Friday, October 20, 2006

Ill-Fitting Genes

First thing first,

I wanna see a medical doctor who's techno savvy. We have CT Scans, Heart Transplants, Neurosurgeons...but a doctor who writes, without using MS Word? I wanna see a doctor who not just saves people's lives but also people the torture of having to decipher his hieroglyphics of a handwriting. A doctor who uses a laptop, types in his prescriptions and sends the them to the nurses via MSN. That'd be awesome. Otherwise, there'll be no way we, advanced genetic biomedical scientists, who one day may come up for a cure for cancer, would want to be associated with people who still thinks mechanical pencils are cool.

That said, let me move on.

I've got a Major Sucky Week forecast coming up. While people in my home country are busy with their Deeparaya holiday plans, i'm stuck here having to figure out what testis size have to do with the mating systems of non-human primates. And on top of that, i'm hit with another bout of depression. And to top it all off, my eczema condition just got worse (no thanks to steroid treatments). It's crazy how this whole thing started off with just another bad itch and culminating into me not being able to attend lectures go out just because i'm embarrased with the way i look right now. And what's making me contemplate on locking myself in with a double latch? Having a sibling who dipped into the same gene pool and still model-perfect, a mother who's gorgeous as heck and whom i bear absolutely no resemblance to, a friend who's been asked out on a super hot date by a super hot guy lately and another one who's been on dates since lord-knows-when. And here i am, stuck in a room, barren as ever.

Frustrated with my condition, I then googled and found out that apparently, my eczema problem is actually a disorder caused by a genetic mutation (MUTATION, baby!) This gene mutation then causes the depletion of a protein called filaggrin, which is normally found on the outerlayers of the skin and functions to form a protective layer at the surface of the skin that keeps water in and keeps foreign organisms out. So, without this layer of filaggrin, there is an impaired formation of the skin barrier foreign substance can easily enter the skin and cause a inflammtory response. "Leaky" skin, as they called it, nicely complements my "leaky" brains.


Skin with filaggrin antibodies


My skin

(Images courtesy of www.mattek.com)

And apparently, since it's genetic, one of my parents must have been carrying a single gene mutation for filaggrin and would experience dry and flaky skin (hmm...i wonder which one). Moreover, the only way to completely annhilate eczema is to undergo gene therapy, which would take years to be developed and decades to be approved of. I'd be my own grandchild by then.

Sigh...at least this will answer the age-old question for us eczema sufferers :
WHY?


(doesn't quite answer "Why me?" though)

s w e n @ 7:30 PM | |