Prologue
This might be the best time of year in Florida. We wake up with temperatures in the fifties, gradually escalating into the eighties as the hours pass into afternoon. The skies are not cloudy all day, for the most part. We get a smidgen of rain here and there prior to the very dry month of May and the much wetter months of Summer. The hurricane season cranks up in August and keeps everyone looking over their shoulders until October.
The two-year-old thoroughbred sales are going on now and racing at Gulfstream is winding down as Calder gears up for another eight month season. Elf had her first two-minute-lick Tuesday morning, negotiating the quarter-mile in 29.1, just about ideal. Juno came up with an abscess, putting her a couple weeks behind and pretty much insuring that Elf will be the first to ship south.
The Kentucky Derby looms ever closer and all the early favorites keep losing. Racing fans across the country look now to The Factor, a very fast sprinter who has yet to go further than a mile-and-a-sixteenth, to see if he has the stamina to get the Derby distance of a mile-and-a-quarter on the first Saturday in May.
The baseball season has started and the World-Series-favorite Red Sox are off to a bounding 2-9 start. Our favorite piñata, Dice-K Matsuzaka lasted two innings in his most recent start. What ever happened to hara-kiri? Most of you, of course, are more interested in our running medical soap opera, so why wait any longer:
As The World Turns—The Ongoing Saga Of Stuart Bentler
When we last left Stuart, he was on the verge of being diagnosed with amyloidosis, put on a course of treatment and returned to the world of the living. But things are never so easy as this in Bentlerland. After an earlier diagnosis of hyperparathyroidism (inaccurate) and a current suspicion of amyloidosis (inaccurate) which never reached the diagnosis stage, Stuart’s doctors are still floundering around trying to get to the root of the problem. And, after all, they’ve only had eleven friggen months, be patient. It’s like all the king’s horses and all the king’s men all over again. That’s what happens when your doctors are named Larry, Moe and Curly.
What if Stuart’s doctors were airline pilots?
“Gee, Captain Larry, this instrument panel is lighting up like the White House Christmas Tree. We’re landing in Canarsie pretty soon—what should we do next?”
“Well, Co-captain Moe, this is certainly a stumper for me. Let me ponder on it for about eleven months while you alert the passengers.”
Or, what if Stuart’s doctors were Cowboy Heros in the Old West?
“Golly, Rex—the villains done tied Miss Pauline to the railroad track and the 3:10 is due in five minutes! Not only that, but they’ve gone and burned down the town, stolen all the horses and, well, you know what they always do to the wimmen….”
“Don’t worry, Fester! They’ll pay for their nefarious deeds! We’ll cut ‘em off at the pass and put an end to this tomfoolery! But first—I’d like to sing you folks a little song….”
Oh, well. At least we’re learning about more exotic diseases every week. We could end up a walking medical encyclopedia if Stuart lasts that long.
Rant Of The Week—Bogus Hurricane Prognosticators
Every year about this time, the newspapers are full of aggravating stories about the number of hurricanes which are going to barge onto the southern coastline, destroying property and killing millions. Every year they tell us the number of hurricanes will increase, the number of serious hurricanes will double and the number of hurricanes which will smash down your very house will appear in record numbers. And every year they are wrong. This seems to make no difference, however, to the newspaper and television people who go back to them year after year for their exalted forecasts. And the main guy they go back to is in goddam Colorado—what’s up with that?
Once, good old Jean Dixon came up with a correct prophecy and she was forever besieged about her predictions henceforth. She was wrong about 95% of the time, but they never forgot about the one time she was right. The hurricane prognosticators don’t even have that going for them—they’ve never been right. Where else can you get a job where you’re wrong all the time and people keep asking for your opinion? Oh, that’s right—you can be one of Stuart Bentler’s doctors.
Rant, Part II—Hurricane Weathermen
And, while we’re at it, what about those hurricane weather guys who try to con you into thinking “hurricane season” extends from the First of June to the end of November? Nobody ever had a hurricane on the First of June or the last of November. Not even close. Hurricanes come in August and September, period. Oh, alright, you might get a teeny, tiny hurricane late in July that will foam up in the eastern Gulf and peter out or dump a few showers on Big Pine Key or something, but no big deal. Don’t tell that to the weathermen, however, who pretend to be just as worried as you about hurricanes but secretly jump up and down in delight when one approaches because it makes them relevant.
“Now folks, there’s no real reason to worry because Hurricane Murgatroyd is still six quintillion miles off the coast of Florida, BUT if a certain impossible combination of events should occur in the next seven hundred hours we could be looking down the barrel of Disaster!”
Stuff like that. And then they’ll tell you to buy some kind of wonky “weather radio” to follow the storm when the power goes out. Last year the power went out around here during a lesser storm and it took out the weather alerting station which fuels the weather radio. They, unlike us, didn’t have a backup generator so they were off line until the all-clear. Now what do you do?
Not all weathermen are nitwits, of course. One time Siobhan called our local weatherman in the middle of a hurricane around midnight and he calmly told her what to expect over the next few hours. He even told her to call him back if she had further worries. And all the stuff he said would happen did. We need more guys like him in the doctor profession.
Questions From The Peanut Gallery
As any of you who have written with questions know, I always answer you within 12 hours, usually much faster, especially within the first two days of publication of a new column. Some questions are funny. Some just seek further information about a subject that is of particular interest to them. Other questions, however, are of broader interest and are thus presented as follows:
Is Stuart Bentler a real person?
We’ve been going back and forth on this one for some time now and, after considerable hemming and hawing, we’re coming down firmly on the side of “yes.” Stuart first entered our consciousness when he appeared one day at the Subterranean Circus, eyed the constant variety of 40 brands of cigarette rolling papers, marched up to the counter and announced, “I’ll take one of each.”
As time passed, we grew to appreciate Stuart’s happy demeanor, quirky sense of humor and wife, Leslie, whom he certainly didn’t deserve. Stuart was on the verge of graduating from the College of Architecture at UF (which he eventually did) but he was a firm believer in the “All work and no play makes Stuart a dull boy” philosophy and he certainly did not want to succumb to that horrid fate so, for a while, Stuart’s apartment in back of the Gainesville Krispy Kreme became Party Central. One of my girlfriends, Patty Wheeler, was particularly enamored of Stuart’s wizardry with the electric yoyo (it even lit up in the dark) and it is probably to the regret of all of us that I did not swap her for Leslie.
Eventually, Stuart graduated, got married and opened his own architecture firm in his native Tampa. Occasionally, his Gainesville pals would pay him a visit but it’s tough to carry on these long distance relationships so we saw him less and less. To his credit, Stuart always kept in touch over the years and brought his children Katherine and Stuart Jr., up to visit the horses and see what kind of people their father associated with when he was young and foolish. Sadly, Stuart Jr. passed at an early age and Leslie eventually migrated out West, leaving Stuart on his own, a dangerous happenstance. He made the best of it, finding another 10-year partner and moving to Phoenix for a short time before finally coming to his senses and returning to Fort Lauderdale where he remains, barely, to this day. Katherine, internationally renowned for her delicate beauty and sketchy choices of men, visits often and stays on top of the medical situation, if anyone can be truly said to stay on top of that mare’s nest of folly and confusion. We’re keeping our fingers crossed. Hopefully, the doctors—even these doctors will, by the process of elimination if no other, figure out what the hell is wrong with Stuart and bring this mess to a happy conclusion. The alternative is unacceptable.
Do Mares Always Foal At Night?
Well, all the ones we know do, but perhaps we’re hanging around in the wrong circles. This probably goes back to antiquity, when horses had predators. The only defense the horse has is flight. If a foaling mare can secret her baby for a few hours, the foal will be able to rise and follow her out of danger. We tried to explain to our mares that we don’t have any predators out our way and it would be very considerate of them to foal between 7 a.m. and 11 p.m. but they looked at us as if they thought we were pulling a fast one.
What Is The Nature Of Siobhan’s Business?
Oh boy, that’s going to take a little while to explain. Siobhan is the universe’s leading expert on Sarcocystis neurona, the main cause of an unhappy disease called equine protozoal myeloencephalitis (EPM). Horses which contract EPM become bobble heads. They wobble, become lame, and are unusable due to microscopic protozoa that invade the central nervous system. Sometimes they die. They get this infection by inadvertently eating opossum feces in their pastures. Texas must be the opossum feces capital of the world because we get more samples and questions from Texas than anywhere else.
Siobhan receives blood samples daily from around the country (and Canada) which she tests to determine the presence and degree of seriousness of EPM. She works with companies large and small to develop assays to detect disease and test possible treatments. Recently, she was able to move her test to Brazil, another opossum hotbed. Hopefully, a vaccine to curb the demon will be developed soon. Things are progressing favorably.
If you want to keep track of all this, her web address is: www.pathogenes.com.
Siobhan has decided that no level of success on the Sarcocystis neurona front is going to win her the Nobel Prize, however, so in her spare time she is working on a cure for malaria. Ambitious as that may seem, I wouldn’t bet against her.
That’s all, folks....
