The Two Kinds of Decay

Bananas

The next time you have some sensory nerve damage, touch the paresthetic skin and evaluate its numbness.

Wait a minute. Then touch the skin again.

Wait another minute, then touch it again. Again. Wait an hour. Two hours, ten hours, a day, two days.

Is the numbness changing? Getting bigger, smaller, stronger, weaker? What have you done in the last four days? Sometimes potassium deficiency causes paresthesia. Have you eaten many bananas in the last four days? Go to the store and buy six bananas and eat them in the space of a morning. And feel that, yes, the numbness is disappearing! Since digesting most of the six bananas, your hands now feel a softer version of the soft quilt you have been lying under!

The world, with its infinite variables, is the wrong place to attempt implementing the scientific method. Most successful experiments work only in vacuums. Boyle’s law, Newtonian mechanics — only in vacuums are they true.

Narratives in which one thing follows from the previous thing are usually imaginary.

Everything that happens, happens in a moment that follows from all the other moments in spacetime.

As I see it, that’s the main problem with neurological symptoms that can’t be measured in numbers yet, and why many of my symptoms weren’t treated.

Those symptoms weren’t treated because they were unlikely enough to be virtually impossible. My reports of them were their only observable evidence.

My symptoms were so unlikely, by the book, that despite my reports of them, they were assumed not to exist.