Welcome back to the What’s The Matter With Me? Podcast for Episode 5: Gallows Humor
In this episode, I have bad reaction to an MRI, suffering fever and headaches for days. I come through it with the help of my wife.
Recap Ep. 4
Recap – last episode, I tried to wrap my head around the idea of asking for and receiving help. A listener wrote in to tell me that asking for help increases effectiveness. We talked about the determination to continue despite the demoralizing nature of the therapy process.
Bad MRI
I had bad reaction to an MRI last week. I reacted to the contrast dye injection. I had a headache and fever for a couple days. It took a lot out of me. I was bedridden.
Gallows humor
If you ever see me flapping my arms and making fart noises, it means someone close to me has died. I am inappropriate.
I’ve been feeling very down since the MRI.
New Lemon Flavor
In some sign of normalcy, I cooked Hoppin Hot Sauce, trying out a new Meyer lemon ingredient that my co-packer sent. The results are promising.
Plants are growing in my garden – see you next time
Begin Transcript
JOHN HOPPIN: What’s The Matter With Me? Podcast, Episode five. Yeah. What’s The Matter With Me,? episode five, back to business. Not really back to business. I’ll get to that later. Last episode, let’s recap. I talked about I wasn’t going to quit doing this podcast no matter what. I admitted that I was a product of the eighties California life. I was born in… I’m a Californian, Okay? I said, “Dude.” I say, “Dude.” I admitted it, and we talked about therapy’s hard. They make you do things that you can’t really do. That’s why it’s therapy. It’s demoralizing, but you’ve got to do it and it gets easier. That’s the cool part about therapy. I got to admit something. I had a bad reaction to an MRI last week. It was really difficult. If you don’t know MRI machines, it’s a big giant thing that you get your head stuck into this hole with light coming out.
It’s creepy. It’s like a science fiction movie. You stick your head inside this giant machine and it scans your head, and actually they sucked me further into this machine and they scanned my spinal column, and that’s even worse. It’s like a punishing noise concert where you get stuffed in the amplifier. You can’t move for 45 minutes, an hour and a half. You can Google “what does the MRI sound like,” and you can get some idea. I’ve learned to fall asleep during this thing because I think my body shuts down to avoid the experience, and sometimes I snore too much and it messes up the scan, and they have to stop doing it and redo some parts, and it takes longer because I snore so much, because it’s terrible. They inject me with contrast dye to see if there are any bleeding lesions in my brain and brainstem, and to tell whether I’m having disease activity or not, because if there’s stuff happening live, that means I’m undergoing neurological degeneration.
The name of the game, I guess. I had the MRI on Wednesday, and I had a headache that night, and I started to get a fever above a hundred degrees. Got to 102 until Sunday morning, it broke. And it made all my symptoms worse. I fell down a lot, had to lay in bed all day, and I couldn’t move, and I have a really painful zit on my ass. And I stressed out a lot. It was very stressful, and I gave myself a hemorrhoid even, which is rare, which is ironic, because I have a radio show and my DJ name is Hemroid the Leader, but I came up with that name when I was 14 and I didn’t know a thing about a hemorrhoid.
And this is kind of joking, I guess. I get nervous. If you ever see me making fart noise and flapping my arms, you know somebody very close to me has died. I try and distract with stupid sense of humor to cover up how bad I’m feeling. And I couldn’t really do anything this whole week. I couldn’t turn. I was in bed, it was hard for me to sit up, turn over. It was hard, and it made my wife scared, and she cried by herself, man. And that kills me because she doesn’t deserve that kind of thing, but there’s nothing I could do about it
Any way. Yesterday… I’m still recuperating. Yesterday I made hot sauce all by myself. My co-packer sent me a new Meyer lemon juice to try in my recipe. So, I made a batch yesterday. I still haven’t tasted it. I’ll taste it today. Anyway, I wanted to leave you with this idea that citrus plants are growing in my garden, and that’s a really cool thing. I have a Yuzu tree, little one. It’s about five feet tall, but it added about a foot in the past week, and I have a Meyer lemon tree about two feet tall. We’ll see where it goes. So, another episode in the books, maybe episode five. It’s What’s The Matter With Me? Podcast
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