Saturday, September 15, 2018

Adventures in physiology

A muscle twitch showed up three days ago. It’s just above the left knee, on the inside. According to a muscle chart I found it’s the bottom end of the vastus medialis (a name my spell checker refuses to recognize). The twitches come and go. Sometimes it’s twitch-twitch-twitch-flutter-twitch-twitch. Other times it’s twitch-twitch…… twitch……….. twitch-twitch-twitch… It doesn’t hurt, it’s just one of those old-man’s-body-falling-apart things. Of course, it’s actually a neural thing. A signal is misfiring somewhere. Or a toddler got loose in the brain’s muscle control department and it keeps pounding on the vastus medialis button.

UPDATE: The twitch has moved to my other leg.

I’ve written before about how my hearing is kind of poor in one ear and worse in the other, making it hard to locate the source of sounds—particularly ones happening somewhere in the van while I’m driving. A squeak developed today that had the tonal quality of the warbling ring of ‘90s phones blended with the tinkling of beer bottles rattling together. I finally figured out it was the plastic wall of my refrigerator rubbing against the styrofoam of the insulated box I have it in. Mystery solved.

5 comments:

  1. I wonder if that's what my leg is doing? I keep thinking my phone is vibrating.

    Solving a mystery is usually a good thing. Now you just need to decide what, if anything, you want to do about that sound.

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  2. Hole in the left eardrum. Can't localize anything. If a charging rhino approaches, I won't have a clue where it is. SAD.

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  3. I've had that same muscle twitch infrequently for most of my adult life. It feels kinda wierd but not too bothersome.

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  4. "Accordingly, and to the author's personal experience, navel lint seems to be a phenomenon that affects primarily male adults."

    Steinhauser found that hairs around the belly button have a scaly structure that pulls fibers from clothing and then directs those fibers—along with dead skin, fat, sweat and dust—into the belly button.

    ReplyDelete