Mosquitoes

I want to sleep

Swat the files

softly, please.

-Haiku by Masaoka Shiki

Many scriptures say (so I am told) that god has made everything on earth for man’s benefit but when a mosquito bites me in the middle of the night the benefit is not immediately apparent. When we shifted to our current house which is on the third floor, I thought I was rid of the scourge of mosquitoes. Surely those tiny wings are not capable of scaling such heights? But I rejoiced too soon. Third floor is not a challenge for mosquitoes.

The tip of my nose is a favourite piece of real estate for many mosquitoes. I will hope that a few shakes of my head would encourage them to leave. But hope is not a plan. Since I could not brush the mosquitoes off of my own volition, I had to think of some other way. At night, I sleep on my left side and a row of pillows is kept against the railing so that my head and legs don't hit it if I cough. I will move my head up and down and strain every sinew to irritate my tracheostomy. This will induce a bout of cough which will make my head hit the pillow and make the mosquitoes fly away. (I never knew that the acceleration and impacts of my head caused by bouts of cough could cause head injuries.)

Some of the mosquitoes that fly away might settle on a part of my body where I cannot disturb them. (There is a word for the part of the body where one cannot reach to scratch. Who knew?) By now I will be too exhausted to try and stimulate another bout of cough and see what happens. At such times I will have no option but to be another link in the food chain. Unlike D.H. Lawrence, I am not 'mosquito enough to out-mosquito' them. I will only hope that they will not leave me the baddest of all Apicomplexans as a parting gift. (I came across this expression last month and thought that it would be fun to make you click that link to find out what the hell I mean.)

I can understand Alfred Russel Wallace's feelings about the living conditions in Wanumbai in Indonesia (As quoted in The Song of the Dodo):

"Instead of rats and mice there are curious little marsupial animals about the same size, which run about at night and nibble anything eatable that may be left uncovered. Four or five different kinds of ants attack everything not isolated by water, and one kind even swims across that; great spiders lurk in baskets and boxes, or hide in the folds of my mosquito curtain; centipedes and millipedes are everywhere. I have caught them under my pillow and on my head; while in every box, and under every board which has lain for some days undisturbed, little scorpions are sure to be found snugly ensconced, with their formidable tails quickly turned up ready for attack or defence. Such companions seem very alarming and dangerous, but all combined are not so bad as the irritation of mosquitoes,"

On second thoughts...centipedes, millipedes, spiders, scorpions...h'm. Enduring stings is not a 'happiness skill' that I am eager to cultivate. I wouldn't have liked to be in the room when Bill Gates pulled this stunt during a TED talk.

Mosquito mavens will be chagrined to learn that at one time, I thought that a world without mosquitoes would be close to the best of all possible worlds. But that doesn't seem a good idea.

A typical day

By about six in the morning, most people in the household are up and about and I will also be up by this time. Danny Nevrath said,"The only problem with the speed of light is,it gets here too early in the morning." I don't have this peeve. I am usually up much before the others.After some exercise, feeding, sponging etc., I watch T.V. or lie quietly for a while during which time the nurse finishes her daily activities. By about 11 o'clock, I will be shifted to the wheelchair after which my day really begins.

By this time on most days I would have tried to exceed memory limits (no doubt unsuccessfully) - some word meanings have to be checked, I will get some ideas for future posts, there may be something to show Jaya, etc. I will quickly take the appropriate actions before I forget something. After that I will begin my usual mix of browsing and reading books.

Dwight D. Eisenhower said, "In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable." Similarly I also make plans but am alive to the fact that none of them may work out because of some unforeseen developments. For instance, one day I thought that there was plenty of time to publish a post but my plan was scuppered by a telephone call just then informing us that a few relatives were coming for lunch and Jaya had to run to the kitchen to prepare something.

Sometimes when I will be reading something about the economics of climate change or about 'useless inventions' or listening to some political humour, Sujit will ask me some doubt in his homework. I will try to clear his doubt to the best of my ability. I will also try to find some diagram or video on the web which can simplify my task. Often I will first explain to Jaya who will then explain it to Sujit which takes time.

Sometimes the nurse will be busy in some other activity and will not be free to manipulate the mouse for me. If I can predict these times, I will switch to listening to some podcast. Sometimes the interruption happens too quickly for me to react and I will have no option but to sit quietly and admire the monitor. A problem with audio is that I may miss part of it because of the sound of a passing truck or some other disturbance.

I will be shifted back to the bed at around 9 p.m. In the ten hours since I was shifted to the wheelchair, if I get to read for about four hours, I would have had a good day. The remaining time would be spent in physiotherapy, helping Jaya in her work, helping Sujit or sitting idly because the nurse is busy with other work. By about ten thirty the lights are switched off as everyone goes to sleep but don't be surprised if I think about The Cupertino effect or about the impact of Wikileaks for a while before I gradually drift off to sleep.

I once heard a podcast in which the speaker said that life is about finding a balance between chaos and order - if life has only order, it is boring; if it has only chaos, you become neurotic. I had a balance between the two before my stroke. After the stroke, for a time, there was more of chaos. Now there is another equilibrium between order and chaos which has been working well so far.

Knowledge and certainty - II

Errors, like straws, upon the surface flow;

He who would search for pearls must dive below.

- John Dryden

Once, when some painting work was going on in our house, a painter stood in my room watching the physiotherapist give me exercises. He asked many questions about my stroke and said that he had heard that if you got a cracking sound when the fingers or toes are pulled, it meant that the limb was normal. The physiotherapist said that it was just the sound of air bubbles popping in a fluid in the joints and was not of great significance. But the painter refused to accept the explanation and started pulling my toes.

I wondered how a person who probably knew nothing about the functioning of the human body could argue so confidently with someone who had studied about it for years. The physiotherapist said that this happened frequently in the hospital. When he would be giving exercise to a person, somebody will come up and say that some other exercise should be given.

Over the years I decided on a rule of thumb for making out whether a person knew what he was talking about. He will use words like 'it depends', talk about side effects, likely complications, failure rates etc. As David Quammen said in The Boilerplate Rhino:

Having had many chances to study scientists as they study nature, I've seen that science itself is a fallible human activity, not a conceptual machine-tool, and that while accuracy and precision can be easily achieved, validity and meaning cannot. The imperfections and constraints vitiating scientific knowledge stand as a warning about the limits of other sorts of knowledge - even shakier sorts - including that based on eyewitness experience. Moral: We live in a tricky universe, and it behooves us to be just a bit provisional about our convictions.

Carl Sagan wrote in The Demon-Haunted World:

Humans may crave absolute certainty; they may aspire to it; they may pretend, as partisans of certain religions do, to have attained it. But the history of science - by far the most successful claim to knowledge accessible to humans - teaches that the most we can hope for is successive improvement in our understanding, learning from our mistakes, an asymptotic approach to the Universe, but with the proviso that absolute certainty will always elude us.

We will always be mired in error. The most each generation can hope for is to reduce the error bars a little, and to add to the body of data to which error bars apply. The error bar is a pervasive, visible self-assessment of the reliability of our knowledge.

On the other hand a person with a tenuous grasp of the subject being discussed, being unencumbered by any knowledge of the subtleties involved, will try to sell you lemon juice giving you 'hundred percent guarantee'. As H. L. Mencken said, "For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong."

Unfortunately it seems that we’re swayed by confidence more than expertise.(I know, I know you are not one of those. It is about others.) Many people also have a poor grasp of probability. (I am not very good at it. I keep getting surprised by the answers to various questions.) Perhaps Arthur Benjamin's suggestion needs to be considered.

Knowledge and certainty - I

The fool thinks himself to be wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.- William Shakespeare

Among many cognitive biases (apparently most people - not you of course - have ‘bias blind spot’) is The Dunning-Kruger effect which is the phenomenon whereby people who have little knowledge systematically think that they know more than others who have much more knowledge. One curious aspect you may have noticed is that they tend to become bosses. Charles Darwin knew about this illusion of confidence and said that "ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge". In Bad Science, Ben Goldacre said:

Today, scientists and doctors find themselves outnumbered and outgunned by vast armies of individuals who feel entitled to pass judgement on matters of evidence - an admirable aspiration - without troubling themselves to obtain a basic understanding of the issues.

Later he says:

I spend a lot of time talking to people who disagree with me - I would go so far as to say that it's my favourite leisure activity - and repeatedly I meet individuals who are eager to share their views on science despite the fact that they have never done an experiment. They have never tested an idea for themselves, using their own hands; or seen the results of that test, using their own eyes; and they have never thought carefully about what those results mean for the idea they are testing, using their own brain. To these people 'science' is a monolith, a mystery and an authority, rather than a method.

The arrogance of ignorance is often seen when you have a medical problem.(This is exacerbated by distrust of Big Pharma due to Marketing-Based Medicine and other machinations.) If you cut your finger and the doctor prescribes an ointment, the servant will scoff at it and say that the best cure is a paste made by crushing the roots of a particular plant. If the doctor advises 3 weeks' bed rest for a bad back, your cousin's friend (who is a brilliant Chartered Accountant you are told) will tell you with evangelical insistence about a protein drink that can cure all aches and pains within a week. Being a brilliant CA doesn't qualify you to give medical advice.The transfer of expertise from one area to another often has errors.

People who have got their medical knowledge from dumbed down news reports will speak with great confidence about cures for various problems.You will be told,"My father was given a particular piece of advice for some ailment and now I am being told something else for the same ailment. These guys don't know anything." But all errors are not equal.As the physicist Richard Feynman once wrote, science creates an “expanding frontier of ignorance” where a discovery leads to more questions which lead to more discoveries.

Which hospital?

Once Jaya had to stay over-night at a hospital to look after a relative's child because nobody could stay due to various reasons. That evening, when the physiotherapist came, he asked me the name of the hospital to which Jaya had gone. I didn't blink for any name that he mentioned, which puzzled him.

If everyone took his cue from the noted intellectual , George Bush and said "I don’t do nuance", communication with me would have quickly reached a dead-end. But this physiotherapist was made of sterner stuff. Like Sherlock Holmes' dog that did not bark, the absence of my usual communication meant something and he was determined to get to the bottom of it.

He tried to think of hospitals that he had missed. He wondered if some hospital had an unusual name but realised that whatever it was, I should have been able to dictate it. (He had some familiarity with my communication system.) He wondered whether the hospital was outside Coimbatore to which I replied in the negative. He might have found a Watson-like computer useful but not having access to one, he asked Sujit to try his luck. Sujit tried his methods but was unsuccessful and he concluded that I was playing the fool.

Suddenly the physiotherapist had a thought and asked me: Do you know the name of the hospital - yes/no? I blinked for 'no' - I didn't know the name!

Repartee

When asked, "How do you write?" I invariably answer, "one word at a time." - Stephen King

For a similar question I will have to answer,"one letter at a time." As you can guess, this is not the best method for indulging in repartees. In The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Jean-Dominique Bauby wrote:

But my communication system disqualifies repartee: the keenest rapier grows dull and falls flat when it takes several minutes to thrust it home. By the time you strike, even you no longer understand what had seemed so witty before you started to dictate it, letter by letter.So the rule is to avoid impulsive sallies. It deprives conversation of its sparkle, all those gems you bat back and forth like a ball - and I count this forced lack of humor one of the great drawbacks of my condition.

In the early years after my stroke, when a splendid retort occurred to me in response to some comment, I used to think that this was an opportunity to get a few claps. I will start dictating my comment to Jaya. After ten minutes, I will wait for the applause. None would be forthcoming. The problem was that no one had the patience to wait reverently for my gem and had been talking about other things with the result that they had forgotten what it was that I was responding to. I will try to remind them of it. Fast forward ten minutes and again the claps will be conspicuous by their absence. The problem this time would be that people would have forgotten a few words from my comment. As everyone knows, a repartee minus key words is as witty and charming as a weather report. Maybe a special computer would have been able to decipher the layers of meanings in my riposte but in the world of real people, it was a miserable failure. By now, knowing that the inordinate delay had killed the punch in my repartee, my initial enthusiasm for displaying my perspicacity would be on the wane and I will wish that I hadn't started the whole thing in the first place. But I will have to plod on because everyone would be curious about what I had thought of. I will accept whatever interpretation anyone puts to my words, my only indention being to complete the damn thing as soon as possible. After the mess gets over, I will wish that I could, like Little Jack Horner, sit in a corner in order to lick my wounds in peace but since this option is not available, I will continue to sit quietly and smile for the sake of the optics.

Steven Pinker said, "In our social relations, the race is not to the quick but to the verbal..." , which is doubly true of repartees. Initially I was eager to show that my mind was functioning as before but now, since most people know that I am a bit better than one of the wax statues at Madame Tussauds, I don't mind keeping quiet. Sometimes, a pithy remark occurs to me in response to some statement but chastised by the memory of the earlier disasters, I resist the temptation to give in to my delusions of wit and wisdom. Heywood C. Broun said, “Repartee is what you wish you'd said”. I am sure he did not say it thinking of a patient with locked-in syndrome.

Framily

I once read an article about Christopher Reeve where he said that a tragedy brings out the best or the worst in a family and he was glad that it had brought out the best in his. I will say the same except that along with the word 'family', I will include the word 'framily'.

Anyone who reads this blog will know that Jaya has been like a rock. The task of a caregiver is unenviable. Sujit quickly accepted the idea that a person can be physically decrepit and mentally normal. Family members and relatives have been uniformly supportive. I have often been surprised by how much time they have for me. I sometimes feel like Julius Caesar: "When Caesar says Do this, it is performed."

My friends have always been ready to help me. When I was about to be discharged from the hospital, I heard about some obscene amount in the bill and I wondered how it will be settled. I learned later that a lot of friends had contributed to settling the bill. I keep hearing horror stories of people getting bankrupted because of some medical emergency. I have never had to contemplate such a nightmare. I came across a Greek proverb which said - "It is better in times of need to have a friend rather than money." I got lucky. Money is a double edged sword. Unlike Oliver Twist, I don't get looks of horror at my temerity when I ask for more.

The doctors, physiotherapists and nurses have also been very understanding. They have no problems answering my queries to my satisfaction. In the initial months after my stroke, when I was more cantankerous than I am now, when the nurses used to be bemused by my dumb charades, I used to think darkly, "Against stupidity, the gods themselves contend in vain."But of course, I was being uncharitable. It is not easy to understand the actions of a guy who couldn't speak and whose facial muscles were not very mobile. It took quite a while for me to realise this. Though wisdom oft has sought me,/I scorned the lore she brought me.

And what do I have to do in return? Sometimes I may have to listen to conversations that I may not be interested in. Sometimes my request may have to take a backseat because something important has cropped up. Sometimes my communication may be misinterpreted and I will have no option but to bear it with a patient shrug. Sometimes I will laugh at jokes that I may not have understood properly - I may be feeling too lazy to ask for clarifications. I will laugh because I see others laughing.

Too little payment for so great a debt.