Get Me 20 CCs of Television, Stat!

So, as I alluded to a couple of days ago, I've been watching the first season of House on DVD. And I've definitely been enjoying it. It's a smart show about scientific problem-solving, which appeals, and I've always been kind of a sucker for the deeply damaged, snarkily sarcastic, lovable-bastard characters. I'm also rather proud that I seem to have picked up enough layman's medical knowledge over the course of my lifetime of random reading to actually be able to follow the biobabble reasonably well. Sometimes I even chip in with a diagnosis. Like, today they had a nun who, in the middle of a medical test, suddenly complained of a nonexistent bad smell and started hallucinating that she was seeing Jesus. "Whoa," I thought to myself from my comfortable seat on the sofa, "that's definitely a brain thing. Sounds like something involving the temporal lobe." Sure enough, up comes one of our heroic medicos and immediately concludes that she has an inflammation in the temporal lobe (although this was a symptom of what was actually wrong with her, rather than the cause). Whoo-hoo! I am smart! I coulda been a doctor! Well, except for that whole not being able to stand the sight of blood thing, which I admit would be kind of a barrier.

I think it can be a dangerous show to watch, though. Somebody said to me the other day that it's probably not a great thing to see while you're sick. "He might give you ideas." And it's true. You can contract a serious case of hypochondria watching this stuff. I mean, I was just thinking about this cold I had, and the fact that, in the last few years (with the exception of a couple of nasty bouts of flu), my illnesses seem to have followed a strange pattern: I feel kind of listless for a couple of days, then I wake up one morning with a very mild set of cold symptoms but a profound feeling of unwellness and a desire not to move much. Then, a day or so later, I'm completely better. I like to think of this as an indication that my immune system is intelligent and healthy. It shuts my body down to give itself more resources to fight the invaders and beats them off handily. Yay, immune system! 'Cause that's much better than coughing and sneezing and being miserable for days. But, y'know, at the moment I'm half expecting to end up in a hospital some day with some horrible, mysterious disease and see Dr. House glaring down at me saying, "Why did you lie to me about your history of previous symptoms?" because I hadn't thought to tell him I'd had a weird pattern of what I'd thought were mild colds, but were in fact the key to diagnosing some rare, scary disease.

I occasionally think that nobody should be allowed to watch medical shows at all.

In other DVD-related news, Netflix was supposed to send me one of the Babylon 5 movies along with the next House disc, because I figured after twelve episodes or so, I might really need a break from the medical talk. And apparently they did send it to me, but all I received was the part of the envelope with my address on it and no disc attached. Grr. The annoying thing is that Netflix won't let you report a disc missing until it's been MIA for a week. Well, gosh, guys, I think we can pretty fairly say that it's not going to turn up in my mailbox, given that it must be floating around without an address on it. Sigh.