Miracle Drug

“Of science and the human heart, there is no limit….
I’ve had enough of romantic love
I’d give it up, yeah, I’d give it up
For a miracle, miracle drug” (U2, Miracle Drug)

Mong-bebe, my former live-in partner, nah, dormate at Ipil - technically, we lived under one roof and I just get a kick introducing male dormates as “live-in” partners. Beat me.

He YMed several links yesterday regarding swine flu after reading the entry here. The links, when I opened them, were sites of pharmaceuticals. Baxter sparked my attention because this is the maker of a very expensive vial injected to me during my long confinement in June last year. The vial was supposed to remedy my albumin deficiency.

Is Baxter evil? The very sound of it smells evil. Well, we just have to be in consensus that pharmaceuticals, by their very nature, don’t earn cookie points in heaven.

That is really an ungracious thing to say for someone whose life was made less stricken because of drugs – nausea suppressants and anti-depressants. Going through 8-cycles of chemo last year, Plasil, a very tiny pill, didn’t make me puke. On my early days of confinement, a capsule called Zoloft which serves as a depression-buster put me to sleep. Zoloft is also a painkiller, I believe, like morphine.

I have an ugly relationship with painkillers not because I am a masochist. In my experience, painkillers are nightmare-inducing and they make me upbeat. Upbeat, that’s not me.

My oncologist in collusion with the psychiatrist stonewalled that popping shiny happy pills before depression gobbled me up was an awesome idea. Depression, my clit.

Depression among cancer patients is such a cliché. Certainly I am not jumping around in euphoria to have what a religious leader says as “God’s blessing in disguise” and in a moment of rarity, I am in complete agreement. A fair warning though: never tell a person newly diagnosed with cancer that having it is God’s blessing in disguise. That person might just become an atheist.

Here’s my take. The good Lord orchestrates our lives around mysteriously logical patterns and we should not even contemplate dismantling or thwarting those patterns but instead learn what the playwright Ariel Dorfman described as “a trembling state of humanity called recognition.” This divine grace Dorfman prefers to call recognition keeps depression at bay, not Zoloft or Prozac.

My sister reproached me for being rude to the psychiatrist. Until now, she picks on my impoliteness and I wrack my head which part was I reprehensible. Sketchy but I recall taunting the psychiatrist not to catalogue people into easy, neat categories. Is that being mean?

In fairness to me (hmp!), I gagged myself in recognition of her discipline. Psychiatry is about diagnosing what’s wrong in people and to be able to do that, you need to lump them into types. In fairness to the psychiatrist, we saw each other on Christmas and she showed no signs of harboring a grudge. Bless her.

So what do I do with my mean streak today? Mong planted the idea – attack the giant pharmaceuticals!!! With great pleasure.

It can be argued that by their very nature, the last thing pharmaceuticals pray for is a healthy population. Granted that we are all healthy, they still make money persuading us to buy their products to remain healthy. Always a win-win situation. Now, imagine the profits they are bound to gain in the event of a pandemic? Don’t, it’s just bowel-staggering.

The current media reportage of this flu the WHO insists is of pandemic magnitude is a bit sensationalized which will only advance corporate interests and militaristic political agenda as I have mentioned in an earlier blog.

The majority of deaths related to swine flu are actually due to lack of proper medical attention, poor nutrition, poor sanitary conditions. Long and short of it: poverty. It’s not the flu, per se.

I am in no position to contest the WHO’s assertions. A flu is a flu. The breakthroughs in medicine and technology have been spectacular enough to suspect this atmosphere of panic created by WHO’s pronouncements over a disease that’s not quite life-threatening. This is not the 18th century. Medical science has reached a point where it can play god and perform mind-boggling acts. Why do they want us to be afraid? Why do they want us to be alarmed?

Unless there’s something they are not telling us.