“It’s a joke!” Dad has said to me many times.  He drops something on the floor and stares at it, unable to bend to pick it up.  “It’s a joke!”  He relies on Mom to pull on his socks and pant legs, to straighten his shirt collar and do up the buttons.  “It’s a joke!”  The push mower pulls him faster than he can follow and he falls, but not, of course, until he has reached the concrete driveway.  “It’s all a big joke!”  I have never thought these jokes particularly funny, but I can certainly recognize the ironies.  And at the hospital he found new things to declare a joke, like when he couldn’t hold his spoon and we fed him his mashed potatoes and meatloaf.  A joke.  And the newest: radiculitis.  Encephalitis, as I understand it, is a swelling of the brain.  Meningitis, they tell me, is a swelling of the membranes protecting the brain and spinal column.  They are dangerous and painful, caused by invading vectors, bacteria or virus.  They can kill you.  But all of Dad’s spinal fluid tests were negative for both.  Had the cause been bacteriological, antibiotics would have been the treatment.  Had the cause been viral, merely time and careful attention.  Now a new theory, the meningitis and encephalitis are not caused from the outside, but from the inside, from some internal mechanism creating the inflammation in the membranes and nerves, radiating out from the central nervous system.  Radiculitis.  “Guess what?” Dad quipped.  “I have ridiculitis!  It all a joke!  Ridiculous!  My central nervous system is trying to kill me!  A big joke!”  And he laughed.  I was glad he could summon the mental and physical wherewithal to laugh.  They injected strong steroids for three days, and he began to move again, and raise his legs and feet, and feed himself, and engage intellectually and coherently with the physicians and therapists.  And to be willful and stubborn again.

(Artist rendering of neural network by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay.)