Hi. Welcome. I hope you’ll click PLAY above to hear the intended podcast version of this episode with original music. (16 minute listen) Enjoy.
Psoriasis and a Mouse
Every Monday afternoon, my friend Bruce comes over at four o'clock to meditate with me. He shows up at four and we meditate for 20 minutes, we say a few kind words and then we do a really friendly fist bump. Then he heads out the door. Well, yesterday, while we were meditating, I heard some scratching coming from the other room. I heard it… and then I forgot about it. And this morning, when I went in to use the bathroom, there in the toilet, floating on the surface of the toilet water was a dead mouse — a black mouse with big ears just floating there, dead — with little mouse droppings on the floor of the toilet. It was so weird.
The interesting part of this story is… first of all, how did a mouse get in my house and how did it end up in the toilet? Who knows how long it's been hanging around here and who knows if there are other family members around. I hope not. I'm guessing that it climbed into the toilet to get some water and once it got in there, it couldn't find a way out.
But the really interesting part of this story is… my girlfriend Emma and I are listening to a book together, a book called Sipsworth by Simon van Booy. It takes place in England and it's about an old woman who befriends a mouse that she finds in her house. It's such a lush book. Every single line feels like poetry and it's narrated by a woman with a beautiful English accent. Sometimes I'll pause the audio just to repeat a line that she says that I find so beautiful. The book is read by Christine Rendell.
Here she is: “before returning to the couch, she glances into the pie box where a gray head with long whiskers is peering out through the hole.”
So it's been such a joy hearing the story of an old woman who gained so much purpose and meaning by befriending a mouse. But I didn't get the chance to befriend my mouse. The first time we met, she was dead.
In the realm of interesting and weird connections, in the realm of coincidences, I have a whole ‘nother unrelated story to share with you. It goes back to 1993 when I moved to New York City to become a famous folk star. Actually, I never moved to New York City. I moved to my friend JP's parents’ house in Great Neck, Long Island. I was a bit of a mess back then. I had long hair and I wore messy clothes. And I got a little bit lost in the home-rolled cigarettes, the coffee, the muffins and the marijuana.
So I'll tell you more about my escapades into the city some other time. But for today, I just want to tell you about sitting down in JP's parents basement in the middle of the afternoon, high on pot, improvising song lyrics into my old four-track recording machine — right off the top of my head. You see, that was my specialty — improvisation. I used to do a show called “100% improv.” That was actually just a cover for a guy that was chronically unprepared. I didn't have the discipline and the focus to sit down and actually write a song. So I would smoke a little dope, turn on the recording machine and let the lyrics fly.
Here's the interesting part. In these afternoon wild, creative recording sessions, I would just try to open my mouth and let whatever sounds come out. Free of inhibitions, my goal was just to let it flow, to be loose and let the words out. Later on, I would sort through my improvisations and try and find something worth keeping. Interestingly, one sound or one word that used to come across my lips was “psoriasis.” For whatever reason, I don’t know. I didn't have psoriasis. I didn't know anything about psoriasis, but it was one of the words that would regularly come out of my mouth.
Okay, 10 years later… yeah, we're skipping a whole bunch of the story, as a matter of fact, a whole decade. But 10 years later, my fingernails started doing weird things. They started having ridges and the tips of them started coming away from the skin and I started getting this weird sore on my behind and I started getting flakiness in my hair. I would scratch my head and all the snow would fall to the pillow. It wasn't much later that I learned that I had psoriasis. It's an autoimmune condition where the immune system attacks the skin and causes big red blotches. I had it on my behind and on my fingernails and on my scalp. Today, I have it all over my body.
Yep, after all those sessions of singing “psoriasis” in JP's parents basement. I ended up with psoriasis. I guess it's kind of like reading that book about the woman and the mouse and then finding a dead mouse in my toilet. But the connections don't end there. The story goes on.
We're gonna jump another decade to 2013 when I was in Kauai — again, with my friend JP, teaching a harmonica workshop. JP and I and a couple friends were strolling along the black lava rocks down below Ben Stiller's mansion when a rogue wave swept two of us into the ocean and only one of us made it out alive. That was me. Our friend Ash was last seen floating face down into the ocean. Yeah, it was a terrifying and traumatic event for all of us. I was life-flighted over the cliffs of Kalihiwai Point to safety. Yeah, my whole being experienced some great trauma that day. But I survived and I made it home to Ohio to see my daughter and my mom and my family.
And not more than just a few weeks later, my thumb swelled up. I had an aching, swelled thumb and also I was experiencing numbness in my arms. So I went to the internet and I did a little search, “aching, swelled up thumb with numbness in the arms,” and I came upon something called “psoriatic arthritis.” Now, psoriatic arthritis is a very frightening illness, especially if you find out about it late at night on the internet, like I did. The very first thing I ever read about psoriatic arthritis was a personal account of someone experiencing a sudden onset of a wave of psoriatic arthritis sweeping through their body and suddenly, overnight, becoming disabled with great pain.
And I got it into my head. “Oh, shit. I have psoriatic arthritis,” which is an autoimmune condition related to psoriasis, where your immune system attacks your joints and “there's a chance that this thing could sweep through my body with a sudden onset.” And I got scared. And guess what? Not more than a couple weeks later, I woke up in the middle of the night with the experience of a wave of psoriatic arthritis sweeping through my body. I kid you not. It was like a fever. The very fear that I had heard about on the internet came true. Remember, I was telling you about that mouse that I've been reading about that ended up dead in my toilet? Yep.
Only weeks after being swept into the ocean by a rogue wave, only days after reading about it on the internet, I was swept into the world of psoriatic arthritis by another rogue wave. I woke up with arthritis in all my joints, both knees, both elbows and both hands. I remember that morning walking through town, all the way over to the house of my girlfriend at the time, in a desperate state of disbelief, in a kind of dream state of fear, not knowing what was going on in my body, completely powerless and afraid.
It was kind of like several weeks earlier, being in the ocean, being swept underwater, realizing that the ocean didn't care that I’m Hal Walker. “What do you mean!? How could this be!? How could this be?” But it was. Psoriatic arthritis didn't care that I'm Hal Walker and I had all kinds of much better plans. Eventually, I made it over to the rheumatologist who officially diagnosed me with psoriatic arthritis and prescribed something called “methotrexate.” (and that's a whole ‘nother story that we're not gonna talk about right now)
But the coincidences go on. The weird connections go on. The story continues — 10 years later. So, back in 2013, I dealt with a lot of pain in my joints for about a year. But then I had a flare up of ME/CFS symptoms and the joint pain went away. Now, isn't that interesting?
Jump 10 years later, a whole decade later, 12 years later and here I am, just a couple weeks ago, in deep ME/CFS territory — severe symptoms, almost fully bed bound, having a hard time eating, really severe neurological symptoms, having more crashes than I care to count and generally just overwhelmed with the symptoms in my body. Then psoriatic arthritis shows up to save the day. (lol)
No, that's not exactly how it is, but for the last couple weeks, I've been having real bad restriction and pain in my right shoulder. I can’t really lift the upper part of my arm. Fortunately, it's not actually constant pain. It's only pain when I move my arm or think about moving my arm… or when I lay on my shoulder. When I'm just resting, it's not pain. It's just a distant kind of fear of pain if I were to move my arm. The ache spreads out to my back and my neck.
But anyway, interestingly, fascinatingly, some smart doctor should pay attention— my ME/CFS symptoms have eased ups little bit. I can't guarantee the connection. It could be the two and a half milligrams of Abilify that I'm taking every day. But my sense is that my body is working on the psoriatic arthritis right now. The psoriatic arthritis is dominating and therefore, my brain is easing up on the ME/CFS symptoms. Isn't that fascinating?
I think that's all I have to say. That's the whole story. It's to be continued.
For the last couple weeks, I have not been as ill, a little bit less weakness, less illness in my stomach, no crashing and I've been off Ativan for two whole days without needing it. But I've got this damn pain in my right shoulder. It's like a crippling, kind of crackly, awful, kind of hard to describe, fragile, joint, radiating bone pain.
That's the whole story, the story of the mouse. I'm just so fascinated by all these connections, all these weird connections — all these coincidences.
You know, I'm not sure which I prefer, the ME/CFS symptoms or the psoriatic arthritis symptoms. To be honest, I think I prefer the pain over the illness. ME/CFS is so debilitating and so scary. Psoriatic arthritis is debilitating. (lol) Psoriatic arthritis is debilitating and scary, too. But I think I'm not as debilitated — like I've sat here and made this whole episode without an Ativan.
Anyway, that's my whole story. I'm sticking to it. I'm gonna close with a little excerpt from the book Sipsworth that I think is very fitting. Our friend Helen is thinking about the coincidences of her life having met this mouse.
It goes like this, “Could what we call coincidence be something intended with a meaning purposely hidden? That would imply design — a god. But what sort of god would strike down a boy's father at dinner time?”
All right, everybody. It’s Living in a Body. By the way, you have a body. Go live in it. Go live in it! It's not going to be around forever — like that mouse. Hopefully that mouse had a good life. I'm wishing all the best to you and yours. Enjoy the day. Thanks so much for listening. Thanks for being here. I appreciate you. See you next time. Bye bye.
Share this post