Blog day is upon me, but I have had little time or appetite to think about it. My wife Joan has been seriously ill and in hospital, where she has had to remain for an extended period. We are hoping that she can be transferred to the slightly less oppressive environment of a rehabilitation facility by the time I publish this. She has enjoyed excellent care during her stay, but any long-term bed-confinement is enfeebling, and she is already woefully deconditioned. She needs to be on a restorative regime as soon as is prudent. The problems have been exacerbated by my own mobility limitations, but a small phalanx of devoted friends has been ferrying me to and fro. The future is, as always, uncertain; but I am less worried than I was a week ago.
It took the experts quite a while to come up with a confident diagnosis, but eventually they did: babesiosis. I had never even heard of babesiosis, which is apparently one of the more exotic (and nasty) of the several tick-borne diseases, all of which seem to be on the rise as the human population spreads over the former woodlands of the northeastern part of our country. Only twenty years ago there were no reported cases of it. Now there are about three thousand each year, with the number rising. For the elderly, a category to which I must reluctantly assign my spouse as well as myself, all such diseases can be quite dangerous. Certainly the immediate visual effects of this one, which include dramatic debility, are alarming.
One of the hospital doctors, in explaining the difficulty in arriving at a diagnosis, told me “These tick-borne diseases can be very tricky.” The adjective “tick-borne” stuck in mind mind, for the mind has its vagaries, and all too easily wanders down the byways of Locke’s “association of ideas" as developed by Sterne in Tristram Shandy. Several years ago I became interested in various notorious criminal cases from the Victorian era in Britain. I actually wrote about one or two them in this blog. One of these cases, which gained considerable notoriety in its day was that of the “Tichborn claimant” or “Tichborn pretender”. This enterprising fellow was an Australian butcher who put himself forward as the long-lost offspring of a wealthy English dowager, whose young son had disappeared years earlier, very likely in a maritime disaster.
There are many historical examples of the desire to believe in unlikely survivals and improbable rediscoveries, such as that of Anastasia, the young daughter of the last Romanovs. Many Russian exiles in the Paris of the 1920s very much wanted her to be alive and well. The entire nuclear imperial family had of course been murdered in 1918 by Bolshevik thugs. More than one vaguely possible candidate presented herself as Anastasia. In similar fashion the dowager had a passionate desire to believe that her beloved child was still alive, and she had placed advertisement in the press throughout the Empire seeking to find him or elicit information concerning him. One such notice came to the attention of an enterprising Australian butcher in Wagga Wagga, who claimed to be the missing English aristocrat. (The lost son was the heir of a baronetcy.) The appearance, speech, and general behavior of this man were those of a proletarian rather than those of a prince. But the mother, desperate to believe, gave credit to the butcher’s dubious story despite his uncouth affect. Practically nobody else did, though, and the matter became a famous law case ending with the claimant’s conviction for perjury and a stout prison sentence.
Tichborn was an English place name, that of a small English village. The pronunciation of its ch is “soft” as in church. Nonetheless a spurious parallel with “tick-borne” instantly invaded my undisciplined mind. Or perhaps my Celtic ancestry is to blame. After all the difference between church and kirk is less philological than geographical. Such are the trivialities in which the mind seeks surcease of sorrow and by incidental fortuity finds a blog topic to boot. I am hoping that by next week things can be headed in the direction of normality. It is probably too much to hope that they will actually have arrived there.
Even while writing this I received word that Joan will be released from Princeton Hospital today (Tuesday) and sent to a rehab center nearby, the medical wing of a retirement community (Stonebridge) where she has many friends…And since writing that, the transfer took place and Richard and I were able to visit her there briefly. I hope we are now in a new and happier place.
