The tidal charts of our future

When swimming in the waters of history, it is good to understand the currents.

Recent problems with my joints began on St Patty’s Day. As if some switch had been thrown in my internal system control room, pain and swelling suddenly appeared in my feet, followed by pain in my ankles, knees, and elbows. I dutifully documented in photographs what I could, all the while scouring the recent medical literature on adult onset inflammatory arthritis, gout, and related conditions. Specialists were consulted. Various tests were ordered, of both the radiographic and laboratory variety. My clinical picture did not precisely fit a single diagnosis. Results from testing failed to confirm a specific condition responsible for my discomfort, fatigue, and tenderness at diverse tendo insertion points. “The edges of these bones are different,” I complained. A few eyebrows lifted. Full facial reactions from physicians were hidden behind their masks.

“It’s something,” my primary care doctor told me. We sighed together, knowingly. Something is a very unsatisfying diagnosis.

“You may not want to set your expectations too high.” That advice came from my youngest daughter, the day before I was to see the subspecialty expert at a medical mecca. I was convinced that a highly tuned clinician with decades of experience could listen to my story, manipulate an extremity or two, and confidently render an opinion. Impressively, my daughter (who herself has inflammatory arthritis) was right: the master clinician gave me an official diagnosis of “arthralgia” (or joint pain), bringing me no closer to a complete identification of my circumstance.

My wife (C) has decades of her own experience. “You should start an anti-inflammatory diet,” she counseled. She shared information with me about herbs and natural remedies that have been shown to improve symptoms of people with rheumatoid arthritis. I told her that I needed to wait.

“I don’t have a diagnosis,” I explained. “I can do all that when I know what my diagnosis is.”

“You’re limping all around,” she replied. “What more of a diagnosis do you want?”

She was right, of course. But I was not to be swayed from my purist course of investigation. Besides, some part of me needed vindication, validation. My joints hurt more than they swelled. The ridges that I felt as new did not seem to impress the physicians to whom I reported the change. I had pain out of proportion to findings.

“I’m not making this up,” I grumbled.

“No one is saying you are,” C answered.

They are, I thought, not so much in words as in attitude. Why couldn’t I have something that clearly fit a pattern so I could just move on with treatment and with my life?

Alas, my health path is not one paved with predictability. Just as things worsened, right as I was prescribed a medication known for its general immune system suppressing power, I accompanied C for a booster COVID vaccine. The first three vaccines had left me with two days of fever and aching; I expected more of the same, layered atop a progression of arthralgia that now included my sacroiliac spine. What the heck, I reasoned. I might as well get maximum immune protection from COVID before starting the new immune suppressing medication. So I rolled up my sleeve to a second booster injection, resigning myself to a week of post-vaccine symptoms prior to a possible longer period of side effects from medical treatment for a still uncertain form of arthritis.

“How do you feel?”

Two days after the booster shot, my response was “pretty good, actually”. Four days after the shot I observed that my joint symptoms seemed to be much improved. A week after the injection I felt the best I’d been in months.

“Maybe I should get one of these boosters every month,” I quipped.

Today, some six weeks after the vaccine booster, the ridges on my joints remain, as do some joint and tendon insertion point discomforts. Overall, however, things are better. I never did start the new medication. And I have decided to take C’s advice of following an anti-inflammatory diet, despite not having a clear diagnosis. My goal, it is clear, is not to demonstrate to a medical professional, or a family member, that I have “something”. It’s to feel better, to live better. My search for a specific diagnosis – a name – had blinded me to the real purpose of seeking evaluation and care: improvement.

We live in turbulent times. Political borders have been breached, internationally. Personal boundaries are violated, domestically. Bullets fly, bodies and precedents fall, and we watch, seemingly paralyzed, as seas rise, rivers run dry, and temperatures flare. Acrimony rains upon global civilizations like a monsoon of unrepentant barbs flung from unseen mountain tops. We entrench ourselves in the language of opposition, of certainty. We empower pundits to prognosticate the odds of our survival.

But we forget that the tidal charts of history have recorded such chaotic discord before. For millions of millennia, the earth and its galaxy have rolled through spacetime, sustained, it would seem, by the momentum of the infinite rather than the constrained myopia of the individual life forms. Only recently have the waves of change been influenced by human behavior. And yet what an impact has that behavior had on the planet and its ecosystems! In a relative sliver of time’s totality, we have emerged, stood upright, and developed capability commensurate with localized consciousness heretofore not embodied as it now resides within the form of homo sapiens. We have recorded and charted, memorialized our observations and the effects of our actions. What came before us and why? We make estimates. We lies ahead and for whom? We act as if we have no control. Visitors within our own awareness, we await some type of external guidance – a celestial diagnosis, so to speak, of our condition – before we are willing to assume responsibility and accountability, before we are properly confident of our ability to act, to make change, to serve as stewards of life in the Milky Way.

All the while, the answers are right there – in the history we have recorded over the past few thousand years. Like a tidal chart, we can predict how the gravitational push and pull of unchecked force will swell and recede over the shorelines of our governments and their borders, of our social structures and their tolerances. We don’t need to wait for some external expert opinion; it is possible for us to move with the currents and tides of our latest turbulent time through humble learning from our past, innovative responses for our future. We need not succumb through inaction to the horrors of ego, power, and greed. We can paddle, we can proactively propel ourselves, into the slipstream of a more positive current if we but choose to do so, guided by the charts and oars in hands.

And who knows what surprises may await us? Just when we think we may most need some panacea, some rescue, some new social formulation to blunt the uncontrolled power of our auto-destructive tendencies, we may discover that a simple action, such as a routine boost of purposeful insight, will bring unexpected benefit. Just when we think we are lost, we may realize we still have a chance to be found.

Our contemporary condition need not be definitively labelled for it to be dramatically helped, if we might only release our energies to an alternate current of our future.