The Art Neuro Weblog

Freaky Story 1
The guy I'm sharing house with is an audiologist. He comes home with stories of deformed kids who need to have their hearing checked out in the public hospital. Sometimes, he finds they have a lot more wrong with them than hearing. 'Pineapplehead' was such a case. 'Pineapplehead' had some strange disorder of bone growth which meant his skull was growing more bone tissue than was necessary. There was a bone growth on the top of his head that resembled a pineapple. The doctors in Samoa couldn't diagnose what his condition was so he was sent to Sydney, arriving with a medical carte stating his case to be 'Pineapplehead'. The doctors in Sydney found out that at the rate his bone growth was taking place, his eye-sockets would close and pop the eye-balls out. The vestibule was not functioning, so the poor baby was in constant vertigo. needless to say, he was deaf as they come.
"But I guess if vertigo and nothing else is all you ever know through your senses, then you must get used to it," my housemate says.

A few weeks ago, my housemate saw a baby whose shrunken head was exactly like an orange, with dimpled skin. The baby was born that way. He too was deaf and blind. There seems to be a bit of a fruit theme developing here, but my housemate says, "When you see these kids, you either laugh or you cry; and really I can only laugh because crying is too hard to do in a workplace."
Surely he sees some normal kids I asked. He told me of the mother who brought in her son who she claimed had hearing problems.
"He just doesn't clean up his room when I tell him to"
"Really?"
"It's obvious he can't hear me"
So he checks the kid who turns out to have absolutlely no problems with his hearing.
"Are you sure?"
"Completely."
"There must be something wrong, because he just doesn't seem to hear a word I say."
The kid pipes up and says "That's because I hate you mum. I can hear every word you say. I'm not deaf. I just hate you."
"No, check him agian... I'm sure he's deaf..."

Freaky Story 2
My other housemate works in Mental Health. The latest person he tells me about is somebody who was made King of Australia in 1972 when the late Queen HRH Elizabeth II abdicated in favour of this fellow who is now King George VII. And if the folks at Mental Health Centre won't listen to what he says, they will all be tried and shot for treason. Needless to say this person was tackled by a bunch of guys in white coats. The guy seems to have been the victim of a psychosis induced by ecstasy tabs. As more people do ecstasy tabs, the more he sees the psychosis created by the drug. My housemate thinks in the future, the streets will be filled with nutcases who have done too much ecky. They are nothing like the casualties of acid from the 70s and early 80s; they are nothing like guys with advanced addiction to THC; they are genuinely psychotic.
"Craziness is on the rise," he says. "The future wil be psychotic."

Like my other housemate, his case folder just keeps expanding. There are positions in the mental health system, that cannot be filled because it doesn't pay enough and nobody wants to do that work. When you add it all up, the future of our society is looking far more psychotic than we have imagined to date, with nobody to look after them.

Freaky Story 3
My good friend Casey has a relative who is a Psychiatrist. He was given a case by another shrink who was retiring from the business. The case involved a teenage Chinese girl. In the first session, he went through the case history and found an overachiever who had given up on academia through her inability to beat everybody at a selective school. Her traditional and conservative parents are worried sick about her, but what is there to say now that she is out of school? Now she has a boyfriend with whom she lives, and an oddly vague manner about her. The Psychiatrist thought she was a sweet girl who probably needed some minor counselling until he noticed some burn marks on her wrist. He asked her what the marks were. She said:

"I got them at the brothel where I work as a masseuse. I wasn't getting any customers even when all the other grils were busy getting customers. I got bored so I wanted to go home, but the madam wouldn't let me. So I decided to burn myself."
The brothel thing came out of the blue, as her case notes had nothing written down on the matter. The Psychiatrist asked how her boyfriend saw her work. She said, "he works in a gay brothel. In fact I'm depressed because he gets more customers than I do. I'm thinking of going into full service soon".
Well, that was something her praents had no idea about. As the Psychiatrist told it, she was borderline personality with a strong , competitive desire to be liked; hence her competitiveness with her boyfriend who was getting more customers.

I'm only writing this down because if I don't write it on my blog, I'll forget these freaky stories. As you can see, they have absolutely nothing to do with Space Exploration, but they freak me out all the same.

- Art Neuro