Homocysteinephobia
The editors, staff writers and sales personnel of this web log are always being admonished by the boss to take better care of their health. This sometimes leads to conflicts when employees are discovered smoking behind the dumpster out back, or when the C.O. finds messages taped to the vending machine that say “Please please make the bottom row all Famous Amos cookies.”
Always one to lead by example, The Cheerful Oncologist has strived to adopt a healthy diet (albeit punctuated by occasional lapses of judgment), along with regular exercise and at least an attempt to retire before the nightly showing of The Sopranos on HBO. In fact, he has developed quite a knack for researching ways to gain an advantage over his neighbor when it comes to avoiding heart attacks, cancer, or…or…or…now what was that third calamity? Oh well, it will come to me later.
Yessir, from green tea to white tea to red wine to peachy salmon par excellence, the boss here has gone out of his way to fortify and sanctify his body against dry rot, putrefaction and termites. Why, he even had his homocysteine level checked and, finding it floating above the upper limit of normal, started himself on high doses of a folic acid supplement in an attempt to lower this level and prevent the forest fire of a myocardial conflagration.
“You know we don’t have definitive proof that taking folic acid reduces the incidence of an M.I.,” said his long-suffering personal physician, a man undoubtedly destined for sainthood for his years of giving advice to this neurotic Gordian knot of an oncologist.
The C.O. laughed at such Wally-Cox-like hesitation and kept on taking folate, along with aspirin, oatmeal, Australian shiraz, soy protein, Tabasco sauce and Evening Primrose Oil, although he mistakenly took this in the morning. He posted testimonials from satisfied customers on the bulletin board and held town hall meetings with his staff where he would cajole them to stop living like it was 1910 and get with the modern program to ensure the benefits of a long life.
Soon the whole office was on folic acid, and the Doc noticed a definite new perkiness in his employees as they skipped along the hallways. He closed the door to his office and spoke to the large portrait hanging over his desk.
“You see what I can flush out with a little push? You just wait and see - someday they’ll consider me to be just as big a hero as you were.”
He sat down, fired up his computer and clicked on the headlines, where he read the following announcement:
“Folic Acid Supplements Won’t Lower Heart-Attack Risk”
“Both reports will appear in the April 13 issue of The New England Journal of Medicine, but were released early to coincide with their presentation Sunday at the meeting of the American College of Cardiology in Atlanta.”
The next morning the following notice was tacked to the message board outside of the boss’s office:
