Through the Autoimmune Looking Glass, Lavender Cures All, Reading The Signature of All Things and Boy Snow Bird

I spent at least five hours of the last week in doctor’s offices. Sometimes this is because of “specialist bounce:” one specialist gets an idea that your symptoms exist because of another system’s (outside that specialist’s purview) errors, and sends you away to be someone else’s problem. It happens a lot. But this week, both meetings were on my autoimmune issues, with a rheumatologist and immunologist. We talked options and genetic testing and, yes, finally, a treatment path. I’ll be starting a kind of monthly shot that targets your immune system called Xolair (it’s sort of new in treating things like food allergies and autoimmune urticaria; it was developed for children’s asthma, but apparently is doing gangbusters in adults with various autoimmune problems involving IgE…) in August and see if it gets rid of at least some of the symptoms; after that, we’ll talk some of the other autoimmune generalist drugs, like Plaquenil (not a heavy hitter, but not high risk) or Cyclosporine (higher risk, but higher benefit.) I can’t help thinking, what if, what if, what if: what if this shot fixes so many of my problems that I can eat at a restaurant without fear of anaphylaxis just touching something with wheat; what if I can travel more widely; what if my life becomes, gasp, almost normal again? (Both doctors did warn me that the shot would only eliminate some of my problems; the neuro and joint problems will probably remain unchanged. So I have to come down off my optimistic cloud a bit…)

Going and sitting in doctor’s offices for five hours a week and talking about how many things are wrong with you might generally get you down. (The rheumatologist asked: how do you stay so cheerful through all of this? And my standard answer to this is: what are my other options?) So I took some efforts to counteract this with outdoor activity, doing things I love. This week, I visited some local East side lovely areas: The Woodinville Lavender Farm, Marymoor Park:

We saw our first yellow swallowtail of the season, and bought some sachets for the laundry. It’s hard to think sad thoughts in the middle of warm sunshine and a field of lavender. It explains why Provence real estate costs so much! I walked around the lake at the Chateau Ste Michelle winery and counted the ducklings and watched the swallows. I watched for new baby rabbits at my local park.

I’ve also had lots of time for reading. I highly recommend Elizabeth Gilbert’s (yes, the Eat Pray Love girl) The Signature of All Things. The sweeping narrative, told in a standard Victorian-era omniscient narrator voice, covers over a hundred years, and a lot of history of 1700-1800’s botany, which I found fascinating – especially medical botany, which I loved studying in college. I also started Boy Snow Bird, a retake on the Snow White story set in a 1950’s story of class and race, which started off so unappealingly I almost put it down. But I hung in there.  The texture of the writing is strange, as if the writer can’t decide which diction her characters should have, and the sentence structures leap from plain to complex. But I’m continuing because fragments of the story are lovely and striking, including a story of a magician who encounters a beautiful woman whose heart is a snake.

I got some work done; I’m almost finished with the author’s note I’m including at the beginning of “The Robot Scientist’s Daughter,” and I researched and wrote down some of my bibliography, which included a lot of tricky government sites that tend to move around a lot. I’ve started my review of Matthea Harvey’s upcoming book, If the Tabloids are True What Are You?

Today my little brother’s wife is coming to stay with us for a week to do some apartment-hunting – in three weeks they are moving out here to stay! My little brother is still in Thailand for the moment, but not for much longer, which makes me happy. It’s hard to stay close to someone on another continent! I think he and his wife will love it here – there’s Shaolin, and yoga, and lots of computer jobs. They may fit in here better than Glenn and I do! So good things on the horizon…