WTF?

By this point, the left knee has… stabilized. It doesn’t heat up nearly as much as it did before, and it doesn’t hurt as much to move it as it once did.

But it’s still not healthy. I have to be careful how I put weight on it because any side-to-side twisting causes pain of a very worrying sort. And I still have that surface muscular paralysis that makes it feel like there’s a cast or a bandage wrapped around my left leg, between the top of the kneecap to around mid-calf.

If the same thing was to happen to the right leg as well, it would definitely make it hard to walk. Right now, I have a bit of a limp, but for the most part, the right leg compensates for the left.

That might be part of the problem, come to think of it. The right leg being overloaded now.

Anyhow, if both of them were stiff and unstable, at the very least I would be walking funny. At the worst, I would not be able to walk correctly without some kind of assistance, like crutches or braces.

That would suck. I might not be the most active of guys, in fact I am probably about as indolent as one can be without being in a coma. There are invalids in hospitals who get more exercise than me because they at least are made to do physio.

But I still enjoy the ability to walk. The alternatives are so much less efficient and, frankly, a lot more work. I have spent some time on crutches and they are a nightmare of a hassle to deal with. They are bulky and awkward and clumsy to use, and they put a lot of strain on your arms, and especially your underarms, which are, after all, now bearing your weight.

I have never had braces on my legs, but they do not look like fun either. And they usually come with crutches.

So needless to say (but I will anyway), I am getting pretty worried. Clearly something is attacking my knees and possibly other joints as well, and so far, medical science doesn’t know what. My GP couldn’t figure it out (typical, in my experience) and has supposedly referred me to a rheumotologist (sp?), but that was weeks ago now and I still haven’t heard anything.

So I might just have to dial myself up another GP appointment and go back to see Doctor Chao and remind him that he has not actually diagnosed my problem yet, let alone solved it.

I think it is unfair to make patients have to come back over and over again and advocate so hard for themselves just to keep the doctor’s attention long enough to get your problem actually treated. I should not feel like I need to have a lawyer or an advocate just to get treatment. The assembly-line approach to primary health care of today is great for making sure you can get an appointment within a couple of days, but it does a poor job with anything that can’t be solved in 15 minutes or less with a quick procedure or a hastily dashed off prescription.

All my life, I have had a strange relationship with doctors. I don’t know if it’s the perversity of fate or the perversity of how I express myself, but I always seem to end up with these sorts of problems that defy simply solutions and that therefore require the kind of focused attention and follow-through that you just can’t get from today’s general practitioners.

The fact that I have a history of being too timid and agreeable to properly advocate for myself only makes the problem worse. The very medical conditions (social anxiety, depression) that a GP first diagnosed in me are the precise reason why I cannot properly advocate for myself in the first place.

But life is pretty harsh for people whose medical conditions make it hard to seek treatment. I am not sure what could be done about that. Maybe some sort of medical advocate outreach program. Something where I would only have to have the gumption to call and make contact once, and then an advocate would take it from there.

Hell, for all I know, that’s already out there, just waiting for my call. How would I know?

Luckily, thanks to the ministrations of a competent medical professional in the form of my therapist Doctor Costin, I am recovering from my mental illness and I am therefore considerably less timid and self-minimizing than before. This opens the door to a more robust and assertive level of self-advocacy.

But it will always seem wrong to me to have a medical system where you have to practically shout at your GP in order to keep their attention long enough to actually be treated for things. It certainly fails to make me feel like my doctor is on my side or that he or she knows me well enough to treat me as a person and not just today’s list of symptoms.

Maybe the information age is partly to blame. There is a lot of information attached to every patient now, and it would take some kind of mnemonic genius to remember it all for dozens of patients.

But there has to be some way to make the whole thing a little more gentle and humane.

I guess doubling the number of doctors would do it. But that’s kind of hard to arrange. People either choose to become doctors or they don’t, and nothing society can do can do much to change that.

Oh well. I will hobble to the keyboard to talk to you again tomorrow, folks!

I’ve been catching up on Sherlock (the Cummerbund Bandersnatch version) via Netflix lately, and it’s got me thinking about my own life as someone who was far too smart for his own good.

I think the main reason Sherlock Holmes is the most portrayed character in the history of the English language and still has a powerful legacy more than a hundred years after the original stories were published is that, for us intellectual types, Holmes is actually an “id” character.

He behaves more or less exactly like us smarty pants types secretly wish we could. He is eccentric and driven and follows the passions of the mind with very little restraint and uses his extraordinary mind in the most exciting and thrilling way possible : the pursuit of crime.

Now, depending on your Sherlock, exactly how eccentric he is varies. Some versions he’s more or less just a slightly eccentric proper gentleman who mostly does drawing-room deductions and his Watson is a bumbling fool only good for taking down notes and fawning over Sherlock and telling Sherlock how brilliant he is.

And that version of Sherlock can be quite entertaining in a mostly intellectual way. But I don’t identify with it. I have never had the luxury of being able to keep my overclocked brain from making me one very strange dude.

The Henderson Cabbagepatch version of Sherlock Holmes is far more to my liking. He’s eccentric to the point of being a barely contained lunatic a lot of the time. He is the sort of person who shoots his wall with a pistol (indoors, no less) when he gets bored and has a lot of trouble actually identifying with people and behaving like one of them despite his extraordinarily sharp understanding of them from an intellectual POV.

I can relate to that. In that, he is more or less a more severe and exaggerated version of me. I too have a great understanding of people that doesn’t actually make it any easier for me to get along with them. I could give you enormous detail as to why people do the things they do. I have never had trouble understanding people’s motives or actions, or at least, not as an adult.

Nevertheless, I am as socially isolated as any other breed of nerd. There is a vast gulf between the sort of intellectual understanding of people that I possess and the gut-level realtime understanding that a socially gifted person has. There are skills you can only acquire via proper socialization, and if you do not get that socialization at the right time of your life, you will be at a disadvantage till the day you die.

Luckily, those social circuits get repurposed into intellectual circuits (or maybe that was the problem in the first place) and so there is at least some compensation for being socially retarded.

And the Bumbershoot Cucumber version of Sherlock Holmes seems like that kind of person as well. It is clear to me that his Sherlock is not the sort of person who could just walk into a random pub and be chatting with the regulars like he’d been there for years within five minutes. He does not seem like the kind of person who is the life of the party wherever he goes.

He does not seem like the type who knows how to mingle.

Instead, he operates within his own icy “mind palace” that gives him a robust avenue for engaging with reality entirely on his own chilly intellectual terms, and even gives him a way to function at a very high level in society without actually having to learn to be a normal person at all.

Makes me kind of jealous, to be honest, inasmuch as it is possible to be jealous of a fictional character. I still have not found my weird little niche from which I can deal with society yet. Unlike luckier souls, I was left completely adrift at an early age. Nobody ever took an interest in me, or if they did, I was just too difficult and hard to reach for them to keep it up. I never had anyone to suggest I focus my enormous mental energies on some sort of goal.

And so I just drifted through life, and I am drifting still. One would hope that by now I would have learned to make my own structure and find my own goals to focus on, but no matter how much time you spend flapping your wings, you still won’t fly.

Plus, you know, mental illness. It’s a bitch.

I’d like to think that if a real world situation that required Sherlockian detective work came up, I could be as driven as he is to find the answers. I could never have his powers of observation, of course. All my skills are cerebral, not sense-based. I barely notice really obvious details of people, let alone subtle ones.

Actually, I am pretty good with sound. I suppose I’ve had to be, growing up as I did with poor vision. So I can notice things in people’s tone of voice that others might miss. I can certainly detect insincerity with great precision.

And it bugs the hell out of me. That’s why I can’t stand it when corporations force their employees to pretend to be more social and friendly than they are. I would much rather aloof but polite service from someone being genuine than artificially perky and over-familiar service from someone who is dying on the inside.

Anyhow, basically, watching Sherlock has prompted me to think of my own role as a maladjusted intellectual.

What we need is something like kindergarten for grownups. Someplace where we can go where there is not a lot of pressure, just cool stuff to do and nice people teaching lessons and lots of gentle encouragement to socialize and mingle.

It would be a rough place to run because a lot of us have some pretty deep issues that might well come out in antisocial behaviour, at least at first. A lot of us do not play well with others either.

But with enough kindness and patience, maybe we can all have that happy childhood that it is supposedly never too late for.

You and me, Sherlock. The game’s afoot!

Talk to you tomorrow, folks!