Confessions of a Liberal Puritan

First off, I've just discovered (after I'd already written that Buffy/Angel as gothic cathedral and Spike as their flying buttresses 'poem') that there's a whole lot of double entendre and really suggestive terms concerned with Romanesque and Gothic architecture. Check out the following excerpts (with emphasis added by me) from this course web-page, http://mars.acnet.wnec.edu/~grempel/courses/wc1/lectures/26cathedral.html


"Moreover, every stone vault contains a force called a thrust, a tendency to bulge outward, which, if the walls are not strong enough to contain it as well as hold the weight of the vault, causes them to collapse. The thrust of the barrel vault is strongest at the haunches of the arch and is, of course, continuous for its whole length.

"In the groined vault, however, the continuous thrust of the barrel vault is broken into individual thrusts which are concentrated along the lines of the intersections or groins of the vault, and brought down to a definite point at the four corners of the vault. In the groined vault, therefore, there are two points of thrust, the haunch and springing point of the arch, but they are isolated along the lines of intersection of the two barrel vaults which go to make up the groined vault.

"If some external support to the walls of the nave or side aisles could be applied at those points where, in a groined vault, the thrust is concentrated, then the function of the walls would be limited to supporting the weight of the vault, rather than both supporting the weight and containing the thrust. They could accordingly be made lighter, and could less dangerously be opened up with windows. . . .

"The chief new structural addition made by Gothic architects was to bring the primitive flying buttress of the Romanesque from under cover of the lean-to roof of the side aisles, and to raise it to meet the higher thrust of a higher nave vault and carry it to the ground.

"Thus what the Gothic Cathedral was from a structural point of view was skeletal framework of side-aisle wall buttresses, flying buttresses, clustered piers, and ribbing in perfect equilibrium, built to support the weight of and counterbalance and carry to the ground the thrusts of the stone vaults of the side aisles and the nave.

"With such a framework, walls as such served no purpose except to keep out the light. Gothic architects then proceeded to remove all the flat wall surfaces and to substitute for them windows of colored glass. . . . In total effect, therefore, the Gothic church is a soaring glass house held together by a skeletal framework of stone, or a vast 'vaulted glass cage.'"


Whew! Who knew a lecture on architecture could be so hot?

Meanwhile, I got a somewhat encouraging call from my endocrinologist yesterday. First, he let me know that my vitamin D level is now back up to a good level, so I could stop taking those mega-doses of vitamin D. And my calcium's still a bit low, but I can scale back to only four, instead of six, Oscal capsules a day, unless I start feeling tingling in my hands again (in which case, I up the calcium again). But my blood test from the previous week also showed sky-high levels of this hormone, parathyroid, that your body produces when the blood-calcium level gets too low, in order to leach calcium out of your bones and get some back into your blood-stream, when you really need it.

The doctor reminded me that he'd said, the first time I saw him, that there might be more than one thing going on with me -- something else, in addition to the vitamin D deficiency. And now he says that they need to test for something called (I think) pseudohypoparathyroidism. (I suppose it's my own fault, for saying last week that I was disappointed not to have at least been given a pseudo-Greek or Latin name for my condition with which to frighten my friends and relatives!).

This thing, if I have it, is hereditary and means that the parathyroid hormone your body produces just doesn't do its job (so hypocalcemia is a major symptom). The doctor said that my round face is characteristic of people who have this, and he asked if my mother's face was also very round (he didn't remember that she'd been with me the first time he saw me, over a month ago -- no surprise), because the disease presents differently if you inherit it from your mother or your father, and mine (if I have it) would have likely been from my mother.

Anyway, I googled "pseudohypoparathyroidism" just now, and it turns out that, besides being extremely rare, people with the most common or first-identified type of this disease usually have round faces, short stature (well, I'm almost 5 foot 9, but that does make me the "runt of the litter" in MY family), obesity (yep), dental hypoplasia (which may have something to do with why my teeth have almost no enamel and practically crumble at a touch), short bones in the hands and feet (sort of), and "mental retardation" or "delayed development" (well, my father told me he THOUGHT I was retarded when I was an infant and toddler, because I was so big and physically awkward and the doctor who'd delivered me told him I'd be brain-damaged from oxygen-deprivation, . . . but I don't think that particular presenting symptom really applies to me, any more).

If I've got this, then my mother and siblings should probably get tested, too (maybe it's fortunate, after all, that none of us kids have ever reproduced). But it WOULD explain, perhaps, how I could so quickly and so severely develop hypocalcemia. Doctor said I probably always had a slightly low level of calcium in my system, but that when (for whatever reason, we'll probably never know) I developed a vitamin D deficiency, there was no place for my body to go to replenish its supplies -- no way, no matter how much parathyroid it produced, to get calcium out of the 'vault' of my bones.

Presumably, this is all treatable, so no worries.