Wiggles Waggle -- Then One Fell Down

This morning I heard that one of the talented members of the popular group Wiggles has had to step down because of illness.  My kids were too old for the Wiggles' phenomenon, but I understand they have quite the following among the thumbsucking set. 

So I wanted to read about what was wrong with the sick guy, Greg Page. Apparently he has some mysterious ailment they've been trying to diagnose since June. To no avail. He's having fainting spells and feels very lethargic, so his understudy has taken over his part in the Wiggles' shows.

Fainting spells and lethargy? But they can't find anything causing it? Sometimes we have symptoms that aren't caused by bugs that are feeding on our organs. They're caused by something that's eating at our psyches. Fainting and lethargy can be deadly symptoms, but they also fall into the category of psychosomatic symptoms. The result of bad stuff that happened a long time ago. Things you bury deep in the back of your mind's dark closet until you open the door one day and everything starts tumbling down all over you. That's Mrs. Linklater's psych 101 amateur diagnosis of the day. I guess they call it PTSD lately.

I wonder when they'll stop giving him blood tests and x-rays and start looking into the events of his life for the cause of his illness.

On the other hand, when you spend your professional life as an entertainer traveling all over the world, the chances of becoming infected with a mysterious illness nobody has ever seen in the US, or in his case, Australia, are higher than we may like to think.

Then again, why does anybody, especially a talented, attractive, young male singer, choose to become part of a group that only entertains children? Not that entertaining children isn't an acceptable profession. I'm just cogitating here. Any time somebody seems out of place, I wonder why? Like a male teaching pre-school. NOTE: I learned just this minute, right after writing that last sentence, that he had been in school studying early childhood education before joining the Wiggles. 

Or it could be a conflict of medication problem. Shots of tequila don't mix well with chocolate milk for instance. Just covering my ass here, trying to think of all the possibilities. [That's because Mrs. Linklater's cockamammy psychotherapeuticological theories don't usually meet with great acceptance. Plus she doesn't want to rock the boat so much that she falls out.]

I worked with someone who was going through a whole battery of tests for MS when I first met her. She told me about her symptoms and they sounded like conversion hysteria to me, i.e., women who get paralyzed or suffer numbness from the waist down after being molested. Her difficult childhood included times in her life for which she had no memory. Her nightmares put Friday the 13th to shame. Oddly, when she was told she didn't have MS her numbness symptoms went away.

It seems to me that docs have a tendency to decide up front that what they're looking for is either one or the other. They will decide that the symptoms are caused by a bug OR something psychosomatic. They will look for one OR the other. Not both.

Plus, in my experience, if it's a guy, the medicos always seem ready to hunt down and kill bugs. If it's a woman, they assume the symptoms have an emotional etiology. I was once put on tranquilizers for what used to be called a "spastic colon." Now it's irritable bowel syndrome, I think. It went away after three months.

A man I know with the same symptoms I had was hospitalized for a week and checked out for everything from cancer to ulcers. Before he left work for all his tests, I told him he had what I had had. 

That's what he had.

Deciding up front that symptoms are bugs, etc. or emotionally driven can be a deadly decision. I had a friend who was assured that her sinus headaches were from job stress, until she had a seizure and they finally looked for, and found, a brain tumor.

See what happens when there's no one to take my keyboard away from me? We go from some poor guy whose career may be over because of an illness, to contemplating the cause of his illness, to the implication that he may have had something evil happen to him when he was young to a rant about doctors.

No apologies.