journal features

day 15: mycaplasma

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

Tokyo, 2009.04.13

So it turns out that in all of the wide world, among countless species of bacteria, we humans have only found one lone species that doesn't have cell walls. I don't pretend to understand how it survives without cell walls, nor do I understand the ramifications for taxonomy or evolutionary theory.

I just want them out of my lungs.

The doctor, when I went back to the clinic today, was surprised to hear that I was still getting daily bouts of fever. He told me the name of the thing that's living in me, and explained that even once the fever was gone I could be suffering with the cough for a month. Not the news I wanted to hear, but then I realized -- I've already been coughing for two weeks, so maybe I'm halfway there! 8)

Now armed with more potent cough-suppressants and more potent antibiotics, I'm ready to have another go at licking this thing. Which, if I'm reading the Wikipedia entry correctly, would seem to be an 'atypical pneumonia' infection.

rand()m quote

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

—Michael Crichton