Luckily, i found one. A doc with a heart and experience to find the cause of my pain. she took one look at the lumps in my elbow and uttered three different diseases that could cause them. Gout, psuedo gout and rhuematoid arthritis. then she told me the test would only take five minutes and wondered why no previous doc had taken the five minutes to determine my ailment.

five minutes later, she bounced into the exam room and announced that i had acute gouty arthritis and that if i followed her directions i’d be back on my snowboard after a 13 year hiatus. i was nearly in tears.

she set me up with a few months of prednisone to help me get past the initial worsening of the disease as the urate crystals started to dissolve and flow through the rest of my body on their way out. then started me on a gradually increasing dose of allopurinol until my blood level was sufficiently reduced to allow the urate crystals to dissolve.

it’s been about two years now and i’m decidely much better off. if i had it to do all over again i’d have done my best to avoid the prednisone and would have changed up my diet and dropped anything with high-fructose corn sweetener in it.

i’m not outta the woods yet but i’m feeling much better about life.

get it treated professionally and stop drinking soda, coffee, beer, liquor and pound tons of water.

Hope this helps!

No! No! No! (I said it three times.) For gout, a lot of things that are usually healthy… aren’t. Fish and lean meat break down into more of the stuff that crystallises – and fruit and fruit juices raise the body’s acidity which both encourages the other stuff to crystallise out and crowds out the kidneys’ capacity to get rid of it the conventional way. Speaking of which, for real suffering just wait until you get kidney stones, which are what come next once stuff starts crystallising out faster than it can be flushed. It’s nearly worse than the worst of my migraines and better than those that don’t settle on the head, plus they last longer, I can tell you.

Apart from not jolting it, there’s really only one sensible thing for gout, which gives you prevention of later attacks and helps clear up the current one: shift the crystallising balance the other way. Keep the affected parts warm, drink lots of non-acid, non-alcohol fluid to help flush it out (alcohol crowds out the kidneys’ job, as before), and stay on a low protein, low fat diet (again, to cut down on producing the muck and to avoid the fat breakdown products crowding out the flushing). With that, my own attacks have got progressively milder and less frequent – so far.

P.S., the Irish Times is a fine bar here in Melbourne.

Now I have had several more boils? The first one i got on my butt, in my taint, 2 days after the hernia surgery. WTF? A gift of the returning Iraqi veterans, rumor has it. Thanks imperial america, what next? Leishmaniasis?

Gout and boils? Am I some sorta dickens character?

By the way, the gout on my big toe was at the base of the toe, on the outside, big and red and hard and painful as helllll. That toe you posted looked like some sorta of vietnam foot fungus my dad had (thanks imperial america). Prop it up.

Dr Dolan, I don’t wish you success, a tenure, a golden retriever, and a gated community where you’d learn to appreciate golf. What an incalculable loss that’d be. You understand – surely you of all people understand – the importance of misery for a writer.

I’m not the only person who would send you money if there were some available means. Surely you can get a paypal button on here?

Best wishes to you and your wife.

I hope you get your accolades before you wind up like JK Toole Dr. Dolan.

-A huge fan

Publish another damn book will ya? Pleasant Hell left me wanting more but I’ve been wanting for a while now.

“…you may be old and sick, but … it’s your miserable godgiven job to do something about that.”

John, please go on in this vain. From your writings of late it seems you are beyond a lot of things, like flattery, or the hope that good text, in the end, magically, wins over the megatons of crap writing that are raining down. I don’t know, maybe you are right. I read your Pleasant Hell, read it again, and will read it a third time (shouldn’t I croak relatively soon) because it is one of the best novels I know—and that this book doesn’t fly on the market is damn depressing, looking at what *does* fly. Perhaps sporting some real big antlers is indeed a handicap now.

But what ever keeps you going, be it sheer spite, stubbornness, compulsion or some last reserve of totally non-admitted hope: I wish you happiness, but from my egoistic point of view I mostly hope that just something will keep you going. I read all your articles for Exile/The Exiled, I searched long to find the few of your poems that are on the net, and I fucking even dug out the old reviews you´d written at amazon.com ages ago. You’re one of five living writers that I care for and finding an announcement for your second novel would be like xmas—but even if you won’t do that: when I look at Exiled and find a new text of yours it gives me the kick to light a fresh cigarette, refill the glass and find the world interesting. Just keep on writing!

Look at a survey publishing frequency: it took Portis 11 years for his third novel to be written/published. PKD’s output dropped significantly after he quit speed (funny enough for him, the speed never even passed the brain blood barrier). HST only wrote one truly great fiction … but his essays were brilliant and widely published.

Read what Dolan said about picking a genre that isn’t fully founded on fakes, liars, and morbid egoists … “the novel” doesn’t EXACTLY fit the description.

In that vein, for a human suffering to have meaning, it has to have taste, I guess. A flavor that, be it bitter as hell, strikes the nerves.

So that leaves me eyeing the structure of your article and kind of being impressed, because you weave together both imagery (gouty pictures), a vaguely humorous but honestly bitter exposition of your own shit, plus the inevitable reaction you have to this guy’s books or whatever. It kind of seems like your article is some sort of vaccine, or antibody or some shit, to the author’s books and main line.

So like, way to go, man.