For every door that closes, another one hits you in the face.It always seems that way to me. When one of life's doors closes I'm usually either right there scrabbling with my fingernails to prevent it closing, or helping it along with a good hefty kick. After that I start looking around at other doors. I'm pretty good at it, a lot of the time I'm standing at the correct door scratching my head when it springs open, which means I usually get hit in the face. Maybe I should be more laid back. One thing I've learned about myself lately is that I love new beginnings, I'm very good at them, and I like endings because every ending means a new beginning, I mean I like them enough to do a fairly decent job at them usually. But I really, really suck at middles. I get bored. I can't do repetitive things for long without screwing up. I guess that explains it, but I really should stand back from those doors instead of Jonesing for a new beginning.
The second aphorism I mentioned was "Turn every stumbling block into a stepping stone". I like mine better:
Turn every stumbling block into a lawsuit. Who put that stupid block right where any sane person would stumble over it?However, I will applaud efforts to pretend that a stumbling block is a stepping stone. Programmers are good at that, in fact they have their own aphorism for it, "That's not a bug, it's a feature". Cats are my role models here, I'm sure you've all seen a cat do something stupid, like slip and fall off a roof into a bucket of water, thrash around like a maniac overturning the bucket, perform a roll and tuck to land in a sitting position licking the inside of their left paw, with an expression that says "What, that? I meant to do that." Perfect.
The third aphorism I mentioned was "Every dark cloud has a silver lining". Google turns up an interesting variant of that, "Every dark cloud has a silver lining, but lightning kills hundreds of people each year who try to find it". I think I like mine better:
Every dark cloud has a silver lining, especially when it's backlit by lightning. Duck!Or as the theme song from George of the Jungle says, "Watch out for that tree!"
That brings me to the main topic of this page. I once heard in an online MS forum that electroshock therapy was once touted as a cure for MS. The general opinion now seems to be that electroshock therapy has negative effects on the blood-brain barrier. The blood-brain barrier is of course implicated in the Standard Theory of MS as possibly being the culprit that allows white cells into the brain where, like a dog who manages to sneak into the room where the buffet is being held, they munch on things they shouldn't. For the dog, cold cuts, for the white cells, myelin. Hence the general feeling that the blood-brain barrier is a very dangerous thing to monkey around with by, say, shooting a couple hundred volts through it willy-nilly.
I have some limited personal experience. At my old house we had this wonderful tile floor that extended through most of the house, including the kitchen, living room, hallways, bathroom, and laundry. Unfortunately it wasn't stuck down very well, which means that it tended to pop loose from the floor during catastrophic water events.
So one day after a thunderstorm, during the period when it stops booming and merely pisses down with rain, we noticed that the front gutter overflowed. It wasn't merely overflowing, it was rushing, gushing, flowing, going to cause that tile to pop up if I didn't deal with it. I grabbed an aluminum ladder, set it in the front flower bed where it promptly sank to the first step in the soaked mulch, and, garbed in shorts and one of those cool Aussie raincoats with the shoulder pads, set about clearing the gutter.
You know where this is going of course. Here I am after all this talk of electroshock therapy, wet, standing barefoot on an aluminum ladder sunk up to its first step into the damp ground, with my hands on a metal gutter that is full to the brim with water, just after a thunderstorm. All of a sudden I feel the hair on my arms and head standing on end. I just have time to think "This is not... good". Between the "not" and the "good" there is clearly some missing time because all of a sudden I am flat on my back in the mulch and I'm hearing the rolling end of what gave every appearance of being a very large peal of thunder. And I'm not talking about missing memory due to alien abduction here.
Nimbly, like the cat I mentioned earlier, I rolled to my feet and ran into the house doubled over to make myself as low as possible, and very astutely locked my wife out of the house as the thunderstorm returned full force, with lightning and thunder and strong winds and buffeting rain as only a Texas thunderstorm can. I couldn't hear her pummeling on the door over noise of the storm, and because I was laughing, laughing like a complete maniac. I'd been hit by lightning and I survived!
I have yet to live that one down.
In the cold, hard light of day it turned out that a pine tree about 20 feet from the gutter took the direct hit, while I apparently took a side-branch. All I had to show for it was a cigarette-sized burn on my left wrist and another on my left ankle. Regrettably, they didn't turn out to be permanent.
Regrettably also, I can't report that my MS became noticably better or worse afterwards.
Bummer. It would have made a great story. So much for electroshock treatment. Keep in mind that this is only a testimonial though.