Of This, That ‘n’ T’other

I’ll get the serious stuff out of the way first.

• I don’t know whether to be pleased or irritated with an article that I came across: a doctor who writes for the Daily Mail magnanimously concedes -below an article on haemorrhoids – that CFS/ME is ‘real’ because he attended a conference that said so.  Thanks, Doc; I’m sure the estimated 250,000 sufferers in this country, many of whom have doctors as uninterested and unsympathetic as you have been, are grateful to be taken out of the category Lying, Time-Wasting Toe-Rag.  I’m ambivalent because yes, it makes me angry that anyone would think my hard-working, hard-playing husband would prefer to lie around the house faking pain and fatigue than provide for his family and enjoy a rich life, maybe playing football with his sons or taking his wife out to dinner; but our ME community is so reviled amongst so many in the medical profession that any acknowledgment that this is a real and debilitating condition is welcome, no matter how patronising the delivery.
• The Hub took part in a study of CFS/ME patients a few years ago, called the FINE Trial (Fatigue Intervention by Nurses Evaluation).  A nurse came to the house once a month for about six months and talked with him.  The idea was to see if a talking cure worked – presumably to test the theory that it was all in his head.  It didn’t help much – presumably because it’s not all in his head.  What did help the Hub was having a sympathetic ear from a stranger; I don’t think people realise the deleterious effect on the psyche when even family and friends – those alleged to know your character – think you’re idle and/or faking it.  There was one person who told the Hub ‘I wish I could get it; I could do with six months off work.’  Try fourteen years and see if you still feel the same.
• You can read a simple summary of the report here.  The conclusion I found interesting was: supportive listening is not an effective treatment for CFS/M.E.  No kidding.  Supportive listening won’t fix a broken leg either; I wonder why that is?
• Here’s a cartoon that pretty much sums up the medical position on CFS/ME:

That’s enough bitterness for one day; this is supposed to be a funny blog.

• I heard a quote yesterday, attributed to the writer Kate Fox: Why do Geordies have an existential problem?  Because they’re always saying, ‘Why I?’ 
• It’s not the exact quote; I Googled it and couldn’t find it, but I did come across a poem of hers that tickled me, especially this line:     Glad never to leave one particular Lancashire town?/That’s Stockport syndrome.
• A sad exemplar of our times over at Parentdish: a reality tv show in the States about a modern Partridge Family has not been aired for over two years because the family is – wait for it – too happy: Despite two years of effort by a television crew to show the seamy underbelly of the family Witchger, CNN reports too many family confessionals ended with smiling kids and parents saying, “It was really fun.”
• I had a giggle at a friend’s recent Facebook status; she has a husband named Brian; I’m pretty sure she meant to type ‘brain’: Going to sleep now; worn out from brian’s overactivity.

Finally, we haven’t had a poem for at least two days, so here’s a bit of fluff for Carry on Tuesday.  The prompt was to use the line One misty moisty morning from the 1973 Steeleye Span song.  Don’t ask me how I ended up with this, because I have no idea:

Boat Race

One misty, moisty morning
a hoity-toity Cambridge few
goaded the gangly, spangley crew
who wore the Oxford Blue:

You shall not prevail, they cried;
when the Thames has reached high tide
we’ll kick your Cox over the side
and then the rest of you.

  

I don’t even watch the boat race, though I still sigh over the memory of Rob Lowe in Oxford Blues – and any other film/tv/photograph in which he appears. 

Sorry, I have to stop typing now; I appear to be drooling.