Three Weird Health Care Mysteries

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

Would you like to hear about three weird ways that cancer has changed my health? Of course you would. These are all very peculiar changes that are seemingly unrelated to the multiple myeloma itself, though who knows? Maybe they resulted from it in some strange way; maybe they’re due to the chemo drugs; or maybe they’re just things that happened coincidentally. I have no idea. Here they are:

Breathing: All my life I’ve been a mouth breather because my nose is chronically too stuffed up to breathe through. I even had my deviated septum corrected a couple of decades ago (it didn’t help). But when I was in the hospital five years ago my nose cleared up. I figured maybe the hospital air was super filtered or something, but after I got home my nose stayed cleared up and it remains clear to this day.

Peeing: My bladder has gotten tougher. Or my prostate has gotten bigger. Or something. But I can slurp down a big ol’ Diet Coke with my popcorn at the movies and not have to get up halfway through. I sleep through the night almost all the time. For some reason, I’ve regressed to about my 40-year-old self. I just don’t have to pee as often as I used to.

Sweating: I am much more tolerant of cold weather and much less tolerant of hot weather. If I lived in Duluth this would be an unalloyed benefit. Unfortunately, I live in Southern California. This is a big change for me: I used to be a typical SoCal boy, playing tennis in 90-degree heat and barely sweating a drop. These days, all it takes is a walk around the block in 80-degree heat for me to start sweating like a pig. It’s very strange.

This is all very mysterious. But after five years I have to figure that these are permanent changes. I wonder what caused them?

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with The Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with The Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate