Feeling Crabby

Did you know that crabs feel pain? Neither did I, but it's right there in the science journal of experimental boilology. It says "If you cook crabs they'll die screaming horrible deaths of utter agony." Or something like that. I mean, look at this article in the Globe and Mail, titled "That lobster you are going to boil feels pain: study".

Wait... are lobsters crabs? 'Cause I'm pretty sure they have different names for a reason. Also... what the hell! How do you know if crabs feel pain! Did they interview the crabs?

EXPERIMENTER: "Ok, now I'm going to give you a light shock. I'll move it up a little after each one and you tell me when you feel that it qualifies as pain."

CRAB: "Gotcha."

EXPERIMENTER: "How's that?"

CRAB: "Tingles a little, that's about it."

EXPERIMENTER: "What about now?"

CRAB: "It's a bit uncomfortable, but nothing I can't handle."

EXPERIMENTER: "And now?"

CRAB: "That's weird... my claw keeps snapping open and closed."

EXPERIMENTER: "Ok, I'm going up again."

CRAB: "Ow! Yeah, that hurts."

EXPERIMENTER: "And now?"

CRAB: "What the hell!? Yeah, I already said it hurts. Turn the damn thing off!"

EXPERIMENTER: "A little bit more..."

CRAB: "Aaaah! Stop it!"

EXPERIMENTER: "You smell so good right now."

CRAB: "What is wrong with you!!!! Owowowowow! Wait, what's that?"

EXPERIMENTER: "Oh this? Ummm.... Stage 2 of the experiment requires me to melt some butter on you. It's nothing to worry about."

Honestly though, how do you quantify pain in an animal? For people it's easy, you just ask them. So what did they use as a criteria for the crabs? Apparently, learning quickly to avoid a stimulus is enough. For example, here’s the crab experiment:

1. There's two caves.
2. Crab goes into one cave.
3. Crab may or may not get a shock.
4. End of trial one.
5. Crab goes into the cave a second time, crab gets a shock.
6. Crab says "eff this" and tries the other cave.
7. Ergo, the crab feels pain.

Whaaaa??? Why does that mean the crab was in pain? I mean sure, as people we can extrapolate and say "yeah, that probably hurt." But by that logic we'd also say anteaters hate their freaking lives because ants taste like ass, whereas in actuality anteaters probably think ants taste like tapioca pudding.

Let me put this another way. I'm going to show you the exact same experiment with a person, and you can tell me whether this behaviour can be explained as straight-up proof that crabs feel pain:

1. There's two elevators.
2. Paul goes into one elevator.
3. Paul may or may not smell fart.
4. End of trial one.
5. Paul goes into the elevator a second time, Paul smells fart.
6. Paul says "eff this" and tries the other elevator.
7. Ergo, Paul feels pain.

See? Step 7 makes no sense. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't describe that scenario as a painful experience (that would be one helluva toot), yet by the crab experiment criteria it's "painful".

Just one more reason to be critical of everything you read.


COMPLETE TANGENT:
Ever heard of Gamma world? It's a roleplaying game like Dungeons & Dragons, made by the same people (Wizards of the Coast), and more or less using the same rules. The major difference is that it's futuristic sci-fi instead of fantasy.

This is the description of one of the powers for the character that controls electricity: "You zap your enemy with an arc of electricity, making your foe jerk and dance around like a spaz."

ARE YOU KIDDING ME? "Jerk and dance around like a spaz"??? Since when was the word "spaz" used by anyone a) older than 11, and b) not totally out of touch with derogatory terminology?

Now, some of you regular readers may be aware that I discovered I was epileptic about a year and a half ago, so obviously I'm going to be more sensitive about this. But this description could basically be written as "You zap your enemy with an arc of electricity, making your foe jerk and dance around like an epileptic.", or ""You zap your enemy with an arc of electricity, making your foe jerk and dance around like a retard."

Including that description in a game book validates its use as a non-offensive term, which it is not. Some people would say that it's part of the vernacular now and has lost its offensive tone, like the words "gypped" (gypsied) or "heepy-jeebies" (Hebrews and Jews). I disagree, because people still use the word spaz specifically in the derogatory manner, directed at the group it's derogatory towards.

At any rate, I wrote the letter below to Wizards of the Coast:

Hi there,

I have a simple request of you, which I hope you'll take seriously.

In the description of the Electrokinetic power "Electric Boogaloo" you say "You zap your enemy with an arc of electricity, making your foe jerk and dance around like a spaz." As an epileptic, the use of term "a spaz" makes me sick every time I see it. Maybe the person who wrote it didn't realize the term "a spaz" means "an epileptic", and was unaware of the painful association that terminology has for any person who experiences grand mal seizures, particularly those who experienced seizures when young. Regardless, could you change that description in future versions of the rulebook? I want to play gamma world, but I literally can't play an Electrokinetic character. Given that there's a thousand other ways to describe the power without using those words, I don't think this is an unreasonable request.

Take care,
Paul

And this was their response:

Greetings Paul,

Thank you for contacting Wizards of the Coast Game Support, we appreciate you for providing feedback. This email is to inform you that we have received your comments, and while we cannot guarantee an additional response, we do appreciate that you took the time to bring your thoughts on the word choice for Gamma World.

Thanks again, and if you have any additional questions or comments for us, please contact us again. Have fun, and good gaming!

Translation: Yeah, whatever.

So hey, Wizards of the Coast; go screw yourselves.

Anniversaries

I've got a couple of significant anniversaries coming up. Well, one just happened actually. On Sunday the 2012 Vancouver Marathon was run, so that marks one year since Erika and I ran the marathon. Yay us! The funny thing about a marathon though is that the actual event is just the slightest bit anticlimactic. We were pumped to do it but let’s be honest: By the time we got there we’d run 437 miles (just over 700km). THAT'S the marathon (for some insight on the experience of training for a marathon you may want to read my first-ever blog post, “Why Not”). The 26.2 miles at the end is just gravy. But it is the milestone. You’ve trained, you’ve run, you’ve done it. It’s a positive thing!

My second approaching milestone may appear less chipper. Actually it’s not, although it sure seemed that way to me at the time. Exactly one week after the marathon I had an uber-seizure that confirmed I had epilepsy. Yay me! No, seriously, this was a good thing. You ever had two years’ worth of 10-20 seizures a day and not know what they were? You get that sorted out and you’re pretty pumped. Now I’m looking at almost a year since my grand mal and I’ve only had one little mini-seizure since August 17th, 2011. Giddyup!

So what the heck is my point? When I was thinking about this it occurred to me that not all anniversaries are created equally. For instance, if we were to graph my excitement over time from finishing the marathon it’s going to diminish as the years go by (by the way, the numbers on these charts are arbitrary. I was too lazy to try and create any sense of coherence):

Marathon-Related Excitement

It's pretty much a linear decrease in excitement until after a few years it's pretty much just "meh". But is that how all anniversaries work? Well no, it's not. So what are the other ways we think about anniversaries?

I think birthdays are a great example of a non-linear anniversary:

Birthday-Related Giddyness

When we're little kids we're super giddy about an impending birthday. It's the greatest thing in the world! Then in middle age it's kind of "Meh... I've done a lot of these". When we get older though, it's time to have an "I'm not dead yet party"! Woot! Granted, that assumes you're in control of your brain (and other things), but you get the idea.

Another example of the parabola is wedding anniversaries. For the most part it's a big deal early on, as well as much later:

Wedding - Expected

But wait... there's significant milestones in there! Those need to be accounted for. And when we do, some interesting patterns emerge. Here, I'll put it into a scatter-plot to make it clearer:

Wedding - Happy

A smiley face! Tell me that's not significant in some way (yes, fifty is bigger than 25. So sue me, the smiley face was funnier than a dude with a pimple on his forehead). Then I got thinking though... not all marriages are happy ones. Sad, but true. What happens to those people? Well, I'd imagine that since they're sad most of the time they'd put greater-than-expected weight on even minor anniversaries. Sort of a "well I haven't killed you yet so there's that" vibe. Let's graph that one out and see where we get:

Wedding - Sad

Brrr... did anyone else feel a chill pass through the room? That's just downright creepy. Let's think about something less disturbing.

Alcoholism! Ok yeah, that's not less disturbing. But people not drinking, that's big! And it's our third type of anniversary graph: The "X number of years and counting!" anniversary:

Abstinence (alcohol-related... for sex data invert chart)

Once again, mostly linear, but now increasing over time. See, isn't math fun? Teachers in the audience, feel free to use this blog as part of your coursework.

Ok, the last one was the hardest to think up an example for. What forms an inverted parabola? Hmm... how did they describe this in school. They said that when you throw a baseball it forms a parabola. Baseball... anniversaries... BOOM! Sports records are the answer! As athletes approach a milestone people get more and more pumped until yay! They passed it. Then everyone becomes a little less excited afterwards because you're just piling on. And then they cease to care altogether. Here's a graph of excitement about Cal Ripken Jr's consecutive games streak (ending when he voluntarily ended his streak. Also, this graph was effing hard to make. Screw you Grade 11 math and the horse you rode in on. Teachers, you can just tell the students not to read that part):

Media Hype-Machine

Realistically this should be a normal curve. But you know what? Screw it, these things were hard enough to make as it is. What was I thinking? I have Photoshop! I have a stylus! I could just draw these things! What the hell is wrong with me!

Have a good day folks.

COMPLETE TANGENT:

I sat on my Kindle. No seriously, right on top of the thing. Cracked the bugger up real good.

PAUL:       Hello, Amazon?

AMAZON:  How may I help you?

PAUL:       Hi there, there seems to be something wrong with my Kindle. It looks like someone sat on it.

AMAZON:  Really, that's unfortunate.

PAUL:       Well I did sit on it, so I'm not entirely surprised.

AMAZON:  Sorry, what was that?

PAUL:       Yeah, I sat on it. That's my best guess why it looks this way.

AMAZON:  Really.

PAUL:       I've pretty much boiled it down to either me sitting on it, or someone else sitting on it. What do you think?

AMAZON:  But you say that you sat on it, right?

PAUL:       Yeah, I guess the evidence is pretty damning on that front.

AMAZON:  Would you like a refurbished one?

PAUL:       Sounds great, thanks.

Just another reason why Amazon rocks.

On a related note, Erika subsequently got chocolate jammed into the charging port on her Kindle. That one may be harder to explain.

Seize the Day

I think that everyone who starts a blog has the same thought: “What if nothing interesting happens?” This seems like a death knell for the blog, and I think a lot of people try to do interesting things simply so that they have something to write about. Hell, I was all set to write about the marathon that Erika and I did two weeks ago… that’s interesting, right? (note… I will still write that post!)

In retrospect I think I should have been more concerned about the alternate option: “What if something interesting does happen?”

Let’s be honest, the things that happen to us unexpectedly are generally either inane, in which case we have to dress them up to make them interesting; or negative, in which case we don’t want to talk about them. Fortunately for the readers, I was born without a sense of personal shame. Just ask my wife about me walking around the house naked… she’s always yammering about “the blinds” being open. It’s just kind of a hum after a while really. The net result though is that I don’t really mind exposing things that others might be inclined to keep private, such as the grand mal seizure I had last weekend.

First some backstory: My biological father was epileptic, quite badly so, a condition that ultimately led to his death when I was very young. Neither my sister nor I showed any signs of the condition though, until 2 years ago when I started to have some problems with speech and comprehension (I’m 33 years old now, my father was diagnosed at 21). Every so often I would lose my ability to speak for a few seconds at a time and anything I tried to say would come out garbled. The same thing would happen while listening to people: they sounded like they were speaking a different language. It wasn’t all negative though. My favourite episodes would happen when I was reading and heard someone talking nearby, it sounded like they were reading the words right off the page in front of me. Now that may not sound like much fun but trust me: when you’re reading Moby Dick and a 5 year-old walks up and says “And half concealed in this queer tenement, I at length found one who by his aspect seemed to have authority”, well that’s just gonna make you giggle.

So at this point, I didn’t know what was going on and while we ultimately decided they were probably some sort of seizure they were at most a minor inconvenience. I was open about it at work, and if one happened while in a meeting I had hand signals at the ready so that someone would know to take over (thanks Schwartz and Graf!). Unfortunately this was happening quite often, sometimes 15-20 times a day depending on my stress level and sleep patterns. In retrospect it didn’t help that I was really stressed at work! I switched roles not long ago though and worked out the relationship between sleep and the episodes, so had actually gotten them down to generally less than 5 a day.

Then last weekend came. I don’t really know much about it, to be honest. I went to bed on Saturday night, then there was a period of major confusion that felt a lot like dreaming but with an uncomfortable air of reality to it. By the time I finally got my head together I was in the back of an ambulance at 4am and the EMT was saying “Paul, you’ve had a grand mal seizure ok?” Then I heard Erika, looked to the side, and saw my beautiful wife sitting there with what you would call “a brave face”.

This is the hard part folks. I will never be able to understand what Erika went through that night. It was so, SO much worse for her than for me. From what she has said, she woke up to me jerking back and forth, seizing up (not surprisingly), and smashing my jaw open and closed. Thank god I sleep with a mouthguard in, but even still I obliterated my tongue and did some serious injury to my back (see the disturbing photo below). Then I stopped. And I mean STOPPED. As in no moving, no blinking, and no breathing. Erika couldn’t get a pulse either, and I proceeded to turn more and more blue. I honestly wish I could take that memory out of her head because when I think about how I would react to seeing her like that it makes me want to throw up, and that’s just from the thought of it. She actually lived it.

After that it was the ambulance, EMT’s, and apparently me dropping a lot of F-bombs. I don’t actually remember that part but I feel confident that every F-bomb was well thought out and valid. Hey, if you can’t drop a couple F-bombs after a grand mal seizure when can you? We went to the hospital and my brain rebooted, I got some meds, and then it was out the door with a phone number and a whole lot of questions.

When you are coming to grips with the fact that you have epilepsy it’s a strange road. I often find myself wondering “What’s that? Is that an aura? Am I about to have a seizure?” Given that I was asleep when I had mine, I have no idea what to expect. I also can’t drive until I’m 6 months seizure-free, and let me tell you that’s gonna be tough. Thank you Erika, and thank you every other person I’m going to mooch a ride from until mid-November (God willing). It’s also not something you can forget about because every night before I go to bed I take a reminder pill and think “Hey buddy… let’s you and me work together and keep my brain from freaking out ok?” On that note though, big shout-out to the folk at Abbot Laboratories: Depakote ER is the shit. Not only have I not had a grand mal, I have not had a single simple partial seizure since I started taking it (the official term for my “episodes” of non-comprehension)! That is awesome, as is the fact that I haven’t shown any side effects so far either. So fingers crossed, and maybe politics is still an option after all!

TANGENT: For a long time I have wanted to go into politics, and I thought that was an impossibility due to my episodes, for understandable reasons:

BRIAN WILLIAMS:  Mr. Parsons, you have been quoted in the past as saying that some elements of a for-pay system could be incorporated into the Canadian medical system in a manner that is beneficial to the whole. Could you speak to that position, and maybe address some of the comments by your opponents that this would amount to introducing two-tiered healthcare into Canada?

ME:  I have no idea what you just said Brian. Not a fucking clue. Was it a question about bagels? Because that’s what I think you were talking about and unless you repeat yourself that’s the question I’m answering.

So that’s my story so far. I’m going to see another neurologist soon (the first one was an asshat. Hey buddy: You see these all the time, I don’t), but that may or may not end up in a blog post. We’ll see. I want to keep these pretty lighthearted, but I needed some catharsis so if you’ve gotten this far, thanks for indulging me.

Take care folks, and give your spouse a hug.

UPDATED: Upon reading my post, Erika wanted to mention that at the time of my seizure I was buck-naked and angry, and had to be wrestled up the stairs by three EMT's who's efforts at covering me up were repeatedly thwarted by yours truly. Maybe the F-bombs weren't all me...

ANOTHER UPDATE: http://www.epilepsy.com/ is a fantastic resource, FYI.