My Dad's Got Shingles!

That's right. My dad's got shingles. Apparently, shingles does not mean that you develop hard, barklike skin and a doubling of strength. Shingles is not an augmentation. It is a sickness. It affects the nervous system and resembles chickenpox.

By the way, chickenpox does not mean that you can see through walls and hear the Velvet Underground in the trees. Those are hallucinations which occur when you refuse medical treatment. I need to stop assuming that illness creates superhuman characteristics. You just get sick is all.

My dad's taking Codeine and antibiotics, stuff like that -- and his wife is going to try some alternative treatments on him. I think alternative medicine is interesting -- provided it works and doesn't hurt anyone. But one thing she's trying makes me a bit uncomfortable. She's going the homeopathy route. Have you heard of this? It's weird, and from what I can gather, it doesn't work. At all. Here's why. Say I've got shingles. I go to a homeopath. She will sell me a vial or pill or something that is a severely diluted form of something else, like an herb. It's so diluted that the molecular structure of the herb is very difficult to detect. And it's potency is gone. Yet it's claimed that it's more potent than it was before. I read that some homeopathic medicines are so diluted that they contain less ingredient in its solution than there is allowable arsenic in our drinking water. This means you're taking water pills. And paying a lot of bank for it.

Luckily, my dad's not going to replace his meds with this pre-germ theory scam. He's a nurse and his wife's a psychologist so they know the value of drugs -- they're just trying something out. I'll choose not to create a tiff over this. But I hope they don't get carried away and start making rash medical decisions. Oh, look at that. I made a shingles pun. Nothing makes me want to shoot myself in the face more than a pun.

-- BANG --

-- thud --

Dead face.