We'll call him "Glen" but that is not the patient's real name.

Glen has been recounting some of his experience as an alien abductee. He keeps going over the saem reoutine. A large contraption with a spring keeps his mouth open while a surgeon runs probes up his nose, down his throat, in one ear and out the other (somehow), and down into his penis.
The penis one he reports as being the most excruciatingly painful procedure the aliens conduct on him, which makes turning him over and sliding a probe into his rectum "as enjoyable as picking your nose". I was typing notes into my computer while he was talking. "And then they did something really strange," he said.
I should mention that Glen has an anal obession, which I only learned about after a couple of sessions.

They wheeled in a small metal cart with a "snake type thing on it".
They fed the snake into his mouth and it slithered down his throat and he reported numbness immediately before and after (measure in an inch) the length of the creature they had inserted into him.
He said that the numbness indicated the creature was squirming around in his guts somewhere.
He then paused for a minute.

"Did it exit?" I asked.

The glave over his eyes wenta way as his eyes flashed around.
"No," he replied at last. He sounded terrified.

"Have you seen a doctor about it?" I asked.

"No," he said quietly, his voice cracking a little bit.

"Is it still inside?"

He nodded slowly without making eye contact with me.

"I'll get you the name and number of a specialist to call. Will you call him?"

He nodded but he did not seem to be paying attention.

"How are you feeling...biologically?" I asked him.

"I haven't eaten in three days, haven't pooped in two, and my urine is dark brown," he said slowly and softly.
And then he added, "they told me not to eat."

I raised my eyebrow.

"They'll be back tomorrow," he informed me, and he was sounded utterly defeated.
"Can you please help me?" he asked with desperation in his voice.

"Of course, we'll place you under observation," but he immediately interrupted me.

"No! No facilities of any kind. I can't. I'm sorry, doc."
He started to quiver.
"I need a plan. I'll be in touch." He stood from the recliner and started out of my office.

Of the sevearl sessions we've had together this is the first time Glen has mentioned anything about the aliens returning and he seems to have shifted the time frame, too.
In previous sessions all of this happened over the course of 2 weeks.
Five years ago.
His condition was getting worse and rather quickly, too.
Faster than I have seen in anybody else, to be frank.

I called up some Lazlo guys to keep an eye on Glen.
One of them got a hunch and decided to check in on Glen, claiming to have entered the house psychically.
My associate, Peter, makes such hairbrained claims all the time, so I'm pretty immune to the games these guys play.
After all, alcoholics have visions, too.
Popeye eats spinach and is suddenly enabled to kick Bluto's ass.
Psychological crutches. Popeye doesn't need spinach in order to kick Bluto's ass.
Anyway. We were talking about Glen's situation, which has all of a sudden take a turn for the worse.

When the agents entered the house they found Glen in his bathtub with a bottle of Popov vodka on the floor and a ginsu knife in his stomach.
Glen was trying to open himself up in an apparent attempt to reach into his own guts and pull the "alien snake" out of himself.
The agents applied some emergency first aid to Glen and had him ready to go for when the EMTs arrived.

Glen has been put in a mental clinic for his own safety and I will continue treating him.
The road will be long and I may not take anymore cases for the time being.
But I regularly check voice mail, email, and snail mail; don't hesitate to contact me if you need to.

[quote="skeptic"]

"No! No facilities of any kind. I can't. I'm sorry, doc."
He started to quiver.
"I need a plan. I'll be in touch." He stood from the recliner and started out of my office.
[quote]

It always astounds me, they want help and attention; and yet they never want the observation and facilities to proper do so.

Debunker wrote:It always astounds me, they want help and attention; and yet they never want the observation and facilities to proper do so.

No shit.
It's not something I've grown used to and I've been in this business for a long time.

Preaching to the choir on this one.

Debunker wrote:It always astounds me, they want help and attention; and yet they never want the observation and facilities to proper do so.

Well as the saying goes everything works fine on the PC when the computer repairman is standing over your shoulder (and as I've experienced it from both sides of the saying). The minute the repairman leaves the thing starts acting up. Perhaps the same goes for all things.

Since we institutionalized him, no aliens have abducted him.
The difficult part is keeping his thumbs out of his ass.
I almost prefer the alien hocus pocus bullshit over that.

And, sadly, he's not responding very well to treatment.
Peter wants to have a talk with him.
But presently Peter's in Prague.

Popeye eats spinach and is suddenly enabled to kick Bluto's ass.
Psychological crutches. Popeye doesn't need spinach in order to kick Bluto's ass.
Anyway. We were talking about Glen's situation, which has all of a sudden take a turn for the worse.

This is going to seem very off topic, but I promise it will get to my point. I will start with a posting by Vincent McBurney at it.toolbox.com

Spinach - how a data quality mistake created a myth and a cartoon character

That's right, spinach.

Since data quality blogging can be dry and technical I thought I would talk about one of my favourite data quality mistakes to spice things up. The myth that spinach is high in iron.

It comes from a simple data quality mistake - the recording of a number with the decimal point in the wrong place. It gave spinach the reputation of having 10 times more iron then any other green leafy vegetable.

Timeline
1870 - Dr. E von Wolf publishes a work that claims that spinach has ten times more iron then other green leafy vegatables.
1929 - the character Popeye the sailor appears in the daily comic strip Thimble Theatre throwing down spinach and getting big musles to save his goyl. (Funny enough, this only happened after people wrote asking how Popeye got so strong).
1933 - Popeye gets his own spinoff cartoon - Popeye the Sailor. Popeye was the "Joey" of his time only the spinoff turned out to be good.
1937 - a group of party pooping German scientists discover that spinach has just 1/10th the level of iron previously claimed.
1938 - Popeye goes into hiding amid claims that he was on steroids all along.

So for over sixty years spinach was considered a food that was extraordinarily high in iron with Popeye as the poster boy of the iron muscle advertising. It took a long time for news of the mistake to filter through to people as it had to travel through medical journals and there was a little distraction of World War II.

Spinach took another hit in the early 90s when research into nutrition refined what we know about iron absorption. To quote the Innvista website:

Although much lauded as a nutritional vegetable, spinach has a drawback in that, while containing high levels of iron and calcium, the rate of absorption is almost nil. The oxalic acid binds calcium into an insoluble salt (calcium oxalate), which cannot be absorbed by the body. The same applies to the iron, as it is bound, leaving only 2-5% of the seemingly plentiful supply actually available for absorption.

The spinach iron myth suffered two big falls. Cut to 1/10th and then further cut to 2-5% of that 1/10th. A pretty big data drop. I did a blog search of the spinach / iron combination and found a lot of entries from people taking spinach for the iron content who had never heard the correction to the myth. It is better to try and get iron from a range of foods rather then spinach along. Spinach has a lot of positive things going for it but iron is not one them.

Simple business intelligence derived from data will travel further and be remembered more easily than complex intelligence. The simple rule that spinach is high in iron has stayed with the majority of people. The more complex rules about spinach and oxalic acids and absorption is harder to spread and harder to remember. It shows the difficulty of fixing data quality problems, that fixing it in the source is relatively easy, that fixing all the people who have derived incorrect intelligence from the original data is bloody hard.

Now while his point is that getting the data right the first time is important, mine is that sometimes things people think are done (or created) for nonsensical reasons actually can have a logical explanation behind them when put into proper perspective. Perhaps there is something more to your very strange client than is apparent on the surface.

It's a clear case of Delusional Disorder.
However, Glen has suffered a couple seizures while under observation over the last three nights.
He mentioned that the aliens were severely displeased with his performance. Last night he was shuttering and muttering, "get out and kill Sebastian".
That's me. I'm Sebastian.
As a result, Glen is in transit to a more permanent facility. As this will lighten my workload significantly
and therefore my stress levels, I'm looking forward to these stomach pains subsiding.
I've been to specialists and all of them tell me the same thing: there's nothing wrong with me.
But that doesn't explain why I wake up in the middle night paralyzed by the pain.

Did you friend get to talk with him first?

Peter has interviewed Glen twice, and will likely visit him a couple more times in the new institution to wrap up this case. I'm barely able to move around at the moment. If you have any specific questions for Peter, I'll be sure he answers them and posts them.

skeptic wrote:Peter has interviewed Glen twice, and will likely visit him a couple more times in the new institution to wrap up this case. I'm barely able to move around at the moment. If you have any specific questions for Peter, I'll be sure he answers them and posts them.

I know you don't want to hear it, but there's an explanation why the doctors can't explain the illness with which you are stricken.

Ask Peter about it, or some of the folks around the Society.

You've had a run-in with someone or something that's taking the slow torturous route on you.

You can't ignore it for much longer, although it's impossible to say just how long things will take to develop.

Better to do it now before you're utterly debilitated and exhausted, however.

Yea, yea.
The Society hasn't been able to help me either.

I've been pain free for a while now. At least on the stomache ailment front. Must have been a temporary bug.
But I'm not really here to write about myself.
"Glen" has gone catatonic and been so for a full week now. His blood pressure, heart rate, and body temperature have reduced to dangerous hyperthermic levels.
A medical mystery at this point on all counts.

This can't end well.

Not for Glen at any rate.

It wasn't the appendix, they checked.
I was getting second, third, and fourth opinions.
Nobody knew what it was.
Sympathy pains is as good as any explanation, I suppose.

As about the patient himself, well, that's another story for another time.
Right now I'm on the move on an urgent case.
But I will get back to Glen soon.

As about herbs, I haven't found any herbal teas or drinks that I think taste good.

This story has been very strange from the start. I can't imagine the ending but it sounds like we might benefit from hearing it. Share as soon as you can.