September 1, 2016
The last time I hit the the "Publish" button on this blog was on March 8, 2010, and a lot has changed since then. For better or worse, I don't remember most of it but here are the highlights.
In March, 2010, Carmen and I were living in a century-old Victorian house in Old Louisville, on the third floor. Carmen had just started working for the Census Bureau and I would join her, counting noses, a few months later. That's what we did for the next six months. Carmen worked as an enumerator for the 2010 Census and I worked in quality control. The enumerators would go door to door to complete the Census surveys of those who had not mailed their survey back.
Quality control folks, like myself, were given a random selection of completed surveys for verification. We would then go back and re-interview our assigned addresses. The enumerators never knew which, if any, of their completed surveys would be checked, but they knew we quality control folk were there and doing our job.
I can only guess how the Census Bureau check the quality of the quality control team, but I'm sure they did. The difficulty of finding people at home and willing to answer a knock on the door made the idea of faking survey results tempting. Summertime in Louisville, Kentucky made a paper-pushing job into a sweaty occupation, but we learned a lot.
For example, there are more transvestites in Louisville then you'd ever guess.
Then, I fell ill with a very rare, and usually fatal, bacterial infection called nocardiosis. It starts off slow and it is difficult to diagnose in the early stages. For a long time the main symptom is that I felt like shit, without relief. The nocardio bacteria is a very slow growing bug and difficult to kill. In many respects it's a lot like tuberculosis, except it's not contagious.
By the summer of 2011, I knew I was in big trouble, but the doctors were clueless. My lesson from this, as if I didn't already know it, was that you rarely find what you're not looking for. Nocardiosis is so rare, nobody was looking for it.
That uncertainty continued until Thanksgiving, 2011. Blood tests and x-rays were useless, even after I ended up in the emergency room with an excruciatingly painful abscess on the back of my head that had caused my scalp to bulge like a blister on a bad tire.
The ER doctors drained about a liter of stinking bloody puss from my scalp in a white-knuckle teeth-gritting procedure that seemed to go on forever. One doctor even apologized that the pain shot he gave me did not seem to work. He was puzzled about that.
They kept me in the hospital over night and sent me home with some antibiotics, not realizing that the nocardio bacteria laughs at a ten-day antibiotic treatment.
One thing I didn't find out about until a few months later is that, unlike most bacteria which is stopped when it hits bone, nocardio just keeps going. My demon bacteria could, and did, eat its way right through my skull and into my brain.
More about this later.
Tom Fox
Louisville, Kentucky
