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.

Plastic surgeons take note - buxom Mexican actress Salma Hayek has found a way, other than implanting silicone or saline at great expense, to make her tits bigger.She was a “skinny tomboy” until she went to a church where there was meant to be a cooperative saint that did a lot of miracles. She put her hands in the holey water and prayed to Jesus to give her some boobs (I have never heard it discussed, but do you think Jesus was a boob man?).

Divine

Any way, lo and behold, she has a famous pair of knockers now.

It’s always irritated me that people have this idea that those nasty little boxes or bottles or packs of juice are so healthy, not like that awful unhealthy soda.

junior gets an overdose

I’m prompted to write this now because Consumer Reports tested 31 popular grocery brand juices and found a lot of arsenic and lead in quite a lot of them.

Arsenic causes cancer amongst other things. Lead poisons nervous systems - especially ones that are developing, so has a particular effect on kids (who are the main consumers of juice of course).

And the Sugar

But let us not also overlook the sugar issue. There seems to be this idea that because juice comes from something “natural” that it must be OK.

Well, sugar comes from sugar beet or sugar cane, both of which are “natural” - or that “high fructose corn syrup” (which is to be sanitized by renaming it.)

And for comparison 8 oz of Coke contains 26g of sugar. 8 oz of orange juice contains 24 - not a very significant difference.

Other reports from the Internet are that a 16 oz bottle of apple juice has 56g sugar - so 8 oz has 28g - more than the Coke. Twelve ounces of grape soda has 159 calories. Same quantity of grape juice has 228 calories.

CBS News reports that the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends no juice before age 6 months. And then just 4-6 oz per day up to age six - but how many parents are filling their kids sippy cups with all kinds of juice?

The $10 billion juice industry isn’t happy with the restrictive advice - surprise surprise. CBS reported “Carol Freysinger, executive director of the Juice Products Association  . . .is critical of doctors, telling parents to eliminate juice, saying it gives a bad name to a healthy beverage and could prevent people from getting important nutrients juice offers”.

Despite the guidelines, 60 percent of 1-year-olds drink juice, averaging 11½ ounces a day, according to 2002 USDA data. That’s up from 57 percent less than a decade before reports CBS.

If you want to get a good feel for how much sugar is in these drinks, take a look at Marshall Brain’s Science of the Brain video on U-Tube urging you to add the equivalent amount of sugar (7 ½ teaspoonfuls) to an 8 oz glass of water.