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To Your Good Health
By Paul G. Donohue, M.D.
Finger Nodules
a Sign of Arthritis
DEAR DR. DONOHUE:
I am 56 and have just been told I have arthritis.
Aren’t I slightly young for arthritis? I saw
the doctor because of tiny bumps that popped out
on the top knuckles of some of my fingers and
because my fingers had become stiff. Only my
hands are affected. Everything else is fine.
I’m having trouble accepting this as
arthritis. What do you think? -- R.K.
ANSWER: I go along
with the arthritis diagnosis -- osteoarthritis,
the most common kind of arthritis. It used to be
called "wear and tear" arthritis, but
it doesn’t occur simply from wear and tear.
We know many factors that are involved, and there
are many factors we don’t know. Aging,
genes, previous injury and hormones are some of
the known factors.
You’re not
too old for osteoarthritis. It’s infrequent
before age 40, and it’s most often diagnosed
in the late to mid 50s. You’re at the right
age.
What happens is
that the cartilage that covers the ends of two
bones splits, fissures and crumbles. The result
is a stiff, painful joint. Pain increases with
activity. Osteoarthritis most often affects the
hands, fingers, knees, hips and the spine in the
lower back and neck.
One form of
osteoarthritis is more common in women, and it
appears you have that kind. It happens in the
fingers and hands. Small bumps appear on the
knuckles closest to the fingertips. They’re
called Heberden’s nodes and are indicators
of osteoarthritis. The bumps are bony growths.
For most,
osteoarthritis is a slowly progressive illness.
Your kind might remain limited to the hands and
fingers.
OLD GORGON
GRAHAM
More
Letters from
a
Self-Made
Merchant
to
His Son
by
George Horace Lorimer
First Published 1903
From John Graham,
head of the house of Graham & Company, pork
packers, in Chicago, familiarly known on
‘Change as Old Gorgon Graham, to his son,
Pierrepont, at the Union Stock Yards.
No. 7
From John Graham,
at the Union Stock Yards, Chicago, to his son,
Pierrepont, at Yemassee-on-the-Tallahassee. The
young man is now in the third quarter of the
honeymoon, and the old man has decided that it is
time to bring him fluttering down to earth.
VII
CHICAGO, January 17, 189-.
Dear Pierrepont: After you
and Helen had gone off looking as if you’d
just bought seats on ‘Change and been
baptized into full membership with all the sample
bags of grain that were handy, I found your new
mother-in-law out in the dining-room, and,
judging by the plates around her, she was
carrying in stock a full line of staple and fancy
groceries and delicatessen. When I struck her she
was crying into her third plate of ice cream, and
complaining bitterly to the butler because the
mould had been opened so carelessly that some
salt had leaked into it.
Of course, I started right
in to be sociable and to cheer her up, but I
reckon I got my society talk a little
mixed--I’d been one of the pall-bearers at
Josh Burton’s funeral the day before--and I
told her that she must bear up and eat a little
something to keep up her strength, and to
remember that our loss was Helen’s gain.
Now, I don’t take
much stock in all this mother-in-law talk, though
I’ve usually found that where there’s
so much smoke there’s a little fire; but
I’m bound to say that Helen’s ma came
back at me with a sniff and a snort, and made me
feel sorry that I’d intruded on her sacred
grief. Told me that a girl of Helen’s beauty
and advantages had naturally been very, very
popular, and greatly sought after. Said that she
had been received in the very best society in
Europe, and might have worn strawberry leaves if
she’d chosen, meaning, I’ve since found
out, that she might have married a duke.
I tried to soothe the old
lady, and to restore good feeling by allowing
that wearing leaves had sort of gone out of
fashion with the Garden of Eden, and that I liked
Helen better in white satin, but everything I
said just seemed to enrage her the more. Told me
plainly that she’d thought, and hinted that
she’d hoped, right up to last month, that
Helen was going to marry a French nobleman, the
Count de Somethingerino or other, who was crazy
about her. So I answered that we’d both had
a narrow escape, because I’d been afraid for
a year that I might wake up any morning and find
myself the father-in-law of a Crystal Slipper
chorus-girl. Then, as it looked as if the old
lady was going to bust a corset-string in getting
out her answer, I modestly slipped away, leaving
her leaking brine and acid like a dill pickle
that’s had a bite taken out of it.
Good mothers often make
bad mothers-in-law, because they usually believe
that, no matter whom their daughters marry, they
could have gone farther and fared better. But it
struck me that Helen’s ma has one of those
retentive memories and weak mouths--the kind of
memory that never loses anything it should
forget, and the kind of mouth that can’t
retain a lot of language which it shouldn’t
lose.
Of course, you want to
honor your mother-in-law, that your days may be
long in the land; but you want to honor this one
from a distance, for the same reason. Otherwise,
I’m afraid you’ll hear a good deal
about that French count, and how hard it is for
Helen to have to associate with a lot of
mavericks from the Stock Yards, when she might be
running with blooded stock on the other side. And
if you glance up from your morning paper and sort
of wonder out loud whether Corbett or Fitzsimmons
is the better man, mother-in-law will glare at
you over the top of her specs and ask if you
don’t think it’s invidious to make any
comparisons if they’re both striving, to
lead earnest, Christian lives. Then, when you
come home at night, you’ll be apt to find
your wife sniffing your breath when you kiss her,
to see if she can catch that queer, heavy smell
which mother has noticed on it; or looking at you
slant-eyed when she feels some letters in your
coat, and wondering if what mother says is true,
and if men who’ve once taken chorus-girls to
supper never really recover from the habit.
On general principles,
it’s pretty good doctrine that two’s a
company and three’s a crowd, except when the
third is a cook. But I should say that when the
third is Helen’s ma it’s a mob, out
looking for a chance to make rough-house. A good
cook, a good wife and a good job will make a good
home anywhere; but you add your mother-in-law,
and the first thing you know you’ve got two
homes, and one of them is being run on alimony.
You want to remember that,
beside your mother-in-law, you’re a
comparative stranger to your wife. After you and
Helen have lived together for a year, you ought
to be so well acquainted that she’ll begin
to believe that you know almost as much as mamma;
but during the first few months of married life
there are apt to be a good many tie votes on
important matters, and if mother-in-law is on the
premises she is generally going to break the tie
by casting the deciding vote with daughter.
When a young wife starts
housekeeping with her mother too handy, it’s
like running a business with a new manager and
keeping the old one along to see how things go.
It’s not in human nature that the old
manager, even with the best disposition in the
world, shouldn’t knock the new one a little,
and you’re Helen’s new manager.
As long as fond fathers
slave and ambitious mothers sacrifice so that
foolish daughters can hide the petticoats of
poverty under a silk dress and crowd the doings
of cheap society into the space in their heads
which ought to be filled with plain, useful
knowledge, a lot of girls are going to grow up
with the idea that getting married means getting
rid of care and responsibility instead of
assuming it. A fellow can’t play the game
with a girl of this sort, because she can’t
play fair.
It’s been my
experience that both men and women can fool each
other before marriage, and that women can keep
right along fooling men after marriage, but that
as soon as the average man gets married he gets
found out. But even if she’s married to a
fellow who’s so mean that he’d take the
pennies off a dead man’s eyes (not because
he needed the money, but because he hadn’t
the change handy for a two-cent stamp),
she’ll never own up to the worst about him,
even to herself, till she gets him into a divorce
court.
I simply mention these
things in a general way. Helen has shown signs of
loving you, and you’ve never shown any
symptoms of hating yourself, so I’m not
really afraid that you’re going to get the
worst of it now. So far as I can see, your
mother-in-law is the only real trouble that you
have married. But don’t you make the mistake
of criticizing her to Helen or of quarrelling
with her. I’ll attend to both for the
family. You simply want to dodge when she leads
with the right, take your full ten seconds on the
floor, and come back with your left cheek turned
toward her, though, of course, you’ll yank
it back out of reach just before she lands on it.
There’s nothing like using a little
diplomacy in this world, and, so far as women are
concerned, diplomacy is knowing when to stay
away.
What you want to do is to
keep mother-in-law from mixing up in your family
affairs until after she gets used to the disgrace
of having a pork-packer for a son-in-law, and
Helen gets used to pulling in harness with you.
Then mother’ll mellow up into a nice old
lady who’ll brag about you to the neighbors.
But until she gets to this point, you’ve got
to let her hurt your feelings without hurting
hers.
Whenever I hear of a
fellow’s being found out by his wife, it
always brings to mind the case of Dick Hodgkins,
whom I knew when I was a young fellow, back in
Missouri. Dickie was one of a family of twelve,
who all ran a little small any way you sized them
up, and he was the runt. Like most of these
little fellows, when he came to match up for
double harness, he picked out a six-footer, Kate
Miggs. Used to call her Honeybunch, I remember,
and she called him Doodums.
Honeybunch was a good
girl, but she was as strong as a six-mule team,
and a cautious man just naturally shied away from
her. Was a pretty free stepper in the mazes of
the dance, and once, when she was balancing
partners with Doodums, she kicked out sort of
playful to give him a love pat and fetched him a
clip with her tootsey that gave him water on the
kneepan. It ought to have been a warning to
Doodums, but he was plumb infatuated, and went
around pretending that he’d been kicked by a
horse. After that the boys used to make
Honeybunch mighty mad when she came out of dark
corners with Doodums, by feeling him to see if
any of his ribs were broken. Still he didn’t
take the hint, and in the end she led him to the
altar.
We started in to give them
a lovely shivaree after the wedding, beginning
with a sort of yell which had been invented by
the only fellow in town who had been to college.
As I remember, it ran
something like this:
Hun, hun, hunch!
Bun, bun, bunch!
Funny, funny!
Honey, honey!
Funny Honeybunch!
But as soon as we got this
off, and before we could begin on the dishpan
chorus, Honeybunch came at us with a couple of
bed-slats and cleaned us all out.
Before he had married,
Doodums had been one of half a dozen half-baked
sports who drank cheap whisky and played
expensive poker at the Dutchman’s; and after
he’d held Honeybunch in his lap evenings for
a month, he reckoned one night that he’d
drop down street and look in on the boys.
Honeybunch reckoned not, and he didn’t press
the matter, but after they’d gone to bed and
she’d dropped off to sleep, he slipped into
his clothes and down the waterspout to the
ground. He sat up till two o’clock at the
Dutchman’s, and naturally, the next morning
he had a breath like a gasoline runabout, and
looked as if he’d been attending a
successful coon-hunt in the capacity of the coon.
Honeybunch smelt his
breath and then she smelt a mouse, but she
wasn’t much of a talker and she didn’t
ask any questions--of him. But she had brother
Jim make some inquiries, and a few days later,
when Doodums complained of feeling all petered
out and wanted to go to bed early, she was ready
for him.
Honeybunch wasn’t any
invalid, and when she went to bed it was to
sleep, so she rigged up a simple little device in
the way of an alarm and dropped off peacefully,
while Doodums pretended to.
When she began to snore in
her upper register and to hit the high C, he
judged the coast was clear, and leaped lightly
out of bed. Even before he’d struck the
floor he knew there’d been a horrible
mistake somewhere, for he felt a tug as if
he’d hooked a hundred-pound catfish. There
was an awful ripping and tearing sound, something
fetched loose, and his wife was sitting up in bed
blinking at him in the moonlight. It seemed that
just before she went to sleep she’d pinned
her nightgown to his with a safety pin, which
wasn’t such a bad idea for a simple,
trusting, little village maiden.
"Was you wantin’
anything, Duckie Doodums?" she asked in a
voice like the running of sap in maple-sugar
time.
"N-n-nothin’ but
a drink of water, Honeybunch sweetness," he
stammered back.
"You’re sure you
ain’t mistook in your thirst and that it
ain’t a suddint cravin’ for licker, and
that you ain’t sort of p’intin’
down the waterspout for the Dutchman’s,
Duckie Doodums?"
"Shorely not,
Honeybunch darlin’," he finally fetched
up, though he was hardly breathing.
"Because youa ma told
me that you was given to somnambulasticatin’
in your sleep, and that I must keep you tied up
nights or you’d wake up some mornin’ at
the foot of a waterspout with your head bust open
and a lot of good licker spilt out on the
grass."
"Don’t you love
your Doodums anymore?" was all Dickie could
find to say to this; but Honeybunch had too much
on her mind to stop and swap valentines just
then.
"You wouldn’t
deceive your Honeybunch, would you, Duckie
Doodums?"
"I shorely would
not."
"Well, don’t you
do it, Duckie Doodums, because it would break my
heart; and if you should break my heart I’d
just naturally bust your head. Are you
listenin’, Doodums?"
Doodums was listening.
"Then you come back
to bed and stay there."
Doodums never called his
wife Honeybunch after that. Generally it was
Kate, and sometimes it was Kitty, and when she
wasn’t around it was usually Kitty-cat. But
he minded better than anything I ever met on less
than four legs.
Your affectionate father,
JOHN GRAHAM.
P.S.--You might tear up
this letter.
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