His Name Is Lou

Physically, I'm feeling a little sick right now. Mentally and spiritually, I'm feeling a little pysched.

Psyched in a good way, that is. I wasn't certain if the word still holds it's previous meaning or if it's changed over time. That's a problem with multiple chemical sensitivity, you don't get to actually speak to people very often. It's one reason why after 5 years of having no TV and loving it, I decided to get cable. If nothing else, television is a good source of up-to-the-minute social references.

That being said, I usually just watch the food channel, or the travel channel, if the show is about food.

Anyway, I haven't been feeling too good this week. The main symptom was mild recurrent nausea, for unknown reasons. I saw another doctor last week who recommended increasing the dosage on one of my nausea-inducing meds, but the nausea has been coming and going all day, not just after taking the medication.

On the plus side (no pun intended), I've lost 10 pounds which quite frankly I could easily afford to lose. Its partially from the reduced appetite the nausea created, and partially because I've learned that when I start getting sick my body puts on weight incredibly fast. Hence, when I start feeling blue now I really watch what I eat.

The nausea started out pretty mild this week and worsened as the days went on. If I became distracted with something I wouldn't notice it for a while, which was probably due to the almost tunnel-like focus that Provigil encourages, and because people in my family have such a high tolerance for pain that it borders on being dangerous.

My dad played pro football and broke his nose 8 times, and even that didn't get him to quit. Heck, the 8th time he broke his nose it was because a car more or less fell on it (it's a long story). The only thing that made him stop playing was when his knee cap was shattered to the point it had to be replaced. And back then they carved replacement body parts out of used hub caps the doctors found on the side of the road, so it wasn't like the new knee cap was going to see the gridiron. Luckily for him a car wasn't to blame this time, I was told it was Deacon Jones, not that it's much of a difference.

By the way, Deacon Jones has to be one of the coolest football names in the history of the NFL. If I ever had a son that inherited my father's physical traits, I'd legally change his name to "Steve Ripyourfaceoff", "Axel Steele", "Butt Knarly", or something like that so he'd be more inclined to pick up the pigskin and punish the opposing team.

And the high tolerance for pain doesn't end there. My mom broke her hip and walked around on it for over a week before she even thought of seeing a doctor. When she finally did go to visit one, he looked at her X-ray and asked something along the lines of "How did you even walk here?". Of course her reply was "I'm married to a man who broke his nose 8 times and has repurposed automotive parts inserted in various locations of his body. Plus, I'm from Kansas, damnit. Now get out of my way because I've got weeds to pull out of my garden".

Thinking about my family's unique characteristics and history cheers me up a bit, but that isn't why I was mentally feeling a little more chipper today. It was all about business.

Last week I came up with a technically-based idea which can potentially improve customer service and a few other things involved with designing and implementing a converged IP telephony network. None of our competitors are doing it, and how nobody else has thought of it yet is completely beyond me. It's not quite up to the level of what I rank as the greatest inventions of all time, which is: beer, the personal computer, and silicone breast implants, but it's still a pretty good idea.

I recruited a co-worker for the technical side while I developed the proposal. Today I presented the idea to a senior manager and the company's (if not the IT industry's) greatest mind. The senior manager isn't too shabby either. They liked the idea. The next step, once the technical build is complete, is to field test it in a regional office. Those discussions are coming up next week. There's no sense putting the cart before the horse, but if it passes the field test it will most likely become company policy, for the prized division of a Fortune 500 organization.

This will be my first major accomplishment since acquiring multiple chemical sensitivity. It's the kind of thing that I've expected from myself all along, and perhaps the type of thing my family, friends, and employers have expected, not to mention my professors back in graduate school and all the undergrads I taught in labs who I always told to study more, much more.

But honestly, that's not all. It's been a little disconcerting to have my career frozen, and then dramatically altered by MCS. The future I had planned for and the future I had worked so hard for was literally stolen from me by multiple chemical sensitivity.

And although the company has been keeping me busy, I've been working without a job description or any defined role. In this industry engineers are the revenue-generating arm of the company. It's takes a coordinated effort of a large team of office personnel to take a project from start to finish, but basically it's the engineer that directly earns the cash to pay for it all. I was hired to be one of those engineers and once you reach that position there's a fair amount of job security. To be disassociated from the revenue stream and with no clear direction hasn't been easy for a guy who once planned for his second term of college and total graduate school expenses with such excruciating detail that his forecast was accurate almost to the penny (next time I'll reserve some extra cash for a post-graduation celebratory cheeseburger and a pair of new shoes).

The abscence of focus and job security, and the lack of control over my career has been a concern. This wasn't too obvious to me in the relatively short time after the MCS diagnosis when I was working from home and studying for industry certifications in Cleveland, but it's been a major concern and something impossible to escape now that I'm working in an office and trying to contribute in more ordinary ways. Especially when the chemical-free nature of my individual work room and the physical limitations MCS dictates is both noticeable and far from traditional.

So when I came up with this new business idea and successfully ran it past the company gods, I did something which suggests I may have a little more control over my career than I thought. I showed some initiative despite fearing the worst. I thought something up and made it happen during the same period of time when I could hardly get off the couch. I went past the physical discomfort and pain MCS was giving me and did something positive. For once I busted out of the tight box that MCS has placed me in. I created something which I may have eventually discovered anyway if I had never gotten sick, but I did it in spite of multiple chemical sensitivity, which is perhaps the greatest accomplishment of all.

I'm not saying this to brag, I grew past all that some time ago (although I might speak favorably about my enormous johnson every now and then). But there are lot of people out there with this condition, more than people think. It's easy to get caught up in wanting the familiar things we can't do anymore and the new things we have to do but don't like, and when that happens we lose sight of the things which make us who we really are. After all this time working around MCS and trying to outsmart it, I guess I just realized I had forgotten who I was.

Hello. My name is Lou Cheese. I have MCS and an enormous johnson. Who are you?