Unable to get headaches
This will probably make most readers of this blog envious, but I am curious to find out whether I’m unique in this respect.
I seem to be unable to get a headache.
Even when I have a hangover, I only have the other symptoms without any headache at all.
I had some kind of mild headache a couple of years ago, but that what as part of some viral infection that caused pain in most of the body, too, so I’m not sure that counts.
A google search for unable headache seems to return only pages about people who can’t get rid of their headaches rather than being unable to get them in the first instance.
So am I a mutant, or is this actually pretty normal?
Sygdom
Jeg havde da haft lidt ondt i halsen i længere tid, men det var da ikke noget alvorligt.
Men så eskalerede det pludselig torsdag aften – mit hovede blev varmere og varmere, og min krop koldere og koldere.
Jeg gik i seng, men jeg sov elendigt – jeg vågnede hele tiden op med den samme meningsløse drøm.
Fredag morgen var jeg slet ikke i stand til at gå på arbejde, og jeg sov næsten uden afbrydelser til sidst på eftermiddagen.
Så stod jeg op, spiste en banan, så lidt TV, spiste en sandwich og lidt is, og så gik jeg i seng igen.
Kl. 5 om morgenen vågnede jeg brat op, feberfri og klarhovedet, men meget, meget træt.
Det tog mig så det meste af lørdagen at komme til kræfter igen, og først i dag har jeg været mig selv igen.
Og stakkels Phyllis ser ud til at gennemleve samme sygdomsforløb, blot med et døgns forsinkelse, så hun har ikke været meget værd i dag. 
Nu håber jeg blot ikke, alle børnene følger efter på rad og række!
Opdatering (17/12): Jeg var ved lægen i dag og fik antibiotika (cefalexin).
Fact and fiction
I’ve almost completed reading Brian Sykes’s The Seven Daughters of Eve.
I must say I thoroughly enjoyed the first two thirds, although the book is a tiny bit out of date. It’s one of those nice examples of popular science that actually gives you a feel for how things happen in the engine room, rather than just presenting the results.
However, towards the end he starts writing fictional stories about the seven “clan mothers” of Europe, and this is definitely the weakest part of the book.
He assigns hair colour and other physical characteristica to them, although he obviously doesn’t know this.
Also, to make the descriptions seem realistic, he strays into areas about which he clearly has little knowledge.
For instance, he writes about one of them that their “language was not elaborate, but quite sufficiently developed to impart [...] basic information.” As a linguist, I know this is nonsense. All human languages, whether spoken by hunter-gatherers or by invest bankers, are equally elaborate and highly developed.
So read the first part of this book, but skip the seven fictional chapters.
Either bad or mad
There’s an important article in The Times today about how to deal with pædophiles.
It basically argues that we normally either punish criminals and then let them get back to normal life afterwards (even though we know they might reoffend), or we decide they’re ill and offer them treatment (possibly for the rest of their lives) instead.
However, we seem to want to do both when it comes to pædophiles: First we punish them, and we then stigmatise them for the rest of their lives because they’re sick.
I had never thought about this before, but I think it’s true.
When it comes to deciding whether to opt for bad or mad, I think we should split the group into two.
An 18-year-old who had consensual sex with a 14-year-old is not a pædophile in my book, and if we think it’s not OK, it’s definitely a crime, not an illness, and when he’s completed his punishment, he should be free to live a normal life afterwards.
On the other hand, middle-aged men raping small kids are in a very different category. It makes much better sense to try to cure them of their urges in high-security psychiatric hospitals and only release them back into society when (or if) the psychiatrists think they have been cured.
Transfat
There’s an excellent article in The Independent today about transfat.
I knew Denmark had outlawed transfat altogether, but I didn’t realise so few countries had followed suit so far (only Switzerland in Europe).
Also, I didn’t realise the results were so staggering. According to the article, “the rate of heart disease among Danes has dropped by a staggering 40 per cent” since the ban was introduced five years ago.
I think there should be an EU-wide ban, but until that happens, I definitely think Scotland (or the UK if it’s not devolved) should introduce a complete ban, the sooner the better!
Water
Dominic Lawson has a good rant about water in The Independent today.
He’s questioning why so many people are drinking so much water:
This organised panic about dehydration seems to stem from a misreading – quite possibly deliberate – of guidelines from the US Food and Nutrition Board in 1945. These stated that “a suitable allowance of water for adults is 2.5 litres daily in most instances. An ordinary standard for diverse persons is one millilitre for each calorie of food. Most of this quantity is contained in prepared foods.” As Shapiro notes, the last sentence of that advice is always left out, leading to the idea that we need an extra eight glasses of water over and above our actual requirements.
Apart from that, I’ve never understood why the same amount of water is recommended everywhere. If I’m in a really hot place, such as walking around in the midday sun in July in Spain or Georgia, I naturally drink lots of fluid. However, during winter in Scotland, I simply don’t feel the need to drink as much (which is natural given I sweat much less), but the water fanatics still claim I should drink the same eight glasses as in the Mediterranean summer sun.
Fusion
For some time, I’ve tried to avoid multi-blade razors because they’re very bad at creating sharp edges such as at the end of sideburns or mustaches. Also, they often are difficult to clean when one hasn’t shaved for three or more days because the hairs get stuck between the blades.
However, I’ve now discovered Gillette Fusion which not only has five blades; it also has access to the back of the five blades, making it feasible to flush out all hairs, and it has an extra single blade on the other side for precision shaving.
It’s not perfect, but it’s the best razor I’ve used yet. Nice.
Yummy, fattening Special K
I’ve never understood why Special K is marketed as a cereal for dieting and staying slim.
I just love Special K with skimmed milk (only the plain stuff, though – wee pieces of dried fruit just spoils the experience), but I consider it a special treat that is bad for my waistline, not at all as diet.
This might have something to do with the fact that I tend to eat portions the size of a small bucket, but also that it’s almost exclusively carbohydrates, which tend to make me fat.
Today I introduced Léon to the joys of Special K, and he loved it, too. Now i just need to convert Charlotte, Marcel and Phyllis…
Hearing test
Anna had her hearing tested when she was one day old.
They mounted electrodes on her head and neck, put on some fancy headphones and then played noises and measured through the electrodes whether her brain registered them. She was asleep half the time, but it still worked fine (and her hearing was just fine, by the way).
I think it’s so much better to measure it electronically and at an early age. In Denmark, they seemingly still do it the old-fashioned way, and it’s just not nearly as precise.
For instance, what happened when my niece Ursula had her hearing test at eight months was this: The nurse stood behind her and made a noise to the left. Ursula turned her head and looked at her. She then made a similar noise to the right, but this time Ursula had figured out what was happening, so she didn’t bother doing looking, and the nurse therefore thought she was deaf in her right ear. It took weeks till she got a proper test and established that their was nothing wrong with her hearing in the first instance.
Triage complacency
When Phyllis and I went to the hospital after the waters broke, we naturally had to go to triage in the first instance – it’s their job to check the stage of labour and send people home or to the delivery suites as appropriate.
The midwife there gave Phyllis an internal examination shortly after 2am and said she was only between one and two cm dilated, so she was wondering whether to send her home till the morning. Phyllis persuaded her to let her stay, but she would only put her up in the normal ward, and she told me to either go home or wait in the reception.
Fortunately, I chose the latter, since I had to wait there for less than an hour before another midwife got me, saying that Phyllis was now six to seven cm dilated (birth starts at ten).
I thus went to the delivery suite with her for the birth that happened less than an hour later, so everything was well, but I’m getting angry at the thought that I could so easily have missed birth if I had listened to the silly triage midwife!
Of course most births happen more slowly, but she should know that it varies wildly and not make decisions that could have horrible effects. In fact, although I didn’t suffer this time, Phyllis had to suffer horrible contractions alone in a ward not designed for labour, and if she hadn’t had the sense to call a midwife soon after she got there, she would probably have given birth alone in a normal bed.
I really think the triage midwife should have looked at how Phyllis looked and not just at her measurements, and she should have given her an extra internal after an hour to check progress before sending her to the other ward.
If she always performs her job like that, no wonder that some mothers give birth in supermarkets and traffic jams!