Appointment with GP tomorrow morning. He is going to be so happy to see me. I just show up every three or four years to explain my self-diagnosis and treatment plan and would he mind signing a few prescriptions? Gotta pity the guy.

I have figured out some of what is going on. Thirty years ago and shortly after getting married, my then=GP was doing a routine physical for me when he came up with some numbers on the lab work that got him rather agitated. He urged me to check in at the local hospital for further testing as in "today!" Because the object of his concern was one of the nastier anemias and because I had started on a strict vegetarian diet not too long previously, I convinced him to let me bring lean red meat back into my life and see what happened. Sure enough, after the sacrifice of several medium-sized mammals the numbers came up to where we wanted them and all was well.

About this same time, the GP moved out of town so there was limited followup. But I felt fine and eveything seemed OK. Time went on and I forgot about the incident. Luckily, my wife did not. It is to her that my thanks goes for much of this that follows.

It is starting to look like a whole flock of pigeons is coming home to roost as several seperate threads of late weave themselves together. The miserable way that I have been feeling over he last year. The steadily increasing feeling of doom that was more and more a part of my thoughts. The loss of the ability to do anything around the house. The realization that I was increasingly becoming housebound. The loss of muscle tissue to atrophy. An acceleration of loss over the last couple of months. The seemingly unrelated problems with potassium control that Laura and I had had to face. It seems to be leading somewhere.

A patient can have a deficiency of Vitamin B12. That is clear enough. That deficiency can be the result of damage to the intestinal tract as in celiac disease. Or it can arise from the inability of your stomach to produce a chemical called intrinsic factor which must be had in order to get the B12 seperated from the food so that you can make use of it. Various types of anemia can present as well. All these result from too little B12. Some of them can be quite fatal.

B12 is everywhere. And if you are deficient for a long time, you have a pentup demand for it to deal with all those cellular "To Do" lists. When that fresh supply of B12 hits town everyone gets busy. As a result, other secondary shortages pop up. Things like potassium, for example. That's what caught me by surprise and knocked me out. My body was moving potassium to safety and making it inaccessable. And that was part of the problem along with the anemia.