Diagnosis equinox: Time, allergies messing you up

Dear Otus,

I'm at my wit's end. Every year precisely on the spring equinox, I come down with a host of inexplicable maladies not related to allergies. Am I alone? I searched a dozen medical sites on the Internet and it seems I've got [everything from liberosis to dysania].

-- Alice Liddell,

Siloam Springs

Dear Alice,

It was wholly a pleasure to hear from you and to be able to palliate your fears. You are not alone.

In fact, untold numbers suffer the same afflictions as you, frequently exacerbated by the diurnal disruption of daylight saving time, which occurs just a few days prior to the equinox. Many of the sufferers are also victims of exulansis, the tendency to give up trying to talk about an experience because you believe people can't relate.

I would be remiss if I did not inform you that the correct term for the spring equinox is the "vernal" equinox. Vern is a hypocorism of Vernon and similar names. The vernal equinox was named after Dr. Verner E. "Vern" Suomi (1915-1995). He has an Arkansas connection.

Suomi was a Finnish-American physician, educator, inventor and scientist. He was considered the father of satellite meteorology and amygdala and escaped to America when the Soviets invaded his homeland in 1939.

Suomi was the first to connect the weather and spring equinox (renamed in his honor in 1949) with a host of previously undiagnosed maladies.

While a young professor at Olin College in Needham, Mass., Suomi was named the 1947 winner of the NAMI Prize in Exemplary Psychosomatics. From 1986 to 1995, Suomi finished his distinguished career as professor (later professor emeritus) at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville's Louise McPhetridge Thaden School of Applied Evolutionary Computation.

Suomi, a lifelong basketball fan, died in Seattle on April 6, 1995, after watching his beloved Razorbacks lose the national title to UCLA, 89-78. Official cause of death was listed as myotonia congenita. Suomi fainted at the final buzzer, never woke up, and died three days later. He was two days shy of his 80th birthday.

The university's state-of-the-art research lab (see photo) was named in Suomi's honor in 2000, and a 10-foot diameter bronze basketball fountain -- the Venal Sphere -- by Fayetteville sculptor Hank Kaminsky was unveiled on New Year's Eve 2002 on the Fayetteville Town Square.

The vernal equinox marks the astronomical first day of spring in the Northern Hemisphere. It is the precise moment when the subsolar point appears to leave the southern hemisphere and cross the celestial equator, heading northward as seen from Earth.

Or, to be more precise, the moment when the extended plane of Earth's equator passes through the center of the sun's disk.

As we all know, when the ecliptic longitude of the sun is 0 degrees, the true motion of the Earth can be affected by up to 1 and a quarter arcseconds of variation in the Sun's ecliptic latitude.

For our simplified purposes, this year the vernal equinox arrived at 11:15 a.m. Tuesday. Equinox (equal night) refers to almost equal amounts of daylight and darkness. It can play havoc on the human body, as it obviously has with yours. To save space, I did not include your list of 27 maladies in the email.

I submitted your top six concerns to the Suomi Lab and graduate lab assistant Loren Pryor responded Wednesday with the medical names that correspond to your ailments. Research them at your leisure.

• Buscard's Murrain. This is an echolalia-like disease that leads to degenerative cognitive ability as a result of incessant repetition of a certain word. In your case, "equinox."

• Malignalitaloptereosis A rare disease which causes the victim to break out in spots, followed by hot and cold flashes, then violent sneezing.

• Xenopolycythemia. A proliferation of red blood cells causing excessive blushing.

• Monachopsis. This is your subtle but persistent feeling of being out of place.

• Fibrolupusthenia gravis. That feeling where you wonder if your symptoms are some weird autoimmune condition or simply psychiatric manifestations.

• Trimethylaminuria. The feeling you say you have that your breath and sweat give off a strong fishy smell.

Until next time, Kalaka reminds you that first and foremost, you are the victim of acute cyberchondria -- worrying about all the worst possibilities after reading the Internet.

Disclaimer

Fayetteville-born Otus the Head Cat's award-winning column of

Z humorous fabrication X

appears every Saturday. Email:

mstorey@arkansasonline.com

HomeStyle on 03/24/2018