Don't tell me I’m a Hetero, Apollo -

The system we use to log in and out of at work is called Apollo. You also use Apollo to look up doctors’ codes, addresses, patient history files and results. Apollo is beyond outdated, its archaic, it’s a system that would have seemed old in ancient Egypt school, but it is the pride and joy of our medical system. Keep in mind, up until less than 12 months ago we were still using a Kalamazoo to record payments. For those of you not working in the advanced field of medicine where technology is king, a Kalamazoo is the clicker clackers for credit cards that used to be used before ATMs, eftpos, tap and go etc. It’s a system that has been out of use since before most of you were even born, except in medicine.

Now Apollo is basically a source code screen. It’s a blue screen where white text appears. If you can’t picture it, go watch an 80s movie with computers, I can’t be expected to do everything for you, take some responsibility for your own education people. Apollo is Big brother, for the intellectuals I know are among my readers its George Orwell’s nightmare come to life, for the rest of you it’s the real-life version of that shit tv show where people became famous for having no dignity and no skills and mostly no personality. Apollo tracks your bleeds, what you have looked up etc etc. This means they are tracking our every move.

When you look up your own test results to save the $80 doctors bill to confirm your antibiotic resistant throat gonorrhoea is slowly responding to the cripplingly expensive antibiotic cocktail you are ingesting daily for the next month, they know. I like to think that whoever is in charge of monitoring that stuff celebrated with me the day I got the all clear. That somewhere in a dark little IT room, some nerd fist pumped my gonorrhoea negative result, and celebrated the happy ending to my story of a deceptively healthy-looking dick that caused me a chronic sore throat and cost me a fortune in antibiotics. But despite the title, this isn’t a story about me contracting a throat STD from a hetero guy having a trial run playing for the other team, it’s about Iron. So, I had been checking my own blood test results for a while, despite my inability to understand the non-STD related stuff. Probably because it’s not an STD, I didn’t notice my dangerously elevated Ferritin saturation levels. Luckily, I started seeing a new Dr who payed attention to such things. Long story short, I have hemochromatosis.

This is a hereditary gene that causes elevated iron levels. When you are homozygous (have two copies of the gene) it can be very dangerous. High iron in the blood can lead to liver inflammation and deterioration, damage organs and can cause other serious side effects. The treatment is venesection, Drs remove about 500mls of blood weekly until the iron levels subside to a more manageable level. If it sounds a bit medieval, it’s because it is. Obviously medical science peaked in the medieval times and it’s been a rocky downhill slide ever since. Makes sense if you listen to paleo types, nutrition peaked in the Palaeolithic, medieval medicine is absolutely advanced by comparison.

For me to have hemochromatosis, at least one of my parents had to pass their second-rate gene onto me. Neither of them had elevated iron levels so it was going to take some Sherlock Holmsing on my part to uncover the perpetrator. This next part is quite hard for me to write, so please forgive me if it is less than easy to follow. If both my parents had passed a copy of the gene to me, I would be homozygous, but in a shock turn of events I’m medically hetero. I am homo to my very core but genetically I am apparently hetero, obviously I demanded a re-test, but the results came back the same. As to be expected, I fought the results. I am clearly a homo, but inside of me are hetero genes. My blood is the blood of unicorns, but it is mud blood, corrupted and contaminated by heterozygosity. Apollo, the Greek god of poetry and music and art, arguably the gayest of gods, was also the god of medicine. His namesake backwards computer system was now telling me that not only do I have a medical problem with a medieval solution, I’m also a hetero. It’s taken some therapy to not really come to terms with my shocking hetero genetic legacy, but one day I will get there. In science there are homozygotes and heterozygotes, in sexy-times there are homosexuals and heterosexuals. Genus wise homo means man. Homo sapiens, Homo erectus (a gay man about to get ploughed for those of you whose science is a little rusty) and homo neanderthalensis (science for footballer). The prefix “homo” means the same. I bet you never thought you would be learning so much important science when you picked up this book, did you? Really this is definitely a front runner for book of the century, you have your history, your philosophy, your science, your computers, your dashing hero, your drama, and your comedy all in one delightfully easy to read manual. I sense a Nobel prize for literature in my future. But back to the summing up, hetero or homo we all bleed the same. We are far more alike than we are unalike, and different amounts of melanin, or sexual preferences, or political ideas are arbitrary lines we draw to create the silly mountains too many people are prepared to die on. Also, I don’t care what science says, I’m no hetero.