Many patients are intrigued to learn that children of alcohol-dependent parents run an increased risk of alcohol relate problems themselves - some say as much as 50%, and particular sons.Partly due to a genetically transmitted tendency to anxiety, to seeking excitement and to being antisocial.

Partly due to an inherited difference in the way alcohol is metabolized.

Partly due to growing up in a household, where you get less attention.

Partly due to just picking up your parents bad habits.

This was elegantly demonstrated by a Pennsylvania farther recently - when he went to pick up his son who was charged with drunk driving. And the police realized the farther was shit-canned as well, and busted him for DUI.

 It’s only March, but spring has sprung - prematurely with temperatures of 90 degrees and 90% humidity already, and everything has taken off. And this is tempting me down the same degenerate path as actress Kristen Johnson.

Everything is growing like mad all over the 30 acres of jungle that Mrs. Gagg and I have to try keep under control.

Life is a purgatory of mulching, weeding, mowing, pruning, digging, fertilizing, composting, fixing fences - in addition to an unrealistic number of not just maintenance projects we have going.

And it all centers right about L5/S1.

That is, it gets you in your lumbar spine - and one of my facet joints in particular (where the lower part of one vertebra articulates with the one below) which is presumably wearing out and probably fossilizing.

And it makes you grimace and groan as you struggle to stand up from weeding or when you roll out of bed in the mornings, like some nonagenarian crone.

I went to Dr K., the orthopedist. He tentatively brought up Physical Therapy - but I told him “get real.” There’s no chance of my having the discipline to be compliant with that - so he sends me to my interventional radiologist buddy J. McL - for a cortisone shot.

An interventional radiologist, as the name suggests, intervenes - with needles, tubes, catheters and any other implement of torture they can think of. All under X-ray guidance - so they supposedly know which organ or part of the body the offending implement is in - which is why it is a radiologist doing it and not just a communal-garden sadist.

As an aside, the pay structure in medicine is insane. You get paid up the wazoo for any kind of procedure, and nothing for “cognitive skills” - i.e. your intellect, knowledge, diagnostic abilities - all that grueling brain work that is required to manage those little old ladies with ten diseases on twenty medicines.

Interventional radiologists are proceduring all day long, thus are fabulously rich - and nowadays every medical students wants to be one (instead of those super versatile, much needed grunts of the medical profession, Family Physicians).

But I have always pulled J.McL’s leg about how he tortures people all day, and how I’m sure he did his Internship at the Tower of London.

So when I text him and tell him “Dr K. wants you to give me a facet block” he responds immediately, and I can sense the alacrity with which he tells me he will be “extremely happy” to do so.

Well I go to see him in the office he’s just moved in to - which just happens to be across the road from the local Hooters, which, I tell him, “I presume was why you picked this location?”

Do they have special S&M Hooters?

So, he gives me a shot, and it’s really not too bad, and I even get a slight improvement after a couple of days, but then we relapse, and basically it really hasn’t done a whole lot. I told him, “next time use the real thing, not the placebo” when he suggests a re-do.

But in the mean time, I have discovered ibuprofen. The occasional one at night, when you remember, doesn’t do a whole lot. But taking two (400 mg) twice a day regular as clockwork is fairly good - though I’m still pretty seized up after we had to cut down a large tree and take down a fence to build a deck by the pool.

But then the dog gets sick. First of all, won’t put weight on his left front leg, and is just lying around unwilling to even go from one room to the next. Won’t eat. Just miserable - this is this half Great Dane, half Lab’, daft as a brush, partly due to a terrible mishap when he was six months old and (somehow) got trapped under the house with his left rear leg hooked over a pipe. No one knew he was there, and he was without food or water for ten days, until the smell from his now gangrenous back leg alerted us (that and the sudden new groaning noise from the crawl space under the bedroom when my daughter was getting ready to go to school one morning).

The gangrenous leg removed by the local vet and never looked back - so it appeared. But having just one back leg has caused the hip joint of the remaining leg to wear out and become extremely arthritic - shown on an x-ray the vet took when we took him in to see why he was suddenly so under the weather.

The pain from this is what was making him so miserable and inactive, was the vet’s diagnosis. So she prescribed him some Rimadyl - a Pfizer product that contains carprofen, and is “the #1 prescribed canine NSAID* in the world,”and “the #1 reason” for your dog to wag his tail, that will make him “adventurous, frisky, playful, energetic, healthy, lively, bouncy, curious, colorful, active, spunky”… and “a true RimaDog!” according to the website - they must have some really highly paid copy writers at Pfizer.

So the dog is on pretty much the same medicine as I have been treating myself with, or prescribing for my patients for years (It always amazes me how it seems you can get any kind of treatments for animals that is available for humans -  the vet offered us a doggy total hip replacement as well).

Not that I was seriously considering it, and didn’t even dare ask the price. But within a day, all thoughts of the dog needing surgery were banished - by the fact that he was tearing around just like his old self, or better.

So that got me thinking. Maybe I could be adventurous, frisky, playful, energetic, healthy, lively, bouncy, curious, colorful, active and spunky?

Which brings me to Kristen Johnston, who is battling addiction according to a piece in the London Daily Mail.

She was stealing Vicodin from her mother, who had just had knee surgery - which is pretty low dog (if you’ll pardon the canine pun). But then she stooped to the ultimate low.

She was “taking pain killers prescribed to my own sweet dog.” 

Who Should Get the Medicine?

*NSAID stands for non-steroidal anti inflammatory medicine, like ibuprofen (in Advil and Motrin), naproxen (in Aleve), aspirin, or one of numerous of prescription arthritis medicines.

 I don’t like to knock my country of origin, so it is embarrassing to have to record that the British seem to be a little quirky in the satiation of their various appetites.

First, Claire Simmons, a 33 year old from Notting Hill in London has eaten nothing but pizza for the last 31 years (can you imagine anyone who would let their kid eat exclusively pizza from age 2?). But she shakes when presented with other foods apparently.

Then Stacey Irvine from Birmingham, who is 17, has eaten only chicken nuggets for the last 15 years (two must be a vulnerable age). She has anemia breathing problems and was recently rushed to hospital with swollen veins in her tongue (some new “nugget disease”? Maybe there’s Nobel Prize in the offing?)

The only meat that 44 year old Jonathan McGowan, from  Bournemouth, in southern England, has eaten for the last 30 years has been road kill - fox has a lovely texture and no fat;  frogs and rats are good in stir fries;  owl makes a good curry (who’d have guessed) but badger’s not nice, and hedgehog is “hideous.”

These seem to be victims of  “Selective Eating Disorder” which is a continuation or exaggeration of being a faddy eater and unwilling to try new foods according toe the University College London Institute of Child Health.

OK, SED is a little quirky and eating exclusively pizza or chicken nuggets is liable to lead to health problems from too little of some foods (vitamins, minerals, fiber etc) and too much of others (fat, cholesterol, food additives). But you could be even more screwy and have “objectum sexuality” like 27 year old Amanda Whittaker - which affects other appetites.

This is a condition where you fall in love with inanimate objects. She was in love with a drum kit (and used to take one of her drums to bed), but now she’s in love with the Statue of Liberty - who just “barged in” apparently.

She has pictures and statuettes in her house and visits as often as possible and says she is “blown away by how stunning she is.”

Actually it’s not fare to blame the Brit’s for being the only crazy ones to present these Monty Python-esq type conditions - there’s a Swedish woman in love with a red fence who is married to the Berlin wall. And a woman in Pennsylvania who is in love with an amusement ride and sleeps with a picture of it.

British media psychologist Dr Funke Baffour says objectum sexuality is a form of Asperger’s Syndrome - in this case in women, not men as in the post on Asperger’s about how all women think their husbands have it. 

Whittaker and her love

But I think the bottom line is there are some pretty damn crazy people out there.