How to Terrify the Crap Out of Your Significant Other Through Selective Book Choices

I am currently undergoing a bit of a research kick into health and wellness. As the Farmers' Almanac predicted, it has been a rough winter in North America, and a few gross events in my personal life have led me to feel pretty much like twenty miles of bad road. Lately my old long term friend anxiety started knocking on my door. (We're not really friends. I hate that fucker.) (Addendum: since I wrote this paragraph a week ago, things have cleared considerably and I'm feeling much like my old self.)

Through serendipity I came across Dr. Carolyn Dean's work on magnesium and its significant role in 800 body processes, including adrenal health, mood, and generally being able to find your inner cool. I started taking magnesium and wow. Then I started using transdermal magnesium (you put it on your skin, it soaks in, and YOU SEE LEPRECHAUNS NO JOKE).

This is all great, and wonderful for me, but for the ever-patient Dave it has been yet another process of watching the kitchen and bathroom fill with strange elixirs and new potions. While he's not especially interested in any of this he's not opposed to it either. He just accepts that this is something I am doing.

In the name of fully researching what I'm doing I ordered a copy of Dr. Dean's The Magnesium Miracle (highly recommended) and have had it sitting on the dining room table and various surfaces for a few days now. I guess Dave has just gotten used to seeing this book and taking it for granted that most of my reading material is wellness oriented right now.

Magnesium Miracle shipped with the other item I ordered at the same time. (I was trying to make the Amazon free shipping threshold...not book greedy at all, no.) This is the back of that book (sorry for the crappy photo....I was trying to take pictures with a potato).

Looks like another, uh, health book, right?

Without giving any context at all, I started telling Dave about the ideas this book is based on. See, every once in a while, in my quest for interesting medical factoids, I come across an article on "helminth therapy," aka Helminth Induced Immune Modulation, aka deliberate infection of oneself with worms (pig whipworm is especially popular) in order to correct diseases. Yes, this is happening.

Besides being incredibly gross on its own, I've long thought helminth therapy would make an amazing foundation for a science fiction / horror story. I was explaining to Dave, quite happily, that I'd wanted to write about this, but awesome Mira Grant has already done it, and I was looking forward to reading her book.

When Dave is concerned about something he goes silent. A long pause followed. He stared at me.

"This isn't something you're going to try, is it?" He's patient enough that he didn't add "I don't think I can get behind that."

I guess I should have led with the fact that Parasite is a work of fiction.