bilditup1 said:
'Recovering' eh? ...ho boy.
It's a 12-step program, and I might have a few steps left.
As for 'the GOUT', I always thought of that as an OT.com in-joke, e.g. referring to it as some kind of diseased version - e.g. referencing the now-archaic way of referring to maladies with a definite article. As in, 'the influenza', 'the polio', 'the consumption', 'the grep'. (And I'd be shocked if nobody ever said 'the gout'!) It's a convention of these boards by now, and saying it without 'the' is by now awkward...
If that's the case, then I bow to convention. However, this does bring up the question of the intended audience of this comparison. Most people won't even know what the GOUT is, so maybe that should be explained.