My titles are getting too long. 4 days after reinfection with 10 hookworms after infecting with 10 hookworms 2/2/09 after not having any hookworms from infecting 8 time the year earlier…
A walking experiment, ongoing. The outcome to be determined.
So far…Mmmmm….It really is a nice sensation. Hookworms in the bloodstream. I guess they’re in the lungs right now? I wonder if I coughed while kissing my husband, could I infect his throat? These are the musing of the evening.
This was actually taken last year. I am not this thin and pale any longer. I'll have to take a contrasting shot...
It’s been a delicous week. I know I am adding nothing to the hookworm research to admit that hookworms + a glass of red wine is really quite nice. I am so much more calm and happy then a week ago. I almost wonder if my anxiety was relating to a loss of efficacy? The immune system, central nervous system, and gastroenterological system is interwined.
I’m expecting to come down any moment, and sink into despair again, but so far so good.
If helminths help deflect depression, it makes sense that a dozen in the bloodstream would alter the immune system in such a way to induce mild euphoria. I enjoy each day like it is my last.
I fell back in the horse manure yesterday, and communed with the dirt yet again. If parasites can manipulate their hosts’ behavior, I wonder what hookworms do to us. A calm, peaceful happiness…fatigue that makes you want to lie back into the soil. My rational mind could google studies to explain it all, instead I watch the clouds slowly breeze by. My hair is full of straw and horse manure. My body? Bacteria and worms.
The pain in my ilium is lessening, but I am still a mucus-producing machine. I am eating things I really shouldn’t. I won’t list them here for fear of the Crohn’s police rebuking me. Let’s just say French fries are probably not on the list of easiest to digest foods. I am hungry again. All the time. One week ago was the 4th week of nausea and no appetite. What an immediate change! I just wish my bowels would improve and stay that way forever.
No night sweats. No crying jags about nothing. No anxiety. And an ever-so-subtle rash and itch. Gas smells pretty bad…sort of a solid stool this morning. No digestive miracles. Achey joints at times. Achey ilium. What else can I report?
I just wish this feeling lasted forever. Then I wouldn’t care so much that I am trying worms for Crohn’s disease, with no one else to compare notes with, and writing about it to the world.
I joke to my husband, “You never knew I would become so interesting!” Through sickness and in health, through hookworm infection and reinfection. I wish I could just cough while I was kissing him, and not have to figure out the whole incubation process. Eeewww.
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