Well, I'd first like to say wow, this place appears to have been pretty busy the last few days.  And thanks to those who wished me well before I headed off.  Surprisingly, I was allowed to bring my laptop for my brief stay, but I wanted to keep my stress levels low, so I didn't bother coming here. 

And they confiscated my webcam for the duration.  I should have thought about leaving that at home to begin with, but hey, hindsight is 20/20, as they say.

Anyhow, I learned a couple of things during my stay at ECMC thanks to a CAT-scan and an MRI, as well as a couple of sit-down sessions with the resident therapists. 

1) It would appear that the majority of my condition, as I've indicated before, is caused by a misfiring of a group of neuroelectrical connections in my brain.  This is where the good news/bad news starts.

2) When the images were compared to my last set of scans, it was explained to me that the part of my brain where the misfires are starting from is normally one of the dormant or unused parts of the human grey matter.  When I asked what that meant, I was informed (how helpful is this?) that nobody on staff quite had a firm theory.   NOT the sort of thing you want to hear, eh?

3) The spread of the misfires has increased since my last set of scans, overlapping heavily with those parts of the brain which govern my sensory input/reception.  In short, as time goes on, it seems that my hallucinations will not become more frequent, but more noticable.  What that means for me, essentially, is that as I get older, these things are going to become much more convincing.  Again, not encouraging.

4) A bit of good news.  There's an injection medication now available to me which is supposed to reduce the frequency of the overlaps (and hence, the frequency of the hallucinations) by about half.  They gave me a dose of that this morning before discharging me.  Here's hoping it works.

5) Another bit of good news.  Based on the slow progress of the misfires' spread, my doctors suggest that I won't likely be completely hampered by this thing until I'm well into my late 60's or 70's, and that in the intervening time, they have plenty of chances to make breakthroughs in dealing with such chemical imbalances.  Bravo, I say.  Besides, by the time I hit my late 60's or 70's, I'll be an eccentric old man anyhow, so who's going to really take notice?  (Ha ha)

Cheers.