Inspired

Inspired
My blog is mostly the rants and ramblings of a wannabe writer—snippets of my life for anyone who might stubble over here. Often my writings are of a medical nature, as I work in healthcare, and I’m a major consumer of healthcare services. (I write solely for myself and not for, nor do I represent anyone else in my posts.) Imagine my surprise when I popped over to one of my favorite physician blogs http://mouseasthma.blogspot.com/ to see a posting about CVID, http://mouseasthma.blogspot.com/2008/04/common-variable-immune-deficiency-cvid.html my disease. Imagine an even greater surprise to read that I was in part the inspiration for the posting. I’m not usually (read: never before) referenced by a legitimate professional. I’m used to being referenced in vain or in less flattering modes, by non (or lesser) professionals. {nonsequitur: can someone help this techno-challenged man and tell me how to create those one word links in my blog, instead of having to put in the whole url?}
Reading about CVID from a treating physician was great, as it’s not a well known or well publicized disorder. While called Common Variable Immune Deficiency, there’s really nothing common about it. In fact, we often go undiagnosed or mis-diagnosed for years before we get the correct physician who knows of it. It took over 13 years to finally get mine diagnosed correctly. On two different occasions, two different physicians were convinced that I was testing ‘false negatives’ for HIV. I’m a gay man, getting chronic bronchial and sinus infections—gotta be HIV. Let me state for the record, these grasping at straws diagnoses were really effective mind fucks. The possibilities were remote, but not high on the radar. While I’ve not been a chaste monk, I’m not what one would consider a heavy player of the field. I’ve had two previous BFs who were HIV positive. We were always careful. But the remote chance was there.
Having just come back from Washington, DC as ‘Lobbyist for a Day’, it was cool to discover that my writing about that experience prompted a physician to do a scientific/medical post about CVID. Thanks, Dr. Mark: for diagnosing and treating your patients, and for making your medical reading public a bit more knowledgeable. Perhaps we (meaning You) did some CME vicariously.