I’ve got so many projects started that I’m beginning to
question what’s going on inside my head. I have a baby sweater in the works, two
books part way read, an oil painting in the early stages and I’ve spent time
working in my walk-in closet where I’ve barely made a dent---my goal is to try every single thing on, then be ruthless about the piles I sort the items to. I’ve
also got some blog entries and a few poems in rough drafts. And then there’s
the joyful day I spent poking around the 23andMe website looking at my DNA test
results. I’ve got more Neanderthal gene “variants” than 70% of the 23andMe
customers…oh, my! 23andMe has a forum for people to compare tests, ask
questions and generally play around like people do on forums. I love forums and
I found a thread about having a lot of Neanderthal genes where people were
joking around about how they have to trim the hair on their toes or put Band-Aids
on their knuckles from dragging them around. One woman confessed that once a
month she wants to tear her husband’s arms off and suck the marrow out of his
bones and now she knows why. All jokes aside, Neanderthal variants supposedly come
into play with allergies and infertility issues which has my name written all
over them.
Since my husband died six years ago this month, January’s
have sent me into a woe-is-me, I’m a lonely widow’s tail spin. But I’m not
depressed this year and I don’t feel lonely although I’m beginning to wonder if
I’m subconsciously trying too hard to keep the boogieman at bay and that
explains why I’m hopping from one project/task to another. Or maybe I just
jumped into the deep end of the New Year’s Resolution pool and got myself
overwhelmed like a kid in a candy store who can’t make up his mind what to buy
with his birthday money.
The baby sweater is easy to figure out. Both my niece’s need
a bigger sweater for their gramma drawers at their cottages and I needed an
excuse to evict the dog from the La-Z-Boy in the living room where he sits a
hundred times more often than I do. I spend way too much time in the kitchen
playing on the computer and I wanted to change that. I’ve been on a writing
binge to beat all binges lately but I’m not creating any particularly interesting. I mean who really cares that I wrote about dumping a whole box of
oatmeal all over the floor and I actually considered putting it back in the box
to cook later? In case anyone DOES care, I did a quick calculation on how long
it had been since my cleaner was at the house and I decided no amount of
microwave heat was hot enough to kill twenty-five days of floor germs and there
was no way I could have gotten the oatmeal back in the box under the ten second
Oreo rule.
My 23andMe DNA test for health risks came back with no gene
markers showing for the 54 health issues and diseases they tested for including
Alzheimer’s, Macular Degeneration, breast cancer, Celiac Disease, Parkinson’s and a bunch of
stuff I've never heard of and was written using a medical jargon I didn’t
understand. I’d study that vocabulary and the links they provided if the 54 tests
had shown some variants, but I’m happy not to have to take on that homework. On
the fun side is trying to figure out how a little spit in a tube could tell
them that I’m likely to consume more caffeine than the average duck in the gene
pool, that I don’t sleep deep, am likely to tolerate lactose, am genetically
predisposed to weigh more than average and I move around in my sleep…ALL TRUE!
Even funnier is the fact that the test report included 27 silly
but accurate traits. For example: I don’t have dimples but have “attached”
shaped earlobes. They told me what hair texture I have, my toe length ratio, my
finger length ratio, my eye color, the fact that I likely am not able to match
a musical pitch, that I was born with lots of hair, that I don’t like cilantro
and mosquitos love me, and that I prefer sweet over salty. The weirdest trait
listed is they said I have dry, flaky earwax instead of wet earwax. “…the same
genetic variant in the ABCC11 gene that determines the dry earwax type is also
linked to lower levels of body odor.” Who knew! Isn’t that crazy. Reading my
DNA results was all fun and games, considering I didn’t have any health risks on
the 54 diseases and conditions pages. I was slightly worried about having the genetic
marker for Alzheimer’s but I can quit wondering if my brain cells will run out
of its hour glass long before I die. Yippie-Yi-Yo!
A few days before getting my test results I saw the movie, My Sister’s Keeper and if you read the
book you’ll know it’s about a couple who had a daughter with leukemia who
conceived another baby whose embryo was specifically picked to be a perfect
donor match to her older sister. This was a fiction story that brings up the
moral issue of editing human embryos but last November a Chinese scientist
claimed he just did that with two babies. Until I got my DNA results back I
didn’t realize how gene specific that could actually get. These babies in embryo
form had their genes edited to “disable CCR5, a gene involved in allowing HIV
to invade cells, which is how a virus infects a host.” Right or wrong a brave
new world of medical possibilities is upon us. ©
