Montalvo Channels Javid

Well, I thought it was all completely bogus, until two things happened last weekend:

1.     I became weak and massively depressed

2.     I remembered chymopapain

Start with the weak: I had somehow managed to put on my shorts. What couldn’t I do? Zip up my fly.

Continue with the depression: I was in bed, sobbing and saying, “I can’t stand it—I can’t stand getting up in the morning and not knowing what’s going to hurt! I can’t exercise, some days I can’t write, I can’t see so I can’t read—every fucking thing I did to stave off the depression I can’t DO anymore! And it’s so FUCKING unfair!”

I could go on and on about this disease, named chikungunya, which is an alpha virus—no idea what that is, but boy, is it true—that’s running through the island like kids run through amusement parks.

Or is it chikungunya? Because, though the search engine of El Nuevo Día refuses to divulge it, I seem to remember that half of the cases sent off to the lab for testing of the disease are coming back negative. So what gives?

Well, it could be a different disease—since I haven’t had the rash that normally accompanies the disease, nor has my pain been so severe that I am literally “bent over,” which is what “chikungunya” means in whatever African language it sprang from. But neither has my disease moved on in that “two to five days” that every writer—not one of whom, clearly, have had the disease—but instead has lingered, very much an unwelcome guest.

Then again, we may have a lousy test for the disease, since some tests—forget the technical name here, but I think it’s “high specificity”—are extremely accurate, but also have a lot of false negatives.

Then we come to the conspiracy theories, to which even the man who looks into my eyes and pronounces them beautiful—my ophthalmologist—subscribes.

“Hey, how is it that they fly that American doctor with ebola—wait a minute, computer, are you serious? Since when are we capitalizing diseases, for God’s sake? And isn’t that buying into the hysteria that we’re all being adjured to resist? Any red squiggles if I write “cancer?”—to Atlanta a month ago, and boom, he’s cured? Do they expect anyone to believe that? Nah, they introduced the disease and then they’ll come up with the drugs or the vaccines in a couple of years, just like they did with AIDS….”

This man, remember, is a doctor….

Well, the conspiracy theories are running rife, but before anyone un-aching up there sniffs at the idea, it is true that Puerto Rico has a terrible history of being the experimental playground for every new drug. Want an example? Well, when they needed to test the Pill—interesting that that cap seems to be the accepted way to refer to the oral contraceptives—the scientists decided that it was too controversial for North American society. So, according to PBS:

In the summer of 1955, Gregory Pincus visited Puerto Rico, and discovered it would be the perfect location for the human trials. The island, a U.S. territory, was one of the most densely populated areas in the world, and officials supported birth control as a form of population control in the hopes that it would stem Puerto Rico's endemic poverty.   

And what was the thing about thalidomide? Was I right in thinking that it had been tried out here? Well, still can’t tell you, since I got detoured by this:

Como sacado de una antigua película de horror, entre 1994 y 2005, el Instituto Nacional de Alergias y Enfermedades del gobierno de los Estados Unidos y la compañía farmacéutica Andrulis realizaron un experimento con la Talidomida en niñas y jóvenes puertorriqueñas con VIH-positivo.   

Guys? You mean to tell me that as late as 2005 you were giving thalidomide to kids who were HIV positive? So I should laugh if my ophthalmologist—along with half of the rest of the island—thinks somebody slipped a new virus into the mosquito?

Enter Montalvo, who at the beginning of this wretched three-month relationship with the alpha virus—and by the way, I have rarely scaled from the omega host to even a phi level—announced with the confidence of the young that he had a cure, and, though nasty, would have me running marathons up Mt. Everest in days, singing arias in full voice as I whizzed past the sherpas. All that had to be done was boil a papaya leaf!

To that end one was procured—passive voice intentional, since Montalvo snatched it from a tree on private property, but hey, at least it wasn’t that famous blue macaw!—and went to our house and boiled it. Then, he proceeded to make us all drink it—and a spoonful of sugar? Forget it, dive into the sugar factory!

So on Sunday, most of the bottle of vile nastiness remained in the refrigerator. Was it any good? Could anything make it worse? Was it worth it? Raf brought me half a cupful, and I swallowed it.

Why? Because I was desperate, and because I remembered, I think, that a famous surgeon up at the University of Wisconsin had used an enzyme in papaya to treat herniated disks. Damn, was it Dr. Javid—and that’s a serious insult, that red squiggle—because Dr. Javid was able to cure people by injection, not a painful surgery? And sure enough, here’s JAMA—that’s Journal of the American Medical Association, an organization not often associated with wacko treatments:

Since all patients met objective criteria for diskectomy, favorable results from chemonucleolysis spared most the trauma of surgery and its attendant convalescence. These results indicate that chemonucleolysis can and should be considered an advantageous alternative to surgery in appropriately selected patients. 

Curiously, the article lists just one author, which in three decades of peering at medical studies, I have never seen. And yes, it’s Manucher Javid, MD. And sadly, he must have died right before the Internet stumbled in, since I couldn’t find much on him. Though there are four cassette tapes of an interview done in 2004, along with the following description:

Early years and family in Iran; Baha'i Faith; Journey to United States; Medical education; Research; Residency; Application of urea solution to neurosurgery; Promotion to full professor; Creation of department of neurosurgery; Recruitment of a department chair. 

Well, was it suggestion, was it Javid, was it Montalvo? I hope not the latter—I’m far enough along in fatherhood to hate it when the smug little brat turns out to be right. Because in three hours the depression had lifted, though the weakness persisted. I continued drinking the stuff, and yesterday was able to write and play the cello. And now I’m out of the stuff, which means it’s gonna be me, not Montalvo, trespassing on private property and committing modified arboreal theft.

Ready for the next conspiracy theory? Consider this, from Wikipedia about chymopapain, the drug Dr. Javid used to treat herniated disks….

The sale and distribution of chymopapain was discontinued in the United States on January 27, 2003 after the company producing it decided to stop selling worldwide.

Know what I think? The patent ran out, and the profit from what was very likely an easily-extracted enzyme from what in the tropics is almost a weed? Not there!

Is it the chikungunya—which forget ebola, deserves a cap—or are there really more bastards out there?