Raynaud’s Syndrome

As a younger man, I fully subscribed to the China syndrome, the fear that a loss of coolant in a nuclear reactor might lead to catastrophic core meltdown in a nuclear reactor.  The hyperbolic extension of this scenario envisioned that the reactor’s fuel rods would all melt together in an unregulated and molten reaction and then drop right through the earth beginning at, say, Blue Rapids, Kansas and burn a hole right through the Earth until reaching some unpronounceable town in China.  Someplace along the line, a movie called The China Syndrome, starring Jack Lemmon, Michael Douglas, and Jane Fonda, hit the screens, with a slightly less exaggerated nuclear reactor accident.  I don’t recall much about the movie now.

I have, at this later stage of life, swapped the far-fetched China syndrome for a more practical model called Raynaud’s syndrome.  In this later malady, instead of a molten core of highly radioactive material burning gigantic hole right through the planet, my fingers get numb and turn white as new copier paper.  I am not sure this is a fair trade.  For one thing, I don’t see any famous actors lining-up to play a role in a drama based upon my fingers tingling a little.

Well, there was that one movie: Attack of the Killer Tomatoes.  No time for that here.

My Raynaud’s is typically triggered by cold.  Gripping something cold, as example, a steering wheel, snow shovel, or hand tool, will rapidly cause the onset of Raynaud’s syndrome.  Essentially, the body reacts to the input of cold by shutting down the flow of blood to your extremities.  Yesterday, I stepped outside and flung a few scoops of snow from in front of my garage door.  Though having spent only two or three minutes out there, in temperatures in the upper thirties, the fingers on both of my hands went entirely numb and grew white as snowcapped mountains.  Forced back inside, I shoved my hands under the bathroom faucet and ran warm water over my fingers until blood flow returned and color and feeling flooded back to the tips again.

Damn.

I am wondering now if this more practical, reality-based syndrome is any better than those exaggerated and then adapted for cinema.  And I am certainly open for a movie adaptation providing a way might be determined to write Salma Hayek or Jessica Alba into the plot.

--Mitchell Hegman