A Continuous Function

Recently, while convalescing, I slowly worked my way through watching series one of Quantum Leap on dvd.  I have fond memories of enjoying the programme as a child, and so wanted to revisit it.

To use Sam’s catchphrase at the end/beginning of every episode, oh boy.  What had I seen in it?  A show with, supposedly, ‘quantum physicists’ as the main characters - Sam and Al - yet it contained no physics whatsoever.  Sam was quite a bland character, whereas Al was a lecherous, cigar-smoking older man in hologram form.  The premise of the whole show is that an experiment went wrong and Sam became trapped in a journey of ‘quantum leaping’ - in every show, he is suddenly in someone else’s body and life.  When he has “put right what once went wrong” - e.g., making sure someone doesn’t get killed, or stopping a disastrous marriage - he leaps again, into the next person and their life, and, with Al’s help, has to figure out what to do to make the next leap.  Always hoping, of course, that “the next leap will be the leap home”.

The episodes have a fairly relaxed paced.  For example, you could pop out to make a cup of tea and some toast without missing too much.  Sometimes that’s what you want from a tv programme.  Cheesy storylines often prevail.  Yet for some reason there is something compelling about watching it - will he make the leap and will it be the leap home, into his own body and time?

Of course we already know the answers.  Yes, he will make the leap, and no, it won’t be back into his own life.  Why?  Because the series couldn’t carry on any other way!  And yet…  As time goes on and episodes roll by, these answers are known and we carry on watching not to find them out, but to find out what the next leap will be.  Who will he be, what will he have to do?  We start each journey from scratch with him, the viewer finding out everything as Sam does.

So maybe I can start to see what I had liked about the programme.  It has a good hook.  It’s gently paced so almost anyone could follow it.  It can be very cheesy and there is always some satisfying truth to find in cheesiness.  But was there something more?

Dr Sam Beckett is an adult - a fascinating subject for a child.  To children, adults are, on the whole, strange and foreign.  The main thing you know about them is that you yourself will be one one day, and so studying them is essential.

Sam is an innately good person.  No matter who he leaps into, he’s on the side of the good guys.  He defends those who need defending, he takes on those in the wrong.

And this is what it comes down to.

He always has a purpose.  As a child, I longed to have purposeful work to do, and I don’t believe I was particularly unusual in that.  Most of the games I played as a child were ones where I was pretending to be a grown-up doing a fairly run-of-the-mill job - e.g. library assistant, teacher, shopkeeper - although occasionally it would be something slightly more flamboyant, such as an actor or comedian.

But the sad truth is that I didn’t have much purposeful work to do as a child.  I wasn’t ’stretched’ at primary school, which was clearly a place to learn about social survival and not a lot else, and my parents lacked the necessary enthusiasm or knowledge to properly follow up my real-life interests or take them seriously.  I feel sorry for the me as a child, and wish the me now had been around then to help me out and show me just what possibilities there were for me.  But as a consolation prize,  it’s still pretty good that the me now is helping the me now to see what possibilities there still are for me.

So the good points about Quantum Leap are it is entertaining, sometimes truthful, and can make a person connect with the idea of having worthwhile work to do, even if they can’t do it in their present situation.  I think that makes the bad points fairly insignificant.  Not bad for a tv programme.

Apparent magnitude is a logarithmic scale to denote a star’s brightness.  The idea is a couple of thousand years old, from back in the days when fancy telescopes were yet to be engineered and all a budding astronomer had to observe with was their own eyesight.

The brightest stars were called first magnitude stars, then the ones half as bright as first magnitude stars were second magnitude stars, and so on.  So it’s actually a backward scale - the greater the number, the dimmer the star.

It’s ‘apparent’ magnitude because the stars are seen through the Earth’s atmosphere, which acts like a filter and removes some of the light, so it only describes how bright the star appears to an Earth-based observer.

More recently, a couple of hundred years ago, astronomers had new technology and therefore better ways of measuring the light from a star, and so the scale was fiddled with slightly.  However, the main gist of it is the same.

The dimmest stars observed have an apparent magnitude of 30+ while the brightest (Sirius) is -1.4  -  although really the brightest star observed is our own Sun, which comes in at a whopping -26.7 .

APOD (Astronomy Picture of the Day) has a real corker today.  It’s an image taken by the Cassini spacecraft of Saturn and some of its ring system and moons.  The planet has apparently undergone a change in some of its colours and the reason is not yet fully understood.

But see the big moon, Titan, above the rings?  That’s roughly 793 million miles or 1278 million kilometres away from Earth.  And we landed a probe there!

I will attend you when you’re very ill

Plump the pillows beneath your head

I’ll undertake your burial

Or my wife Mary will, if I’m already dead

From A Father To A Son, John Shuttleworth

During the summer (northern hemisphere) of 2008 I started to have a severe attack of a recurrent balance problem of eight years standing.  This time I was bedridden for weeks with vertigo, dizziness and constant nausea.  Not to mention the panic, anxiety, stress and depression caused by the vile and unrelenting symptoms.  It was certainly the worst illness I have experienced, and the worst period of my life so far.

I tried five different prescribed medications, which I tried in turn, and then some of them concurrently, but none of them made me better.  I was in a pit of despair for weeks on end, with no sign of recovering.  I saw the rest of my life as isolated, lying in bed, totally reliant on other people… only able to shuffle to the bathroom and back, listen to the radio and cry.  I could barely walk, with even the tiniest head and eye movements provoking worsening of the symptoms.  Either the world felt like it was moving around me, or else I felt that I was moving when I obviously wasn’t.  Walking a few steps felt like I was walking on the deck of a ship in the middle of a storm.  The smallest tip of my head downwards produced the feeling of standing on the edge of the world’s tallest building.  I couldn’t read, use any kind of screen, and found eating extremely difficult due to the persistent feeling of motion sickness.  I couldn’t wash due to all the movement required, and some days I couldn’t even clean my teeth.

In short, it was utterly wretched.

Because I requested it, a GP referred me to a specialist in a hospital roughly 70 km away.  The NHS waiting list was approximately 6 weeks.  Asking someone with a severe balance problem to wait for 6 weeks, then endure a car journey of this length and then find their way around an unfamiliar and busy building is somewhat akin to asking someone who has broken bones in their feet to jog to their local A&E department for treatment.

As the specialist also works privately, I asked for a private referral to see if I could jump the queue.  When the appointments finally came through the post, it turned out the NHS appointment was before the private one.  Such is life.  So the NHS it was.

After waiting through 6 weeks of torture, I made the also torturous journey to see the specialist, only to find… he was off sick with a bad back.  Instead, I was to see a junior member of his team.

I was told that there could be no firm diagnosis at this stage, the only answer was to ‘keeping moving about’, have ‘balance tests’ in the hospital at a later date, and he would re-check my MRI scan from two years ago to make sure there was nothing indicated on it.  I was given medication for what is elsewhere called ‘migraine associated vertigo’ and for the motion sickness.  A couple of weeks later I had the unpleasant balance tests, for which I had to stop taking the motion sickness medicine, and which found nothing wrong, and was then put on another waiting list for physiotherapy.

I have always had quite a lot of headaches, and earlier in 2008 had experienced my first visual disturbance of enlarging bright flashing lines, which was a bit scary, but I did not realise that this made me a migraine sufferer.  I had assumed that having migraines meant clutching at your head in the severest amount of throbbing pain, feeling sick and sensing an ‘aura’, whatever the heck that means.

The medications seemed to start slightly alleviating my symptoms and allowed me to begin down the road of weeks (so far 5) of repetitive Vestibular Rehabilitation exercises.  These are exercises involving eye movements, head movements, whole body movements, and various combinations of these.  It is a difficult, long, hard slog and it demands a happy, positive frame of mind.  I still have yet to see an actual NHS VR physiotherapist and have so far been giving myself the physio.  Thanks for your prompt and efficient service, NHS.  It is now three months since I went to see a GP about this particular attack.

In a rather cliched way, I now have even more appreciation of normal, everyday life and am determined to return back to it.  I want to take part in life, with as many of my senses intact and functioning properly as possible.  Being virtually trapped in bed and unable to move my head or eyes much for over six weeks tends to focus the mind on what is important.  I see other people fretting or fighting over inconsequential things, and I don’t know why they do it anymore.  If you are in reasonably good health and have people to love who love you, then everything else is froth.  If I fully recover, I will probably continue to have bouts of this illness in the future.  That makes it even more important to enjoy life between the bouts.

I hope you never get this illness.  Here is one woman’s story.   Here is another.  And a famous one.  Apparently 40% of the UK population has suffered from a balance disorder by the time they are 60 years old.

What are the chances.  Quite high it seems.  We have a finite amount of time alive and something like this or worse could hit you at any time.  But don’t use this as a reason to worry - it’s a reason to enjoy everything, have a laugh and make the most of being healthy when you are.