Rhubarb Pie

2010: The Year of.....

There are a few things I will be focusing on in 2010.  I am happy in my home life and my work life, and I am getting back into a pattern of exercise that is starting to feel good again.  So my hope is that I can attend to other things without screwing any of that up.  

I've been thinking about Fun, as I wrote a little while ago.  I'd like to have More Fun in 2010.  I realized that I haven't quite learned what is fun for me at this stage of my life -- there are things I used to love doing, and some of them I might want to do more of, but some of them don't sound like fun right now (e.g. gathering a ton of friends to meet out at a bar, or come over to play games).  Those don't sound awful, but they aren't necessarily the best way for me to have fun at this stage of life.  On Christmas Eve some friends and I walked to the pond in the park in the center of town and went ice skating, and then came home for an afternoon of cooking and hot cider.  That was fun.  I think I can have more fun by taking more excursions, planning more adventures, participating in more pranks.  I think it's kind of fun to play cards with people.  When I sat down and thought about fun I thought about a few categories of fun: there's solo fun, couple fun, and fun with friends.  I think that in the late 30s "fun with friends" changes, so noticing how and when the different opportunities for fun show up will be something I pay more attention to this year.  "Couple fun" is tricky, too -- there's lots of contentment in cooking together and curling up with our books or a video, but that's not quite what I mean by "fun."  Ice skating, swing dancing, and walking a few blocks to see the Red Claws play: those seem like good bits of fun we can add, and I think paying more attention will yield more ideas.  And then there's solo fun.  It was really easy for me to identify what is fun for me by myself.  I like to take the dogs on rambly walks.  But the thing that immediately jumps out as the most fun thing I can spend my time doing is going to be the biggest focus of 2010: The Brain. 

The Year of the Brain (Comic Book).  What is really, really fun for me is to learn about the brain.  And the funnest way for me to learn something is to draw cartoons about the concepts and how they relate to one another.  When I thought about how I might have more fun the obvious answer was to spend the year learning as much as I can about the brain -- specifically, cognition and decision-making, and the systematic flaws or limitations that seem to be part of the way we process information and make meaning out of it.  What I care a lot about is how people make sense of the world and how they can make better decisions -- that's why I like the job I'm in right now, and that's what I am curious about when I read the books I read.  I am not sure if what I need is psychology or neuroscience or philosophy -- I've been checking books out of all three areas of the library.  When I'm further along on this project I think I'll have some better ideas about which field I'm most specifically interested in, but for now there's a lot of reading and drawing I need to do just to start asking the right questions.  I don't know or care right now whether anyone will ever want to read my comic book about how to use your brain better, but I know that learning enough to figure out what goes in it, and drawing the pictures to tell whatever story I've arrived at, will be the most fun I can have by myself.  I'm cheating by starting early, gobbling up lectures on DVD by a Vanderbilt neuroscientist.  Actually, I started on this years ago, in 1994 when I first read The Moral Animal.  But 2010 is the year I'm going to do it in a more specific, focused way.  (Want to see some pictures of what I'm talking about? Here you go.)

It's also going to be the Year of Using My Power For Good.  I hope it won't be the only year of that.  I spend a lot of time doing volunteer work of one sort or another, and I've been thinking about that, just as I've been thinking about Fun.  I want that time to be more meaningful than it has been so far.  I have a law degree, and a license to practice, so I've been going to the district court about once a month to help people get protection from abuse orders.  I'm not sure it's the best way for me to help, although I do think that, mostly, I've helped make something hard a little tiny bit easier for some people.  That feels good, but it's not as good as it could be if I were doing something slightly different with my time.  I have some ideas that might be a better use of my time and my brain and my law license, but I'm not quite sure how to make those things work yet.  I'm also on the board of a nonprofit that I started, with my dad, a long time ago.  I've been doing a lot to help that organization, but I'm still not sure I'm doing enough, or doing the right sorts of things.  Finally, at work, I think mostly what I do is useful, and if I can do it well I am helping some people who need it.  But I think there are ways I'm not using all of my power -- that sounds groovy, but I don't want to get more specific just yet.  I'm trying to think about how to be a better advocate for my students in particular, and for people looking for jobs more generally.  There are some charlatans out there, ready to prey on the confusion and insecurity of people who aren't sure whether or how they will get hired.  I don't like those folks very much, and I'm trying to figure out what my role in that landscape should be.  So this idea has a couple of components.  One is "Use My Power" -- by which I mean, the things that I do especially well, that are different than what other people offer, that make me feel fulfilled when I exercise them.  And the other is "For Good," by which I mean, well, to help the world in some way that feels meaningful.  I'm not sure what the scope of that kind of contribution should be.  Something that makes me different from you is that I seem to be blindedly devoted to individuals.  I can't think about groups or populations, at least not while retaining any passion or sense of purpose.  I'm not very capable of abstraction, even though I'm reasonably smart, and can fake being logical and rational pretty well if necessary.  I care about individuals, not groups.  I haven't figured out how to be efficient and effective and to make as broad a contribution as possible when that seems to be my mindset.  

 I need to sit down and review 2009, so we can all set our expectations about these goals appropriately low.  I didn't cure Crohn's disease, or read all of Shakespeare, or even do a very good job planning my reading.  But I have more to say about all of that, so I'll write that down in the next couple of days. 

I Am Beginning To Think I Will Not Find A Cure

The other day I was sitting at my gastroenterologist's, talking about poop, and she asked me a question about mine.  "I'm not completely sure," I said.  Maybe twice a day, maybe three times, maybe a little more?  

It's good you're not obsessed, she said, and I wondered whether she was right.  I won't find The Definitive Cure if I am not obsessed, and I feel a little guilty about that.  On the other hand, becoming obsessed with poop takes a lot of time and attention, and there is a great big beautiful world full of interesting people who need my attention, too.  Still, I am not satisfied with the amount I have learned, and the amount I still don't understand, about Crohn's disease.  

Last night I went to a presentation about Crohn's in a hotel conference room.  It was sponsored by the makers of Cimzia (TM), and it will perhaps not surprise you to hear that one of the speakers was a patient who struggled with the disease until at last a doctor prescribed her Cimzia, and now she's doing great.  The other speaker was a Mt. Sinai gastroenterologist named Tom Ullman, and it was he I was there to hear.  He's friendly to Cimzia and the other anti TMF drugs, but didn't seem to be beholden to them in a way that ruined his credibility.  Not too far into the  presentation, after he'd encouraged us to ask questions, I asked him what the mechanism of action of this disease is.  That's the most frustrating part.  Nobody knows what causes it, or why it shows up in some people when and where it does, why it manifests differently in different kinds of patients, what might trigger it.  This is the part that makes me want to start taking organic chemistry and immunology, because that is such an unsatisfying answer.  

I wrote some stuff down on my index card for further research -- some doctors trying different kinds of treatments, some molecules and proteins I want to learn more about, etc.  But there were two big things about last night's presentation that stayed with me. 

Dr. Ullman's philosophy, he said, was that people with Crohn's disease should get to a point where they think about it as much as they think about cavities.  Sure, daily care and attention, and a couple of doctor's visits a year, but otherwise, having this condition shouldn't take up too much of your life.  Hearing this settled part of me down.  I have been phrasing this in my head as a binary decision: either I am cured, and I don't need to worry any more about Crohn's disease, or I have it, and I am failing myself and the world if I do not obsess about it.  Maybe that's a false choice.  Maybe it can be more like tooth decay or gum disease.  

The second thing was how really bad Crohn's disease can be.  I've read about this on the internet, of course, but being in a roomful of people, some of whom have had huge hunks of their colon removed, or been on Prednizone for long amounts of time, or who can't go out of their homes because they must stay near a bathroom at all times, holy cow.  This is not how it is for me, and it is my solemn intention to do whatever I can never to get there.  I'm basically very close to the tooth decay stage right now -- a mild medicine is working pretty well for me and there's the promise and the realistic hope that it will work perfectly.  This can be so very bad.  I hate that there's no clear answer available, that for all that is known the variation in individual responses to the disease and to the various treatments is vast and inexplicable and unfair.  That part, too, makes me feel like I am too lucky and too smart to give up trying to figure this out. 

Year of the Cure: I Need Your Help

So, I think we need to invent something so that we can cure Crohn's disease.  I have figured out what we need to invent, but I don't have the technical skills to actually build it.  But you and our readers, who are very smart, probably do, or maybe you have friends who do.  At the very least maybe you can tell me what kind of people might do this for pay and how much money I'd have to raise to pay them. 

Here's the problem this invention will solve, for me and some of the million people who've got it: we need to know what's going on in our intestines, and to monitor them for changes daily as we try out different things that might cure us.  We can't see what's going on in our intestines.  The ways to see into intestines are expensive, cumbersome, and unpleasant.  So the biggest clue about what's going on in our intestines is looking at our poop.

As data, poop is common and reasonably available.  Here is the problem: it is socially unacceptable to be really interested in poop, or to compare notes about it.  It's also transient -- you can't show it to your doctor.  You have to describe it, which is hard even for a person with a pretty good grasp of language and a pretty high threshhold of embarrassment.  And it's hard to remember with any accuracy what your poop looked like four days ago, and be sure about whether it has changed a lot since you stopped eating meat or started taking those pills. 

But those difficulties in tracking poop are easy to overcome.  I have a handy camera on my mobile phone, and I can take it with me into the bathroom, and capture the information that I am about to flush away.  The photo is automatically time and date stamped.  I can send it to a website where it could be uploaded into a series of photos, and I could go in and tag the dates that, say, I changed my medication.  I can see trends and changes in my own intestines.  I can compare what's happening with me with what's happening with other patients, without being icky or having to have embarrassing conversations.  

It seems to me the technical solution to a social hangup is pretty easy to build, by mashing up some existing technology -- a sort of taggable Flickr stream, anonymized, with the ability to upload photos from a mobile phone.  People like me, staring fixedly into the toilet trying to remember and understand and figure out what is going on inside us, can snap and upload and communicate a lot more information to our doctors.  We can be more systematic about monitoring our symptoms.  How do we build this tool?     

Self Improvement Update

Year of Shakespeare: no change.  I think this is twofold -- I am convinced it will not be very hard to read all of Shakespeare this year, and I needn't push it.  Also, I still don't have the right reading chair, and so I'm postponing Shakespeare until that chair is in place.  Everything else about my new reading nook is set up: the lighting is right, the bookshelf is right nearby, with the Shakespeare books stacked up neatly and a pile of index cards and some pens there within reach.  I even bought a chair at a used furniture store, but the narrow little steep staircase up to this garret room proved too tight for the chair, so I had to return it.  Soon.

Year of Planned Reading.  Hmmm.  I've been reading a lot.  A LOT.  More than in a long time.  But I'm not so sure about the Planned part.  I've gotten away from my disciplined preservation of daylight reading time.  I haven't stuck to the Plan -- I've been grabbing books opportunistically at the library, or ordering things on interlibrary loan and reading them ahead of others because of their due dates.  I've been fiddling around with my Kindle and reading different books on there than I would read in hardcover.  I've been doing a lot of reading related to the Year of the Cure, and some reading related to my job.  I should sit down and list what I've been reading, or even try to take a look at all the books I have checked out of the library right now and impose some intention on the pile.  Reading, yes.  Planned? Not so much.  In honor of my good intentions, I'm going to devote the next two hours to reading, as soon as I finish up this post.  

Year of the Cure. This is complicated.  I know a lot more than last time I wrote, because of all the reading I've been doing.  Maybe.  I certainly know more about the architecture of the small and large intestines, and the chemistry of digestion.  I'm not sure I understand it at a level that would let me make meaningful decisions.  I have some choices to make, and I have some misgivings about the different options.  I am not sure what my course of action should be.  I don't think I've found the right allies and advisors.  I don't know if it matters.  I think my disease is mild and will probably always be.  Maybe this shouldn't be my big fight.  Maybe medicating it and doing more interesting things is the right approach.  On the other hand, I have a Big Idea that I think might help lots of people.  Implementing it would take a huge amount of energy and some money and a lot of time.  This deserves its own post, which I will write a little bit later.  Another day, probably.  Tonight I need to read.  

The Cure: My Plan

I still haven't finished reading all the literature, nor have I settled on a specific plan.  So this will change.  But while I'm figuring it out, I've adjusted my eating habits.  I'm eliminating all the regular old bad stuff that people say to eliminate: no processed foods, no sugar, no white flour.  That's how I should be eating anyway, right?  I'm going gluten free, so there goes bread and baked things.  And I'm going a little further than that, because I like the Communicatrix and she's got Crohn's (and bad, too-- yikes) and swears by something called the Specific Carbohydrate Diet.  So I'm trying that out, although I haven't managed fanatical adherence.  (Just now I had some balsamic vinegar as part of my lunch, which is verboten.) So that means soy, grains, and most dairy are out, too.   

Essentially, there seem to be two general approaches to this condition: those aimed at the symptoms and those aimed at some theory about the cause.  I like the cause approach better as a mental framework; unfortunately, the scientific studies don't seem to support any conclusion about a cause, so those whose remedies are based on a theory about cause seem to be, basically, making everything up.  Not saying there aren't any empirical results -- on the internet you can find persuasive anecdotal and testimonial support for just about anything.  But when nobody agrees on the cause of something, it's hard to be systematic about evaluating strategies aimed at the cause.  Oversimplifying like crazy, I like to think of the cause folks as the "flowing meadow" school, because on some of the most earnest websites there is a lot of comparing the intestines to an ecosystem, full of swaying lush grasses and good bugs and bad bugs, all in harmony working to digest my lunch.  The premise of tinkering with diet is that someone mowed the meadow and killed off the good bugs, leaving the bad bugs swarming like a cloud of locusts.  The remedies are different, but the Specific Carbohydrate Diet is all about starving the bad bugs, repopulating the good bugs, and trying to keep things digestively simple (monosaccharides, not disaccharides or polysaccharides) until it's a flowing meadow once again.  It's more complicated than that, obviously -- I'm being simple partly for effect, and partly because I don't understand it much beyond this level.   

So I've been about 8 days being as compliant as I can with these eating restrictions.  (I'm allowed caffeine and certain alcohol -- dry wine, vodka, and bourbon are all ok.)  I cheat daily with half-and-half in my coffee, because life does not seem bearable without that.  Today as part of my big salad I had some tomatoes (allowed) that had been marinated in balsamic vinegar (not allowed).  Last week I mixed a can of diced tomatoes into an otherwise compliant chili recipe, I had four or five tortilla chips, I had a half cup of brown rice, and a couple of sips of beer, although not all on the same day.  Oh, and I made some smoothies with yogurt that probably wasn't compliant -- you're supposed to make your own yogurt, fermented for more than 24 hours.  But mostly I've been living the life.  It's more of a hassle than a drag -- hard mostly because I have to go out of my way to figure out what to eat, not because I miss any specific foods. 

What else am I doing?  I have an elaborate plan for monitoring my symptoms more stringently, which I am at work building now and will reveal when the time comes.  At one of our readers' suggestion, I'll try to make an appointment with an expert at a teaching hospital, either in Boston or New Haven.  I'm continuing to read everything I can find.  I see my doctor at the end of the month.  Keep your ideas coming.      

I could use some hippie eating suggestions, because sourcing and preparing food within these odd rules is taking up a lot of attention. 

What I Did Not Do This Weekend

Yesterday, right around 3 o'clock, I started feeling wistful and panicked and desperate.  The weekend was sliding to a close -- I was going to the gym at 3:30 and had friends coming for dinner at 6, so I was almost done with my free time, and I just felt so disappointed.  A whole, empty weekend, and although I was up at 6 both mornings, I left so much undone. 

1) I did not figure out The Definitive Cure for Crohn's Disease.  I read for three hours on Saturday, all around the Internets, and I had big plans to summarize the landscape of thought about the illness and form a plan to start learning more about the various theories out there.  But I don't think I've read enough yet to really do that.  There are some serious proponents of a kind of onerous diet, so you may indeed get your wish to think about some adaptive cooking.  Anyway, stay tuned. 

2) I did not pay our taxes.  Nor did I sit down and think about Personal Finance, and figure out a Grand Plan.  That's on my list of things to do. 

3) I did not solve the problem of not having a reading chair in my office.  I got most of my books out of boxes but now I need more bookshelves.  I did not solve that. 

4) I raked a lot of leaves but did not borrow a truck to take the huge pile of sticks and branches to the dump.  Our small backyard is almost entirely full of pieces of the old apple tree that NBT pruned.  So that's not done.

5) I did not figure out a satisfying storage solution for my t-shirts.  They're still getting jammed into the bottom bureau drawer, along with sweatpants and jeans.  It's not the right answer. 

6) I did not figure out how to Get Totally Organized.  I'm going to have to do that one night this week.  The current problem is that my days are heavily scheduled on Microsoft Outlook, so during business hours I have become trained to rely on that.  That's good, right?  But I don't use it when I'm away from work, and I don't have a system that captures the information.  So when I'm not in my office, I'm never quite sure when I'm busy, or what I'm forgetting.  I would really like to avoid a PDA, but I'm not sure if I can.   

7) I did not read any Shakespeare, or any of the Grapes of Wrath.  I hardly read ANYTHING this weekend. 

What We're Curing

I love that you think I'm all brave and stalwart about using the medical system.  That's not really me -- I'm a big avoider, too, although lately with better health insurance and now my new friend Crohn's Disease (the latest diagnosis) I'm navigating the system better.  I seek out nurse practitioners, not MDs, and base my doctor choices on convenient location, if I don't have a recommendation or a particular person in mind.  I was getting pretty fabulous dental care for a while there, but after a few visits my hygienist struck me as bossy and too talkative, and so I haven't been back for a few years because I haven't figured out how to stay at the same practice but request a different hygienist.  It's more on this theme of passive barriers, and how certain small difficulties can make an important task into something that gets indefinitely postponed.

With passive barrier type situations I have the most success if I way overreact -- I'm either an avoider entirely or I take on a huge project, like The Year of The Definitive Cure. 

Anyway, now we have a different name for what's going on in my intestines, but I don't know much more.  I'm afraid you've scared our wise and thoughtful readers away from sending cures, strategies, hypotheses, kooky ideas, studies, and dietary suggestions our way -- please, friends, I want to hear what occurs to you, so don't imagine that the inbox has been flooded with better ideas.  Below the fold, I'll tell you what I know, which is very, very, very little.

'Cept when I break an arm.

Good.  I like that approach, that you intend to fix the problem all the way.  Maintaining "basically OK" by staying on medicine seems like a second-best option if getting all the way well is available.  I have a thought to muse about and a confession to make.

We share the email address for this blog, so I've seen the emails you're getting.  They go exactly to my first impulse, but I don't know if my first impulse is a good one.  The ideas that people are sending can all be classified as "increase food purity", in some form (no grains! no dairy! no sugar!*).  I have to admit that when I hear of someone getting ill, my first response it "treat it with some food regime".  I honestly don't know what I think of this.  On the one hand, your body responds to its inputs, of which food is the dominant one.  You hear stories of cures, and of breaking the regime and immediately seeing the symptoms again.  It is easy to see the connection.

Still, I keep wondering if this is a form of magical bargaining.  "If I follow complex rules rigorously and become even more pure, can I earn my way to wellness."  Or maybe, "only the pure and rigorous get health", or "there is a set of rules that I can live by that will earn righteousness" or some other nasty insiduous Calvinism.  There may well be medical studies that I don't care enough to look up.  But I'm starting to wonder what underlies the whole premise and the fast and strong push for food purity.  Is it an American trait?  When I mentioned to my French cousin that I was coming off a sugar fast, she laughed.  "That's so American", she said. 

And my confession:

I'm impressed that you're aggressively pursuing treatment.  I, on the other hand, haven't been to a doctor in twenty years.   The last doctor I saw was my pediatrician.  (Don't scold me.  When I was in school, which was FOREVER, I did the lady-visits at the school clinic.  It has been a while since then, though.)  Yeah.   I don't go to doctors.

I don't even have an aversion to doctors, except that 15 minute appointments sound annoying.  It is just that I don't know what one would do for me.  So far as I know, I'm healthy.  I feel good, minor injuries excepted.  For those I get massages.  Going to the doctor is never the next thing on my list and then another few years have passed.  I have good health insurance, but I'd have to find an actual doctor, which is a chore, especially since I'd want a feminist doctor who understands athletes** and how do you tell that from a name in the phone book?

I have to deal with this soon, because I figure I should get a full physical if I plan to be pregnant in the short-term.  I am sorta resentfully noodling around the edges of this chore, not really doing much about it.  Inside, I don't want to address this.  So I'm impressed that you're dealing with your health straight on.  Me, not so much.

 

 

What I'm Up To

You're going to be sorry you asked, you know.  Because this post is filed under the category "Year of the Definitive Cure."  I'll try not to be graphic.  But right now I'm prepping for the colonoscopy I'm getting tomorrow.  The fact that it is taking place on April Fool's Day has not escaped me, nor has the fact that the first instruction on my preparation sheet for what to do on the day of the procedure is "Do not cement your dentures in today."  I am trying not to be resentful that I will be spending tomorrow sedated with a.... well, you get the idea, and if you don't get the idea then I will not be the person to spoil it for you.  I am trying to be grateful for the fact that the 70 or so ounces of disgusting liquid I am pounding back, 10 ounces at a time, in 10 minute increments, which will shortly send me rushing to the bathroom, is not as disgusting as it was three years ago, the last time I did this.  Sedation technology has gotten better, although they won't be giving me the good stuff tomorrow, for administrative and staffing reasons that are tedious and disappointing.  The person who is certified to administer the better sedation doesn't work on Wednesdays, and this is the day I have to come in.   

I have been thinking and planning a bit more about how I am going to bring about The Definitive Cure, but first we've got to take a look, and see what's going on.  I have a new doctor, who partly thinks I am a crackpot but seems to be humoring me and my aggressive approach by giving me lots of information.  She seems willing to experiment a bit.  I am a pretty mild patient.  "You're not *that* sick," she says.  Those words don't make sense to me.  I don't feel "sick" at all.  And I don't want to be a person who "manages" a disease. I want to be a person who used to have this thing and then got cured.  That's me.  I suppose because I'm "not that sick" there's not much of an incentive to do too much to treat me -- I respond well to basic medicine, and my symptoms disappear.  I think I'm supposed to feel lucky about that, and I suppose I do, in a way.  Flirting with mysterious health problems is really sobering, and makes me appreciate how little I worry about my body.  On the other hand, being not that sick isn't the goal here.  We can do better.  I'll keep you posted, and will try not to make the details too icky. 

2009: Year of __________

Wowsers.  2009: Year of Pregnancy for Megan.  I like it, very much.  If you leave the skate park and I stay there, we must do what we can to make sure we don't get tetchy with one another, or, on the contrary, overly effusive about how much we support the other's divergent choice.  I actually don't think that will be very hard, knowing you and me as I do.  Anyway, my 3 projects are not as ambitious as your one.  Nonetheless, I'm excited.

1) Year of Shakespeare.  I'm going to read all of Shakespeare this year.  I read Comedy of Errors this weekend, plus a bunch of sonnets.  Plus an editor's exposition on the sonnets, telling me what I should think about them.  Perhaps I won't do too much more of that sort of reading.  I'm halfway through As You Like It, and I can tell you I do like it, very much.  I have more to say about the Shakespeare project, and about the Shakespeare I'm reading, but I'll do that in other posts. 

2) Year of Planned Reading.  I'm much more excited about this than I am about the Shakespeare project, although it is odder and less specific and more dorky than the Shakespeare project.  It sprung from the Shakespeare idea, because I have no real idea how to go about reading all of Shakespeare and started considering how to do it well -- what order, which editions, should I read critical essays or not, and if so, before, during, or after the original works??  Also, how long will this take, and when will I do it?  So I had to think about a plan for my reading, which otherwise just sort of happens before bed or stolen moments of unplanned time.  And then I got excited.  What if I actually PLAN to read, and block off time for my reading goals, and progress through my booklists with some order and some discipline instead of picking up books whimsically?  This is related to my intensifying interest in brains and psychology and neuroscience and philosophy -- whatever field it turns out to be that I've been hacking away at with undiminished curiosity for the last 10 years.  This year I will give my interest a little more respect, and make room for it to flourish.  I have a lot more to say about the Year of Planned Reading, but I'll save it for another post.  Well, I'll just say a few quick things.  Some components include: 5 hours blocked for reading per week, in addition to bedtime reading and stolen moments reading.  3 hours on Saturday afternoons, 2 hours on Wednesdays (or perhaps a different weeknight, depending on the other events of the week).  Also, I am plotting to buy a Kindle, which I've been coveting for almost a year.  And, I just checked this book out of the library, and even as musty and brown and dull as the cover is, even though it's library due date stamp indicates that I am the only person ever to check it out of the library, I can't wait to get home and read it.  I am stoked about this project.  I'm in a book group, and that's the only intentional and deliberate reading I've done.  Everything else has been haphazard.  This will be a big, big change.   

3) Year of the Definitive Cure.  I have ulcerative colitis, which is generally unsymptomatic and occasionally rises to the level of a mild nuisance.  Medicine generally keeps it in remission, but I have decided that's not enough, and I want a Definitive Cure.  Interestingly, I called today to make an appointment with my gastroenterologist.  I like him a lot, and was looking forward to telling him about the big plans I have for us.  I was told that he'd left the practice, with no plans to continue practicing medicine.  Hmmm.  So, I have no idea yet how the Year of the Definitive Cure is going to unfold.