If you've been following this column, and I hope you have, you may be interested to know that James and I are now officially going out and have been for three months (actually quite a bit longer for me). He's a senior researcher in my lab and we've managed to keep it hush for now, although I think the prof knows. That's only because he knows everything. Everyone else is either in the dark or pretending very well.
I spent most of the day grappling with those damn myocytes again. I've finally mastered the art of pipetting but still can't do it and talk at the same time. My cells keep dying but at least my patients seem to do ok. If I leave these three years with no publications but a batch of surviving cells then I will consider it a success.
I leave the lab late and watch a little television with dinner. I have a couple of glasses of South African Merlot and spend the first half of the night asleep on the sofa before I realise where I am and drag myself back to bed.
Imagine hearing a person gripe about his life being “dead”. It must be difficult dealing with the fumes of a putrefying body or the tragedy of disappearing vital organs. In episode 14 of the 4th season of the hit TV series “ Scrubs”, a character named Jerry depicted the role of a patient with the “Walking Corpse Syndrome”.
The “Walking Corpse Syndrome” is a form of psychosis that deludes the patient into thinking that he is dead and decaying. Sorry necrophiliacs, because in reality, he’s very much alive and not about to decompose anytime. He believes he’s losing parts of his body, organs or blood, his soul included. It is also called “Cotard’s Syndrome,” after Jules Cotard, the Parisian neurologist who first decribed its symptoms.
This syndrome is typically related to depression and in psychoses such as schizoprenia and bipolar disorder.Road daredevils beware, as cases arising from brain injuries have also been reported. In 1996, a Cotard’s case was documented in a patient who suffered brain injury after a motorcycle accident. After being discharged from the hospital in Scotland, his mother brought him to South Africa. However, according to the patient, it was a trip to hell, as evidenced by the heat and that he died from various causes, from septicemia to AIDS, to an overdose of a yellow fever injection. He believed his mother’s spirit was borrowed to show him around hell. “Going through hell” gets a new perspective, with parental guidance this time.
Cotard’s is thought to be related to Capgras’s Syndrome (the belief that your relatives have been replaced by impostors). A disconnection between the brain areas that recognize faces and the area that associates them with the emotions that are connected with that particular face has been implicated as the culprit.It has higher incidence among middle-aged and older patients.
Cases known are too few for a reprise of Michael Jackson’s video, “Thriller”. Electroconvulsive therapies have shown help especially with associated severe depressive disorders. With the rarity of this syndrome, doctors are still at a loss for adequate treatments. This calls for a challenge among medical researchers to save these patients from their untimely “deaths”.
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