Another very hot day with only a hint of a passing thunder storm this late afternoon. Breakfast outside was ok but for lunch we opted for the cool inside. Half an hour ago, R emerged from his study where he has been grading papers all weekend, stretched himself and suggested a short spin on the bicycle. Like a fool I got up and looked for the keys and my phone and made it exactly as far as the back steps.

Yesterday was a vertigo and nausea blur, vague memories of eating delicious ripe apricots in the evening, balancing on my bed, carefully holding a paperback in my arms waiting for the letters to stop whirling and turning, telling myself that all vertigo attacks have subsided before as this one surely will, eventually.

These days it is blatantly obvious that I am simply the wrong person for this disease.
Assuming that there is indeed a right person to live with a serious chronic condition, the one with all the red warning lights and the overlap syndrome and B symptom caveats. In short, the kind which causes smart medical experts to sigh and get off their comfortable chairs, walk around their shiny desks to hold your hands. If they have ever heard of it, that is.

This disease that currently rules my life (it comes in flare-ups and I remain hopeful that like previous ones the current one will eventually subside, too) used to be called Wegener's disease, named after a German pathologist who first reported on this condition in the 1930s, a time when there was no treatment, the few patients he based his findings on had died quite suddenly.
It's just my luck that Friedrich Wegener was a nazi, and possibly a dedicated one. This from an investigation by Woywodt and Matteson in Rheumatology (Oxford) (2006) Vol. 45: 1303-1306:

The facts we have uncovered do not prove Dr Friedrich Wegener guilty of war crimes. However, the evidence suggests that Dr Wegener was, at least at some point of his career, a follower of the Nazi regime. Dr Wegener's mentor, Martin Staemmler, was an ardent supporter of the racial hygiene. In addition, our data indicate that Dr Wegener was wanted by Polish authorities and that his files were forwarded to the United Nations War Crimes Commission. Finally, Dr Wegener worked in close proximity to the genocide machinery in Lodz. His interest in air embolism is also troubling. Although we know that Wegener was a popular and skilled teacher and colleague, our data raise serious concerns about Dr Wegener's professional conduct.

In 2008, The New York Times wrote that a nazi past casts a pall on name of a disease. For a while, this story was my party piece, I told it with a grin, to take the edge off when I had to react to another round of never-heard-of-it remarks. I don't do that any longer. I am also not one who is hurt or insulted by the name of this shit disease. That's the least of my problems right now.

Today, I am mostly just mad and jealous of R and everybody who can walk without needing a wall to hold onto. But I am repeating myself.