by Unknown
Submitted by
DR. AND DR. JACK SLAY, JR., PH.D., M.D.
Cross References
Bloodflower’s Melancholia; Diseasemaker’s Croup; Figurative Synesthesia
MOTILE SNARCOMA
Motile Agglutinate Snarcoma of the Subperineal Pondus
Countries of Origin
Oncologist have identified this uncommon fibroid tumor in several of the industrial nations. The etiology of snarcoma remains unknown, although anecdotal evidence gathered by the American Congress For Cancer links the malignancy with compulsive eating of spent paper matches.
First Known Case
In 1921, Mr. Lumpur Kos, a flax dyer of Khulna, Bengal, developed an aggressive snarcoma which is now a treasured specimen in the permanent collection of the Provisional Pathology Museum of the Audrey Nickers Memorial Teaching Hospital of Bombay.
Symptoms
Prior to ultrasound readings and exploratory biopsy, the diagnosis of snarcoma hinges on somatic indicators such as shortness of breath, flocculence of the urine, running sores of the nasal procus, bleeding from the ears, prolonged epiductoid olomony of the distal grottum, spitting, fainting spells, intrafusile vomiting, and adhesive bed sores.
Treatment
Pondal snarcoma can be surgically excised with great success, but is often treated chemically as a second choice, for no better reason than that the attending surgeon “couldn’t find the pondus.” This situation is inexcusable.
Surgical Procedure
After a standard transcolonic approach to the postpubic oversum has been established, the first and third inguinal veins and the fontiform lymphatic spinkos can be distended ventrally using a pair of Vega’s lateral forceps, thus exposing the purple infoldings of the pylophancus or organ of Gorki.
Dissect the porensic artery, slice it diagonally, and insert 30 centimeters of sterile latex shunt. Apply your Forke’s scalpel to the juncture of the pylophancus with the yellowish lobar tabuclomen. Expect copious drainage of Cowlick’s fluid into the surgical field. Have plenty of suction tubes on hand. They tend to clog. Slocotomize and displace the tabuclomen by a succession of deepening incisions. Now you can utilize your perforated elbow retractor (1) to draw aside the main prutenoid mass of the pylophancus. This procedure should provide access to the pondus and its snarcomal extrusion.
Grip the snarcoma firmly in the jaws of a pair of Poker’s tongs. Use Benway shears to snip the tumor free from the pondus. Drop the extracted snarcoma into a steel basin of saline.
Now here’s where the procedure can get a bit hectic. You may withdraw your tongs and find only a scrap of the snarcoma in its jaws. Pondal snarcomas are known to sacrifice pieces of themselves in order to avoid capture.
And that’s the least of their little tricks. Your snarcoma may turn out to be a motile snarcoma. A motile snarcoma exhibits mobility under stress. In layman’s terms, it can crawl. In fact, it will stretch out its fibrous mycelia like tentacles and drag itself around your patient’s guts like a beached baby octopus on Benzedrine.
It may suddenly hide behind a kidney. If you flush it out again, it may head for the small intestines. At all costs keep it away from the intestines. Hunting it down in there makes a terrible mess.
As a last resort, it may even fling itself from the abdominal cavity. I have personally retrieved two snarcomas from the floors of operating theaters. (One of them went safely from a butterfly net into a preserving jar. My nurse stepped on the other. An accident, or so she said.)
In any case, a snarcoma can’t survive in the wild. Just keep it away from any patients with open body cavities who might be nearby, and it will die a natural death.
When the snarcoma is under control, examine the surgical field for corruption and use Plook’s tweezers to extract any glybolic granulation. Disclevature or oblation of the hemophragmic orphule typically indicates opportunistic inspusal of the peripheral mesencrum by infragort C-cells. Be aware that mumblision of the cocapsular endosucrament can eventuate in slethonular blucoposis.
Rinse and close. Don’t forget to remove the arterial shunt.
And always remember to take off your gloves before eating.
Submitted by
DR. STEPAN CHAPMAN, HOLDER OF THE OSSTRICH CHAIR OF POLYSURGICAL PRACTICES, INSTITUTE FOR FURTHER STUDY
Endnote
(1) Popular Surgical Instruments: Classics and Collectibles, Wendell Ortt, Green Dog Hobby Press, Boojum Florida USA, 1996.
Cross References
Ballistic Organs Syndrome; Buboparazygosia; Diseasemaker’s Croup; Hsing’s Spontaneous Self-Flaying Sarcoma
NOUMENAL FLUKE
Verbiform Vermistosomiasis
Country of Origin
Jutigny, France
First Known Case
Dr. Ephraim Rackstrow, 1875
Symptoms
Logorrhoeaiac episodes, occasional drowsiness, aphasia (rare); otherwise no symptoms
History
It is one of the great ironies in the annals of medical history that this disease was discovered not by the great diagnostician and pioneer of early neuropathological research, Dr. Ephraim Rackstrow, but by his wife Toussia; and it is one of the more humbling tragedies as well, in that he was the first known victim. One of Charcot’s most accomplished students, Rackstrow participated in several extraordinary research projects in the first decade of his medical career, assisting such other luminaries as Dr. Julian Maltrait and Dr. Austin Blaney. In 1875, using his limited resources, he established a small lab in the provincial town of Jutigny, where he assembled a small collection of carefully selected mental patients. He brought them together in order to study the particularities of neurological diseases affecting language, and especially the phenomenon or disorder known as Logorrhoea: incessant, uncontrollable, garbled speech.
Subsequent inquiries into his case have indicated that it was in the spring of that year, shortly after his research began in earnest, that he contracted the fluke. His wife, Toussia, by all accounts a woman of high acuity, and whose séances had been a minor sensation in Paris the previous season, recorded in her diary a series of exceedingly subtle variations and changes in her husband through the month of June. By mid-July, she was increasingly convinced that her husband was “occupied by an incorporeal intelligence,” and further, that “this spirit, or daemon, intends to use me to propagate itself.”
In an entry dated the following morning, Toussia relates an unaccountably prescient dream in which she, paralyzed, gazed at “the one lying next to me” and perceived that “the worm of his mind is always awake.” Two days later, on July 21, finding it too hot to work, Dr. Rackstrow apparently returned early to his home and brought a chair out into the shade of one of the large trees behind the house. He was reading a newspaper in this chair when Toussia crept up behind him and struck him a single glancing blow to the head with an axe she had specially sharpened for this purpose, shearing off most of her husband’s right parietal bone and exposing the brain. Shortly thereafter, having brought her stricken husband into the house, Toussia discovered through direct inspection the now widely-recognized signs of the noumenal fluke.
It has since been learned that the fluke is a unique logogenetic parasite which reproduces via Logorrhoea; the logorrhoeaiac’s stream of often nonsensical syllables irritates the nerves of the inner ear in such a way as to cause associated brain tissues to produce certain proteins, which coagulate in the bloodstream into a single egg. The egg will lodge in one of the major blood vessels in the brain for up to six days until achieving the larval stage, whereupon it will move to the fissure separating the two cerebral hemispheres. Over the next six to eight weeks, the larva will develop into a mature fluke of up to four inches in length, being slightly less than a pencil in diameter, composed of proglottid rings with a holdfast organ at one end. The fluke filters the blood for nutrients but does not absorb iron, hence anemia is not indicated; and it also manufactures neurotransmitters that induce logorrhoeiac episodes in its victim, for
the purposes of reproduction.
When its reproductive stage is complete, usually in seven to 10 days, the fluke’s proglottids separate from each other and lodge in different blood vessels throughout the brain, developing independently into smaller, sterile flukes of one inch or less in length. Some researchers believe that, even at this stage, the fluke is still a single organism in serial form, communicating through proteins distributed in the blood. The lesser flukes will remain in place until the natural death of the host. Their presence seems to affect the host’s mental capacities, often promoting an increased facility with abstract thought. This was first noted in Rackstrow’s case; he survived for 10 days after Toussia’s attack, during which time he was confined to bed, his head held off the pillow in a makeshift wooden frame. Toussia never left his side, in an apparent desperation of remorse, and, by her account, Rackstrow quickly lapsed into a delirium, during which he spoke incessantly. The fluke, by this time, had passed its reproductive stage, as Toussia notes seeing various of the smaller, sterile flukes through the walls of the blood vessels: “I counted at least seven; they were diaphanous, nerveless, unmuscled tubes, that waved in his blood’s current like linen sleeves, and, like ghosts, they tapered away into invisibly diaphanous membranes.”
Toussia not only kept watch over her husband, but she recorded everything he said, which, it would appear, amounted to a long and highly-organized discourse presenting a new model of time. While this work was supposedly burned with the rest of Rackstrow’s papers after his death, Toussia having been confined to an institution after an anguished attempt on her own life, rumors persist that it is still being kept in the French Archive, and that several prominent French intellectuals have been secretly permitted to read selected passages.
Cures
25 to 30 mg of camphorated parziquantyl, administered orally.
Submitted by
DR. MICHAEL CISCO, C.C., B.P.O.E., S.V.S.E.
Cross References
Buscard’s Murrain; Diseasemaker’s Croup; Jumping Monkworm; Mongolian Death Worm Infestation; Postal Carriers’ Brain Fluke
OUROBOREAN LORDOSIS
Country of Origin
United States
First Known Case
This dread disease was first diagnosed in Mississippi in 1900. Harmon Creets, better known in his professional life as part of The Helen Oberstella Sideshow and Traveling Menagerie of Afflicted Personages as The Human Wheel, was the first known patient diagnosed with Ouroborean Lordosis.
Symptoms
Congenital and continuous radical lordosis; a backward curvature of the spine that not only affects the lower back, as in typical lordosis, but the entire length of the spinal column, including the neck. Throughout the duration of his life, the patient is slowly bent backward into a circle until his face is directly adjacent to the posterior. Hence the name “ouroborean,” as in Ouroboros, the mythical worm that swallows its own tail.
History
By the time Harmon Creets was a young man of 25, his body had formed a perfect circle. He was discovered in an institution that catered to those with formative diseases of the spinal column by the famous entertainer Miss Helen Oberstella, and given a place of prominence in her traveling show. In his act, Creets would grab his ankles and roll like a wheel down a portable set of steps and then tip and “gyrate in a lively manner like a spun penny coming to rest” (as quoted in The Lord’s Botches: The Life and Acts of Helen Oberstella). Creets married the beautiful giantess Madame Large and together they performed an act in which she used him like a hoola hoop. Eventually, the condition worsened and Creets succumbed to his affliction by being suffocated against his own hindquarters.
Cures
Currently this disease is treated with corrective surgery, which must be begun in the first year of life. In Harmon Creets’ day, there was no known cure. Creets, himself a man of singular wit, was once quoted as saying that if one suffered from this disease, it was “only a matter of time before you will simply kiss your ass goodbye.”
Submitted by
DR. JEFFREY FORD
Cross References
Diseasemaker’s Croup; Female Hyper-Orgasmic Epilepsy
PATHOLOGICAL INSTRUMENTATION DISORDER
The Man With Two Watches Problem
Country of Origin
Tomorrow
First Known Case
The first diagnosis of Pathological Instrumentation Disorder (PID) will be made on May 12, 2006, in Toronto, Ontario. The patient, a Mr. Gary Warren, presented symptoms typical of extreme mental distress—elevated pulse, perspiration, acute abdomen, dilated pupils—at the Queen St. Mental Health Center, where a preliminary diagnosis of acute stress disorder was made. The patient’s serotonin levels were normalized through quick trepanning, and he was entered into a course of group therapy sessions in the newly installed microgravity chill-rooms. Mr. Warren’s symptoms worsened, however, despite daily trepannings. The only visible relief came when in close proximity to diagnostic equipment (EEG, e-meters, MRI/CT Scan apparatus). Even a wall-clock, a PDA, or a thermometer seemed to help.
Mr. Warren was moved to the Bertelsmann-AOL-Netscape-Time-Warner clinic and into the care of Dr. Jojo Fillipo, a specialist in media disorders. Under clinical observation, Mr. Warren was presented with a variety of diagnostic tools, beginning with those found on his person at his admission:
• A Palm Computing “Wrister” wristwatch
• A small, homemade RFI detector
• An integrated wireless appliance of baroque appearance
• A multifunction handheld medical unit, apparently stolen from a Mexican clinic (sphygnomometer, EEG, blood-sugar/HIV/Hep G/Pregnancy diagnostic)
• An elderly, analog light-meter
• A DNA-signature encoder
• A distributed location/presence device marketed to children for the purposes of playing text-based role-playing games
• An elderly “turnip”-style pocket watch—not working
• A “commando”-style knife with an integrated compass and thermometer
Devices were provided to the patient singly and in combination. Alone or in small groups, the devices produced a marked lessening in the patient’s symptoms—in fact, the mere presence of devices intended to measure Mr. Warren’s symptoms appeared to alleviate them. In larger groups, or in certain combinations (the wireless appliance and the location/presence-device, for example), symptoms were exacerbated to alarming levels. At one point, Mr. Warren lost consciousness for a period of three days, during which doctors defibrillated his heart twice due to unusual cardiac events.
Dr. Fillipo’s research failed to uncover any symptoms to distinguish Mr. Warren’s disorder from traditional cases of hysterical anxiety, except that Mr. Warren failed to respond to any traditional treatment. Dr. Fillipo worked with a group of BANT engineers to substitute replicas for Mr. Warren’s devices, said facsimiles under Dr. Fillipo’s remote control, and when Mr. Warren returned to consciousness, he was once again provided with his apparatus, while Dr. Fillipo undertook a series of controlled experiments, with alarming results.
The first of these was Mr. Warren’s pregnancy. Dr. Fillipo introduced a series of false positive test results for pregnancy into Mr. Warren’s medical unit. Over the course of three months, Mr. Warren developed secondary sexual characteristics (breasts) and most amazingly, primary characteristics—a rudimentary uterus with burgeoning fetus was positively identified first by Ultrasound and then by physical internal examination. Dr. Fillipo then provided Mr. Warren with a package of “Urinoracle”-brand home pregnancy tests, which had been doctored to provide uniformly negative results. Within one week, Mr. Warren’s pregnancy had subsided, and the fetus and uterus had been reabsorbed into his digestive tract. Mr. Warren’s other symptoms worsened during this period—he compulsively re-tested his own urine on the provided strips and, with each conflicting result, his physical distress worsened, culminating with another, longer coma, lasting nine days.
Continued experiments with conflicting and false data produced similar results. Mr. Warren’s body temperature could be physically altered by means of changing the thermometer’s reading; his blood could be made to manufacture and then banish HIV and Hepatitis G virii, and his melatonin levels and REM cycles responded similarly to changes in his timepieces.
Dr. Fillipo’s experimentation came to an abrupt end when she caused Mr. Warren’s location/presence device to produce a reading to the effect that he was actually at one of his bookmarked locations—apparently a tidal island off the coast of Newfoundland, submerged at the time. Mr. Warren’s body was recovered from St. John’s harbor some weeks later, badly decomposed. Cause of death was determined to be drowning.
Diagnosis and Treatment
PID will be extremely rare in the immediate future—only eight known cases to date—and has thus far only been present in technologically developed regions, primarily North America, Europe, and parts of Asia. As noted, it is symptomatically nearly indistinguishable from other forms of hysterical anxiety; however, it does not respond to trepanning and similar accepted therapies. Positive diagnosis can be made through the use of a doctored thermometer or similar device—see the Fillipo-Chinto questionnaire for a more systematic approach to diagnosis.