So we're going to be going in tomorrow for Christian's first appointment with the kidney specialist. We did, of course, have to wait 4 weeks for the appointment, which is a source of complaint for Christian. Christian has actually had a lot of complaints about the medical community as a whole lately. They are, of course, generally true. Nonetheless, I think it is part of his way of dealing with the illness. Not that I'm trying to psychoanalyze him or anything.

Chronic illness really is a huge thing to deal with, though. My mom was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis when I was young, and it was pretty hard for me to deal with. It was especially hard for me to deal with the fact that she had a hard time dealing with it. Realizing that your parents are not the eternal towers of strength that you thought they were is always hard to come to terms with. The hives, too, were hard for me to accept, especially since I kind of felt at the time that I was just too young to be having any big medical problems.

A year ago or so I was talking to Christian about my fears that I would someday get rheumatoid arthritis, and he tried to tell me that in ten years or so there would be a cure for it. "Yeah right," I said. Even with all the progress we have made in medical science, there is still so much that we don't know. Most of the time we just treat the symptoms. Even then, the fixes are generally methods that are harmful to the body in other ways. No treatment that medical science comes up with even compares to the effective beauty of the body's natural defenses. Not that I'm saying that we should stop working towards that goal, but I don't think that we're ever going to even come close.

This all reminds me of that part in Star Trek IV were they go into the 1980s hospital and Bones runs across this old woman in a wheelchair:

                                          WOMAN
                             Doctor...

                                           BONES
                             What's the matter with you?

                                           WOMAN
                                     (faint)
                             Kidney... dialysis...

                                           BONES
                             Dialysis?? What is this, the dark
                             ages? Here, swallow one of these.

                   He slips a lozenge from his bag under her tongue.

                                           BONES
                                     (continuing)
                             Call me if you have a problem. 

                                           (later)
                   A group of HOSPITAL and POLICE GUARDS round a corner,
                   see the fleeing Kirk, and race toward us, CAMERA
                   PANNING. As they exit, HOLD on double doors which
                   open. Sitting up on an emergency gurney, happy as a
                   clam, is the feeble old lady we saw before. Two
                   DOCTORS, one pushing.

                                           DOCTOR 2
                             So! How do you explain it?

                                           DOCTOR 1
                                     (stunned)
                             According to the scanner...
                                     (beat)
                             ... She's grown a new kidney...

Now that's definitely the human dream right there. Of course the funny thing about Star Trek medical science is that they have all of this fancy stuff that can heal broken bones, cancer, the common cold, whatever it is that we have problems with nowadays. So what do they do? Invent a bunch of more exotic diseases like, for example, ones that make people turn into strange monsters or something. That's what happens when the human dream meets scriptwriters.