Catching Up

I am about to post my 2996 contribution--my remembrance of Frank Mancini--but I want to this catching up post first so that Frank’s memorial remains at the top of the page for at least the next twenty-four hours. I had hoped to get it ready to post by Saturday morning so it could ride the top for the entire weekend while I was watching Grandma again but I didn’t manage it. Due in large part to that migraine I was fending off for most of last week.

It never did become full-blown but it was miserable enough. None of my tried and true methods for banishing it worked and it did not dissipate completely until several hours after I took my B-complex vitamin after realizing that I had not taken one for at least ten days. I had taken them with me to grandma’s but had forgotten to take them.

This is the third time in the last six months that inadvertently forgetting to take them has resulted in a return of a plethora of miseries which had plagued me for decades--some like the insomnia and anxiety and mood swings since at least grade-school, the migraines since my twenties and the high blood-pressure since the late nineties--all of which had been resistant to standard prescription drug remedies.

I’ve been taking them regularly for nearly a year now, ever since my mother gave me what was left of my dad’s stash after he died last fall. It wasn’t until the week, early this summer, which I wrote about in my posts called A Series of Importunate Events I-IV that I made the connection between the B vitamins and the diminishing of those plagues.

My perception of that connection has just been reinforced. I had been blaming my seeming disintegration to the confluence of the three anniversaries of Katrina, 9/11 and my dad’s death last September. It made perfect sense to me that the anxieties stirred by those anniversaries would leave me feeling more than a bit undone.

But the fact that I regained an equilibrium within twenty-four hours after resuming the daily dose of B-complex makes me wonder if it was a B vitamin deficiency all along. Wouldn’t that be ironic? And if it is so, what would my life have been like if that had been discovered and remedied in my childhood? How would my life have been different? More importantly: Who would I be today? These kinds of questions intrigue me to no end. Which is probably why I am drawn to fiction writing as a question like that would take a novel to explore in depth.