21 July 2008
Taking A Life
"When it became clear he wasn't going to move out of the way, I closed my eyes, covered my face and held my breath.
"By the time we were stationary, four of my eight cars were in the platform and I was on autopilot. I told the passengers there would be a delay in opening the doors due to an 'incident', and was calling the line controller for assistance when I heard a tap on my cab door. A smart man inquired, 'Do you know there's a person under your train?' I looked at the blood on the windscreen momentarily before assuring him that, yes, I was aware.
"He paused for a heartbeat, looked at his watch and said, 'So, how long before we get on the move again?'"
(from "Last Year I Killed a Man," by Vaughan Thomas, in the Guardian, 19 July 2008, via Scott)
11:36 Posted in community , death , health and medicine , other people said it , travel and place | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
18 July 2008
Goose + Man Story
In the Boston Globe, a 5-page piece by Vicki Constantine Croke about making tough veterinary care decisions features a lovely story about Mark Podlaseck and his goose with cancer, Boswell, who seems to like The Iliad.
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13 July 2008
Don't Videotape in a Storm
Even from inside the house. Here's why.
15:50 Posted in art and photography , gardening and weather , health and medicine | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
08 July 2008
What You Need: One Nag, One Hysteric, One Geek, etc.
Assistant Defense Secretrary S. Ward Casscells says that advocates need to speak up when they feel that their war-wounded loved ones are being ill-served by military hospital staff:
"On your team you need a champion. ... You need a nag, a hysteric, someone with computer skills, and someone who can read the legal fine print. It's daunting."
(in "When Wounded Vets Come Home" by Barry Yeoman, AARP magazine, July/Aug. 2008)
14:40 Posted in health and medicine , other people said it , politics, government and law | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
05 July 2008
More Current and Passe Bits
I've been away since Sunday. Now I'm back.
** David Sedaris in The Austin Chronicle on the flap over a year ago about his 'embellished' stories:
"I take a story, put it on a scale, and say, 'OK, if this is 96 percent true, that's an acceptable ratio for ground beef, and it's more than acceptable for heroin and cocaine, so I'm going to call it nonfiction.'"
** In a fascinating article on Jacques Barzun in the 22 Oct. 2007 New Yorker, which I was reading at a friend's while away:
"Barzun wanted to do on the page what he did in the classroom: help the reader 'carry in his head something more than the unexamined history of his own life.' not because knowledge is inherently good or makes one a better person but because it fosters an independence of mind."
Barzun, who is over 100 years old, is quoted as saying: "Old age is like learning a new profession. And not one of your own choosing." He's refering to an irony of aging, that (now in the words of the article's author, Arthur Krystal) "when time is short, old age takes up a lot of time," what with "doctors' visits, tests to be suffered, results to wait for, ailments and medications to be studied."
For some this comes in old age; for some, much earlier (and for some, never).
** From Ruth Rendell's Not of the Flesh (2008), which I'm finishing this weekend, Inspector Wexford says something along the same lines:
"Modern medicine is wonderful. I just wish we didn't have to hear about it day in and day out. In the Middle Ages they say people brought God into the conversation all the time, and with the Victorians it was death. We talk about our insides."
06:00 Posted in books and reading , health and medicine , other people said it , pop culture , silliness and humour | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
24 June 2008
Tuesday Bits: Grief, What Moves Through Us, How Will We Be Remembered?
Some of what moves through us, and how it keeps us moving.
sunlight, air, water, nutrients, blood, instincts, our neurons' electric spark, sensations, perceptions, information, ideas, conceptions, conversations, emotions, communion...
I like it, and I think I like the colours he uses for the words even more.
---
Leroy Sievers (My Cancer) asks how you want people to remember you. My instinctual response is, I don't. Maybe, somehow, in these things Dave Pollard lists, above, that move through us, but without my name attached. Maybe I don't want to be remembered or missed in my absence so much as felt in my presence. Ask me another day and I might respond differently. Sometimes I feel anxious and sad when I think about so much personality and experience (each person's) removed from our midst in an instant, never to be replicated in exactly the same way (or so I believe) ... Of what use was it all, all this striving, all this becoming, all these relationships, all this unique composition of particles, waves, energy, self? Then I answer myself: of no use. That's a calming thought somehow.
I like this aspiration, in the comments: "That I went through my bout with cancer with ... a sick sense of humor." Another one says, "Off to get fresh bread for breakfast. Please remember that I did things like that."
---
Addicted to grief ... In the journal 10 May 2008 issue of Neurolmage, UCLA scientists report a study of grief that may help explain why some people "grieve and ultimately adapt, while others can't get over the loss of someone held dear." Grief may be an addiction; thinking about the loss may stimulate the reward region of the brain, which provides the griever with a kind of pleasure in the midst of pain. The reveries about the loved one may not be felt as emotionally satisfying, but they may be craved and re-enacted because of the reward response they trigger in the brain.
The lead author of the study, asst. professor of psychiatry Mary-Frances O'Connor, explains:
"'The idea is that when our loved ones are alive, we get a rewarding cue from seeing them or things that remind us of them. ... After the loved one dies, those who adapt to the loss stop getting this neural reward. But those who don't adapt continue to crave it, because each time they do see a cue, they still get that neural reward. Of course, all of this is outside of conscious thought, so there isn't an intention about it.'"
In the study, women whose mothers or sisters had died of breast cancer looked at either a photo of their loved one or a photo of a female stranger while their brains were scanned. They found that while both those with complicated grief (the kind that continues and can be debilitating) and with uncomplicated grief have activity in the pain network of the brain after looking at the photo of the loved one, only those with complicated grief showed significant activation in the nucleus accumbens, a region of the brain associated with reward.
What this synopsis of the study doesn't say is whether someone is chemically determined to have complicated grief with every loss or only with some losses.
Abstract and link to full report ($) here.
11:17 Posted in community , death , health and medicine , neuroscience, psychology, the mind , other people said it , simple living | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
20 June 2008
Friday Odds and Ends
I've read Leroy Sievers' My Cancer every morning for a couple of years. It's often a difficult way to start the day, and it's an important touchstone for me, too. His latest scans showed cancer in multiple places (9 June) and his story seems to be taking yet another turn. Many of the commenters also have cancer or care for someone with cancer.
______________________________________________
This blog entry, by Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution today, from and about the novel Atmospheric Disturbances, got my attention:
"'It may be that friendship is nourished on observation and conversation, but love is born from and nourished on silent interpretation. ... The beloved expresses a possible world unknown to us ... that must be deciphered.'
"That is Gilles Deleuze and it is the front quotation in the new novel Atmospheric Disturbances, by the very beautiful Rivka Galchen. The key premise of this novel is that a 51-year-old psychiatrist suddenly believes that his wife has been replaced with an exact look-alike; he refers to her as the Simulacrum. I read it straight through."
______________________________________________
I'm still reading Alain de Botton's Status Anxiety and about to begin Charles Tilly's Why: What Happens When People Give Reasons ... and Why. When I saw it recommended, it reminded me of a House MD episode, "It's a Wonderful Lie" (ep. 4x10), and House's assertion that the "only reason to give multiple reasons is that you're seasching for what the person wants to hear."
11:51 Posted in books and reading , health and medicine , neuroscience, psychology, the mind , other people said it , pop culture | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
18 June 2008
Night Owl to Morning Person?
Deepa Ranganathan at Slate gets doctor's advice for making the transition from late-night party girl to virtuous greeter of the dawn -- or at least, observer of the sun while it's still in the eastern sky ...
Fun article. She speaks of morning people, "who count among their ranks Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi, nearly every American president, and even Jesus. (See Mark 1:35: 'And in the morning, rising up a great while before day, he went out, and departed into a solitary place, and there prayed.') Night people are stuck with psychopaths like Adolf Hitler and Juan Arreola, the guy in Pennsylvania who nearly killed his girlfriend's 2-year-old last year, explaining to a judge, 'I'm not a morning person.'
The advice is pretty simple:
1. Choose a new wake-up time no more than two hours before your current wake-up time
2. Avoid bright light a few hours before bedtime. Wear yellow sunglasses if you have to.
3. Don't drink caffeine or alcohol after 3 p.m.
4. Take an over-the-counter melatonin supplement six or seven hours before the old bedtime each day.
5. On waking, immediately take a half-hour walk, so as to soak up the sun. Where I live, this experiment can take place every month of the year if the aspirational rising time is 7:45 or later, or if it's earlier, only during those months when the sun makes an appearance before you do. In any case, try to choose a time when the sun is not only up but also effective: "Outside, sleet fell from a heavy, gray sky. 'This is the kind of morning that makes you glad to be alive,' my boyfriend grumbled.")
(Note: I'm writing this while I'm wide awake and setting it to publish at 6 a.m. on Wed., when I won't be.)
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14 June 2008
Skunked
Our dog was skunked last night when she went out for her last pee of the night, around 9:15 p.m. She got it in the face and neck. At first she couldn't open her eyes and was foaming from the mouth. Though my spouse saw the varmint trying to escape our fence, he wasn't sure in the dark, seeing it at a distance from the rear with its tail held aloft, whether it was a skunk or a porcupine (it looked large), so we checked the dog's face for quills, and bites or bleeding, while she was still out on the deck. Finding none, and smelling a strong eau-de-Pepe-Le-Pew, we assumed a skunk spray.
We called the emergency vets, who told us to rinse her face over and over with warm water, which we did in the tub upstairs. We didn't really want to bring her in the house but it was dark outside, we don't have a portable tub or wading pool or anything large enough to use as one, and we weren't sure where the perpetrator was. After the warm water rinse -- by now her eyes were open and she'd stopped foaming -- we scrubbed her with a tomato sauce-water mixture. We are apparently quite ill-prepared for this sort of event: no tomato juice, no hydrogen peroxide and about a half-cup of white vinegar to our names.
Fortunately, it was warm and not rainy last night, so we opened most of the windows upstairs and some downstairs, using window and exhaust fans in some, but the house still stinks to high heaven today. Last night, it smelled like a chemical, a burning rubber kind of smell, not really the smell I associate with skunks. Much more concentrated and acrid. The forecast is not looking good for us, with rain and cooler temps expected from tonight through next Friday.
The dog slept in our room last night, on her foam bed covered double with washable material, but even the foam (three layers down) stinks today, so it's time for a new bed for her. The human furniture is of course off-limits to her for a while.
We humans also stink. I went to the Farmer's Market and grocery store today and heard people wondering if there was a skunk around. There was a fluffy black-and-white long-haired chihuahua running around at the Farmer's Market that caused some double-takes. :-)
My car stinks, though I sat in it only for about 8 minutes total. I'm running the 4th load of laundry now (so far, all dog-related) and have two more, at least, to go.
The dog went to the vet's this morning for a booster rabies shot; she was current on her rabies vaccine but they recommend a booster any time a pet has a run-in with a wild animal. She's now getting her second and third baths, with a mixture of white vinegar, baking soda and a little Dawn liquid detergent -- to neutralise the skunk's potent oil. The vet recommended this, or rather instead of vinegar, hydrogen peroxide, but though I bought some hydrogen peroxide earlier today -- along with white vinegar, gloves, sponges, and more baking soda -- we still don't have enough of it to do the trick, and the vinegar seems to be working well. We're keeping it away from her face. (The vinegar is also working well added to the laundry.)
Our dog is a short-haired shedding variety that doesn't get groomed. Her fur can't be shaved without her looking like a Gloucester Old Spots pig and leaving her prone to sunburn and other skin injury. Judging from other spots she's had shaved for medical procedures, the hair may not grow back, either.
The skunks are around, we think, because our neighbours on both sides have grubs, which skunks love. We have a lot of nightcrawlers in our lawn -- not sure whether that's a skunk food source, too. We don't have any garbage outside and thankfully, the skunks don't seem to be nesting under the deck.
Sunday Update: We gave her another bath yesterday using the hydrogen peroxide, baking soda, Dawn recipe linked below. She still stinks. Part of the problem is that most of the spray was on her face -- eyes, nose, mouth -- and that's where we can't wash much using the solution.
(Photo: The dog with a treat resting on her nose. One of her other tricks, besides disturbing skunks.)
Helpful de-skunking websites
What to do when your dog has been skunked (PetPlace.com) - our vet printed this out for us
The best way to deskunk your dog (Brian Retzler)
Solving problems with skunks (The Humane Society)
12:35 Posted in animals , gardening and weather , health and medicine , householding | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
10 June 2008
Colonoscopy
I had my first colonoscopy yesterday, due to some ongoing symptoms I won't divulge here. It wasn't nearly as bad as I expected based on what I had read online and heard in passing (so to speak ... so many puns available for this kind of thing ...). Reading about other people's colonoscopy experiences (especially this one; read it in reverse) did help me in preparing for my own, so here's my story.
The official instructions I received said that on the day before the procedure (i.e., Sunday, the day of the prep), I could have a light breakfast, plus as much clear liquid as I desired -- which included non-red/blue/purple jello and popsicles, black coffee and tea, and soup bouillion -- and then after taking the prep, only the clear fluids. Knowing that the intention of drinking a gallon (4 liters) of electrolyte solution -- the Golytely 'prep' -- was to thoroughly cleanse my bowels (whoo-ha!), I thought it might make sense to eat lightly for several days before the prep, to have less bowel 'material' to clear.
So, on Friday, three days pre-procedure, I had no breakfast, a lovely buffet lunch of mostly seafood and salads, and for dinner I split one small appetizer (a yummy crab fritter) with my spouse, and had a glass of white wine while listening to some jazzy music at a local venue.
Saturday, two days pre-procedure, I ate a very light and bland breakfast (2 scrambled eggs and half an English muffin), no lunch or snacks, and about 2 cups of rotini pasta with soy sauce and one soy hot dog with a little cheese for dinner, with a small glass of white wine. Again, pretty bland. No snacks afterwards but plenty of water and tea all day.
Sunday, the day of the dreaded prep, I had some black tea in the morning while hanging out in worship service, a little water, then nothing until THE PREP, which I started at 3, an hour before the time specified in my instructions. I usually go to bed early and was hoping to preserve my sleep as much as possible, without constant trips to the bathroom.
My prep was Golytely (get it?), the gallon of saline electrolyte solution to be drunk 8 oz. at a time, every 10 mins. Besides eating lightly and blandly, well ahead of time, I did several other things that I think helped the prep go smoothly:
* I had asked my nurse if a little Crystal Light could be mixed with it; the manufacturers' instructions say nothing can be added, but I had read online of people adding Crystal Light and that sounded good to me. She told me, off the record, that I could add up to one tub to the mixture; she recommended the lemonade flavour.
* I made the solution, with the Crystal Light Lemonade mixed in, the night before I needed to ingest it, so it had a good long time (about 20 hours) in the refrigerator chilling.
* I started drinking the Golytely at 3 p.m. I drank an 8 oz. glass and actually, it tasted fine to me. It was the hottest day we'd had here so far this year, in the mid 80s, and the solution was almost as refreshing as cold lemonade. Seriously. Nothing like as bad as I'd heard. Not soapy. Though my instructions said to drink it every 10 mins, I stretched it to 15 min. intervals.
I had my first serving of Golytely at 3, and the next seven servings -- I was measuring roughly, so it turned out that a serving for me was actually closer to 10 oz. -- every 15 mins. thereafter. The instructions are to drink each serving all at once, not sipping it, and that worked fine for me. But after two hours, with about 80 ounces inside me and with nothing coming out, I was feeling full to the brim with liquid. I wasn't nauseous, but I was rather bloated and I couldn't drink anymore, so I waited a half-hour, until 5:15, and chugged down another dose. Still nothing. I started Googling to find out how long it should take before the first bowel movement. The Golytely site said things should be moving in an hour. I was getting worried.
By the way, during the time I was drinking, I watched an episode of "House MD," walked around and weeded the garden, sat in the sun and read a book, did several crosswords, ran up and down the stairs doing the usual household things. In short, other than being tethered to the kitchen, I lived my usual life. I also did my regular half-hour weights workout right before starting the whole procedure.
At 5:30, with still nothing happening and no room to ingest more liquid, I called the hospital for the physician on call. By the time he called me back, about 45 mins. later, I could report success! Approximately 2 hours and 40 minutes after starting the prep (90 ounces in), it began to work its magic.
Not to go into too much detail, but magic it was! About 20 more oz. and 3 hours later (8:30ish), I was done. Even the first bowel movement was mostly liquid, and after the first four bowel movements, everything was pretty much clear. I had no cramps, no pain of any sort at any time. I ate an orange popsicle and some orange jello to celebrate, drank some water, watched a Poirot, and settled in to sleep.
I got up around 2 a.m. to go once more (very little), and from then until I got up around 7, my stomach made gurgling, burbling sounds that kept us pretty well awake. (The dog, as usual, slept fine.)
The instructions for procedure day (Monday) allowed 1-2 glasses of clear liquid but nothing within 2 hours of the procedure, which was scheduled for 12:15. I drank about 8 oz. water from 8-9 a.m., then nothing else but a stick or two of (non-red/purple/blue) sugarless gum, which I had cleared with the nurse. I was thirsty and restless, ready to get the colonoscopy over with. I worked in the garden, weeding and watering, took some photos, did a short workout, cleaned both toilets :-), and generally occupied myself until the golden hour.
We arrived at the clinic (a separate building near the hospital) at noon. I gave the receptionist the medical history form I'd completed and she gave me a form asking questions about the prep, including "Did you have a good result?" :-) It also asked whether I drank all the prep (no) and if no, how much did I drink. I drank about 110 ounces in total, a little more than 3 liters. We had a very short wait, of about 5 minutes, just long enough for me to witness a woman post-procedure who was shivering, her teeth chattering, and who said as she was led by the nurse through the room, "I was awake for the whole thing." Yikes! That's exactly what I didn't want to be.
After I'd undressed, donned the back-tying gown (made of rather heavy fabric) and the fun, colourful socks I'd brought with me (bring socks!), and stowed my belongings in a "tamper-proof" plastic bag, I met my prep nurse, Erica, whose manner was comforting, warm, and calm, and who gave me plenty of time to respond to her questions and to ask her questions about the procedure. She had me lie down comfortably on a wheeled cot, took my vitals (BP, pulse, temperature, O2 saturation; listened to heart and lungs), and went through my medical history and asked for clarification and elaboration of some of it (mainly about my arrythmia). She prepped and inserted an IV port in my hand, in a vein near the top knuckle of my right ring finger. I felt only the first little sting of the needle to find the vein, then nothing when she inserted the actual IV port. She hooked me up to a saline drip, which I couldn't feel.
I asked her about the Versed (Midazolam, a benzodiazapine) and Fentanyl (an opiate) I would be taking via the IV during the procedure, stressing that I wanted as much as they could give me so that I was not alert during the procedure. She said I'd be awake -- i.e., "breathing on your own," which to me isn't necessarily a sign of being awake, as I breathe on my own every night while I am asleep ... -- but that I would be comfortable and in no pain, of that she could assure me. (Previously, another nurse there, by phone, had told me that I would be awake and that I would know what was going on but that I wouldn't care.) As soon as she was finished and leaving the room, another nurse, Rachel, came in to wheel me in my comfy cot to the procedure room, which was filled with machines and monitors. Also cubbyholes labeled "large forceps," and such.
Rachel didn't have Erica's bedside manner -- she seemed sort of depressed to me, maybe she was just tired -- and didn't speak much as she got me situated, put the pulse thingy on my finger, and attached transmitters to me so they could monitor my cardiac function throughout. When I mentioned my desire to avoid pain, she said I might feel some cramping when the scope went around corners. That was (scary) news to me, after what Erica and the other nurse had said. I could see on the monitor that I was slated to receive "moderate sedation," which I guess is the norm.
Erica came in, squeezed my shoulder, and wished me good luck.
Geoff, another nurse, came in and chatted too loudly and casually for the psychic space I was in just then. I felt vulnerable and anxious, which was partly from not knowing what would come next, and also, I think, from what felt like the subtly oppressive and overbearing presence of the room. What kept me from getting really worked up was my tiredness, from lack of calories and nutrients, and from lack of sleep the night before. I just didn't have a lot of resistance available. Geoff and Rachel did engage me in conversation as we waited about 20 minutes for the doctor to show up. (They had to page her.) We talked about our dogs, mostly (after their question, asked separately by each, "What do you do for work?" fell flat), and then Rachel and I talked about how we each came to live where we're living. At some point, I think when she said that her parents divorced when she was 18, Rachel reminded me of my youngest sister, and as I was making that connection, I saw my pulse drop to about 70. We also found that we both had family living in the same very small town about 500 miles away. Small world.
The doctor (Dr. S.) entered, sat near me, and briskly began to tell me all the bad things that could happen. She does about 1,000 colonoscopies per year and finds about 40% of people have polyps. Removing polyps can be dangerous: from 2% to 4% of people have complications from polyp removal that might require emergency surgery or another scheduled colonoscopy to remedy. She told me that there is a 5% polyp miss rate and a .5% cancer miss rate.
She also brought up the fact that I had called her office last week to talk with her nurse about why I needed this procedure. (Sidebar: That nurse, Chris, was great, chatted with me for about 20 minutes, went over my medical history, explained why based on that history she thought the colonoscopy was needed -- which my primary care physician had not done and for which she wanted to charge me $100 for a phone consult! Chris was reassuring, detailed and forthcoming in her information and tips.)
Dr. S. said that based on my recent medical history, she thought I needed this done. Her tone seemed mildly reprimanding to me. By this time, of course, I was in the room, seconds from the procedure; obviously, her nurse's arguments last week had been persuasive or I wouldn't have been there. Why reiterate now, except to berate? Maybe she meant it as reassurance, but her manner was not reassuring, it was aloof and businesslike. As she spoke, she was rapidly making notes, not looking at me except briefly every now and then. She never smiled, or I couldn't detect it if she did. She seemed to be reading a script, which I'm sure she was, performing five or so of these things each working day. I hoped that she was like my dogs' former vet, a man well-known both for his excellent veterinary care and for his dismal people skills.
For about 5 minutes, I just lay there while Dr. S. did something at a terminal behind me. By now (in fact, since shortly before the doctor came in), I had a little oxygen nose tube, which was irritating. I kept taking it out and trying to readjust it so it felt better. Finally it did. I heard Dr. S. tell Rachel and Geoff that I was ASA1, or something like that, and I asked what it meant. Rachel told me that level 1 meant that I was at the lowest sedation risk. I asked her to give me all she could. :-) Then she did.
Geoff asked me turn onto my left side, and he removed the blanket and gown from my backside. I mentioned that I have sciatica in my left leg and he asked me if the position was hurting. It wasn't and I remember thinking that if it was, it wouldn't be for long! The last thing I recall is either Rachel or Geoff asking me how I was feeling. The first time I said I was a little dizzy or woozy, the second time I said I was getting sleepy (or maybe vice versa), and then I went into the happy world. I'm not sure of the exact time but it was about 1 p.m. (I think they paged Dr. S. at 12:40 or so.)
The next thing I was aware of was being in the prep/recovery room again and being asked about my spouse coming in with me. I think I told the nurse (another one, Holly) his name, so they could call him in the waiting room, and then he was there. It was 2 p.m. I was feeling groggy, sort of very sleepy and a little dizzy. Not too unpleasant. I was still hooked up to the IV when my spouse came in (he says -- I don't recall). Holly told me that they hadn't found anything of concern during the colonoscopy and she gave me some papers. She told me no driving or alcohol for 24 hours (the first nurse, Erica, also told me this). She unhooked me and said I could get dressed and go when I wanted.
I'm missing parts of this because what I remember next is looking down on the bed and seeing my clothes in their "tamper-proof" plastic bag, and I don't remember standing up. It was sort of like being in a dream, when you can't recall how you got from point A to point B. I remember that I was unsteady standing up but I managed to get dressed, apparently, per spouse, without help. I remember leaving the room, thanking Erica, who was standing in the hallway outside the room, and feeling quite unsteady on my pins as we took the elevator down and walked to the car. I was a bit clammy, like when I have a minor case of the flu, and when we hit the outside air (still in the mid-80s), I felt too warm and slightly nauseous.
The feeling cleared quickly and from then on, it was clear sailing. Oh, did I mention that I had not one moment of gas or bloating (that I'm aware of) after the colonoscopy? My spouse had had a half-hour of it after his so I was expecting some, but I felt great immediately. The only lingering effect is a bruise on the inside of my right knee, which must have come from the pressure of it on my left leg, due to the position I was in for the procedure.
When we got home, my spouse encouraged me to eat but I was too sleepy. I went to bed from 2:30-4:30, woke up feeling great, and we went out to dinner, where I had more mostly bland food (ravioli, small salad, diet Coke). Then we took a short walk downtown and I had most of a glass of iced tea at a cafe. We ran a couple of errands while walking, and when we came back to the car to go home, I sat on something we had bought a half-hour earlier and thrown onto the front seat (a box of pasta), which is unusual behaviour for me -- not to recall that something was in that seat, and not to notice that it was -- and a sign that I was still a bit foggy, I think.
I had a couple of small bowel movements in the evening, mostly liquid. My stomach gurgled off and on. I slept well and woke up very early (5 a.m.), thanks to my deep naps of yesterday.
This morning I had my usual soy sausage, tea, and juice with vitamins. My stomach is still gurgling from time to time but I'm feeling fine.
Based on my experience, and remembering that I am not a medical professional!, I recommend, if you are in good health, either juice-fasting or eating a light and bland diet for at least 2 full days prior to the procedure (3 or 4 days of light eating might be better). Add Crystal Light to Golytely -- that's unofficial, of course, as the Golytely people say it's verboten. (NuLytely has its own "flavour" packs -- from what I read online, orange is the best bet.) In any case, make sure the stuff is thoroughly chilled. You might not have to drink all the liquid, if your movements are clear (straw-coloured with little particulate matter). Stay near the toilet for about 5-6 hours from the time you start the prep but don't be surprised if it takes 2-3 hours to get things moving. My urges to go weren't sudden but they were pretty constant, about every 15 mins for a couple of hours. Bring socks with you to the procedure, especially in winter (but many medical centers are cold year-round). Don't plan to do anything much for at least 3-4 hours afterwards, and in fact, another instruction from Holly was that I shouldn't do anything requiring judgment for the rest of the day/evening, like cooking. I did actually cook three things around 8 p.m. without any trouble, but my spouse was there in case I spaced.
All in all, a pretty good experience, one I wouldn't mind repeating, and I can't say that about many medical procedures.
17 June update : So, I'm trolling around online, now that I have the official report of my colonoscopy and its findings in hand, curious about how much Fentanyl and Versed other people got. I got 200 mcg Fentanyl and 10 mg Versed "in small aliquots" (bit by bit through an IV), and based on my online research (e.g.), that seems to be a lot, like twice the normal dose, for which I am very grateful. As noted in my procedure report, "She tolerated the procedure well." (I hope that's not some doctor shorthand for "It was awful but she can't remember and we're not telling.")
Anyway, came across this hilarious and factual-sounding colonoscopy story from poopreport.com and felt it would be a disservice to keep it to myself.
09:00 Posted in health and medicine | Permalink | Comments (4) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
27 May 2008
House Rules Booklist: If You Like House MD ...
... you might like these books, suggested by members of various library listservs.
The query I sent out was:
I'm looking for fiction that will appeal to someone who likes the FOX TV show, House MD, starring Hugh Laurie. The appeal factors could include medical diagnostics or medical mystery, interesting dynamics among medical professionals, cynical smart doctors, close co-dependent friendships between male doctors or men generally, an underlying belief that 'everyone lies,' and so on.
Here are the suggested authors, series, and titles. I haven't read any yet. I'd love additions, and comments if you have read them:
Ariana Franklin (pseudonym for Diana Norman). New historical thriller series set in the 12th century about cynical, smart female physician Adelia Aguilar who is brought to England to solve murder mysteries for King Henry II. She's a coroner. First in the series: Mistress in the Art of Death (2007). Last (and second): The Serpent's Tale (2008).
Eileen Dreyer. Standalone medical mystery thrillers featuring cynical, world-weary nurses and EMTs. Also writes a series featuring Molly Burke, forensic nurse and death investigator in St. Louis, MO. First in series: Bad Medicine (1995). Last: Head Games (2005).
Sequence (2006) and The Silent Assassin (2007) by Lori Andrews, medical thrillers featuring geneticist and forensic specialist Dr. Alexandra Blake, described as smart and edgy. (Reviews compare the books to the popular TV series NCIS).
CL Grace's series featuring Kathyrn Swinbrooke, a female doctor in medieval times when only men could be doctors. Titles: 1. A Shrine of Murders (1992); 2. The Eye of God (1994); 3. The Merchant of Death (1995); 4. The Book of Shadows (1996); 5. Saintly Murders (2001); 6. A Maze of Murders (2003); and 7. A Feast of Poisons (2004). Some romance. (Grace is a pseudonym for writer P.C. Doherty.)
Echo Heron's medical thriller series featuring nurse Adele Monsarrat, who has a quirky sense of humor. Titles are Pulse (1998), Panic (1998), Paradox (1998) and Fatal Diagnosis (2000).
Lifelines (2008) by C. J. Lyons. Set in a Pittsburgh hospital, involves the new attending physician whose first night doesn't go well. When she's accused of negligence in the death of the son of the Chief of Neurosurgery, she starts investigating to save her career.
The Bugman novels by Tim Downs: 1. Shoofly Pie, 2. Chop Shop, and 3. First the Dead. The main character, Dr. Nick Polchak, is a forensic entomologist in North Carolina who helps solve crimes based on what the bugs say. He has a wry sense of humor. The books are marketed as Christian fiction but are not preachy; values are implicit, not explicit.
06:00 Posted in booklists , media, film, tv, radio , health and medicine | Permalink | Comments (2) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
06 May 2008
What I Did and Didn't Do
There's a line in a song I like that goes "I've grown so tired of grieving for what I did and what I did not do." It's been running through my head a lot lately and it feels like grief just saying it.
In some churches, there's a prayer asking for forgiveness for sins of omission and sins of commission: "in your compassion forgive us our sins, known and unknown, things done and left undone." Is to ask forgiveness the same as to grieve? Is there a time factor at work, so that perhaps grieving comes first, then asking for forgiveness, and then absence of grief as I feel absolved; or perhaps grief, a recognition of wrong or imbalance, is sometimes simultaneous with confession?; and likewise, if I don't feel my grief, and/or don't ask forgiveness, will I continue to grieve as an ongoing process, perhaps lodged in my body as much as my heart or mind?
I'm asking because I was reading the other day that some people think resentment -- holding onto wrongs, attaching to them, perhaps even nursing them -- causes cancer (Louise Hay for one, here for another; just google 'cancer' and 'resentment' and you'll see). I don't think I'd ever say that emotion or even attachment to emotion causes physical cancer, but I think that getting stuck emotionally probably contributes in some way to an overall lack of embodied well-being.
But then I thought that maybe grief, and in particular grief about one's own actions -- or perhaps it has more the quality of regret, shame, disappointment, remorse -- might affect well-being as strongly as resentment. (And maybe they're related, concurrent.)
Even if I don't go over and over in my mind or heart some wrong I feel I've done, some good I feel I'm not doing, there is still a sense for me sometimes that I'm always being called to account for the moral right and wrong that I've done, and, even more, the right and wrong that I continue to do. How much of that underlying sense comes from the American/Puritan emphasis on individual responsibility, (Amercan) Christian teaching, the 'punishment' tendency of the current culture, my own genetic predisposition and upbringing, who knows. I know I'm not alone because I hear a lot of other people voice the same thing, though more often in talking about a sense of personal duty as necessary, meaningful, and fulfilling than in talking about how wearisome such a sense of duty feels.
The line from the song captures so well how it feels to me: the energy-drain, the resentment, the grief I feel about feeling that I have to be always grieving my imperfect actions. It's oppressive, heavy, enervating.
I find some solace, strangely, in the prayer of confession, even as it directs my attention yet again to what I'm doing wrong. And I find solace in James Alison's discussion of forgiveness. He calls it, in On Being Liked, "a process of undergoing 'being undone' from various traps, dead ends and ensnarlments," and thus being able to participate in being (re)created. That's how Buddhist meditation feels to me, too, a way of 'being undone' from ensnarement.
Alison says that faith is not about morality or about what we do: "It's a receiving something. It's someone having done something for us." It's being able to relax in the regard of someone coming towards us, someone who likes us, someone always offering us friendship.
I know the partyline on confession is that it can keep us from holding on to past sins of omission or commission, that it offers relief from the grief, but I'm after something else here. There's something in the whole standard of good and bad, in the need to measure oneself against that standard, that seems counter to who I hope and even believe God is. (And as I write that, a flood of Bible passages come to mind to counter my hope. I have another hope, thanks to Girardians, that we've read a lot of that stuff inaccurately over these many years.)
I might phrase my 'belief' as "All have fallen short, and all are falling short, so why measure? Does it matter exactly how far short I am? And striving to improve my position vis a vis that standard by doing what I think are good acts -- is there a point to that? Is faith really about morality? What if God just wants to give me something, just wants me to receive it lightly, not to grasp it but to let it undo me, and in being undone, to live life more fully, with all the passion, participation, presence, and risk that implies?"
Even that, curse my heritage, leaves me with a standard against which to measure myself, which is, to what extent is what I'm doing life-focused, to what extent death-focused? Am I acting in the flow or not? "Am I alive enough?" becomes just another way of asking myself "Am I good enough?"
Somehow, it's the measuring that prompts the grief, and the weariness, and the dissonance, and yet everywhere around us, including in religious teachings and practice, there's the encouragement and often the obligation to measure. I think there's another way, another way to be alive without the measuring. In fact, I think the only way to be alive is sans measurement. I know it for sure when I am so involved, so 'part of,' that the present enlarges and I have no sense of time passing. That is the 'flow' that so many speak of (I first read about it in Mihály Csíkszentmihályi's book about it), where measuring falls away, is undone, and something that can compassionately accommodate both "what I did" and "what I did not do" is created, discovered, revealed.
13:45 Posted in community , health and medicine , neuroscience, psychology, the mind , theology, spirituality, philosophy | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
03 May 2008
The Contagion of Violence
Long cover article titled Blocking the Transmission of Violence by Alex Kotlowitz (author of There Are No Children Here: The Story of Two Boys Growing Up in the Other America, 1992) in the NYT Magazine today about CeaseFire, a group of mostly ex-cons working in Chicago and a few other cities to contain the contagion of violence. The key point: violence is contagious, like an infectious disease:
"THE STUBBORN CORE of violence in American cities is troubling and perplexing. Even as homicide rates have declined across the country -- in some places, like New York, by a remarkable amount -- gunplay continues to plague economically struggling minority communities. For 25 years, murder has been the leading cause of death among African-American men between the ages of 15 and 34, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which has analyzed data up to 2005. And the past few years have seen an uptick in homicides in many cities. Since 2004, for instance, they are up 19 percent in Philadelphia and Milwaukee, 29 percent in Houston and 54 percent in Oakland.
"The traditional response has been more focused policing and longer prison sentences, but law enforcement does little to disrupt a street code that allows, if not encourages, the settling of squabbles with deadly force.
"CeaseFire tries to deal with these quarrels on the front end." 'Violence interrupters "suss out smoldering disputes and to intervene before matters get out of hand. ... [It] doesn’t necessarily aim to get people out of gangs -- nor interrupt the drug trade. It's almost blindly focused on one thing: preventing shootings.
"CeaseFire’s founder, Gary Slutkin, is an epidemiologist and a physician who for 10 years battled infectious diseases in Africa. He says that violence directly mimics infections like tuberculosis and AIDS, and so, he suggests, the treatment ought to mimic the regimen applied to these diseases: go after the most infected, and stop the infection at its source.
"'For violence, we’re trying to interrupt the next event, the next transmission, the next violent activity,' Slutkin told me recently. 'And the violent activity predicts the next violent activity like H.I.V. predicts the next H.I.V. and TB predicts the next TB.' Slutkin wants to shift how we think about violence from a moral issue (good and bad people) to a public health one (healthful and unhealthful behavior)."
About violence and murder, Slutkin is convinced that "longer sentences and more police officers had made little difference. 'Punishment doesn't drive behavior,' he told me. 'Copying and modeling and the social expectations of your peers is what drives your behavior.'"
The interruptors, Slutkin says, "have to deal with how to get someone to save face. In other words, how do you not do a shooting if someone has insulted you, if all of your friends are expecting you to do that? ... In fact, what our interrupters do is put social pressure in the other direction."
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About this contagion of violence, and its cure, Girardians have a lot to say:
** Rene Girard, in "Are the Gospels Mythical?" talks about the contagion with reference to Peter's denial of Jesus:
"Peter spectacularly illustrates this mimetic contagion. When surrounded by people hostile to Jesus, he imitates their hostility. He obeys the same mimetic force, ultimately, as Pilate and Herod. Even the thieves crucified with Jesus obey that force and feel compelled to join the crowd. And yet, I think, the Gospels do not seek to stigmatize Peter, or the thieves, or the crowd as a whole, or the Jews as a people, but to reveal the enormous power of mimetic contagion -- a revelation valid for the entire chain of murders stretching from the Passion back to 'the foundation of the world.'"
** James Alison, in a 2007 lecture entitled "Love Your Enemy: Within a Divided Self," talks about Jesus's command in Matthew 5, "Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you":
"The instruction is not one about being a doormat, it is one about how to be free. 'Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you' means 'do not be towards them as they are towards you, for then you will be run by them, and you and they will become ever more functions of each other, grinding each other down towards destruction. ... Instead of that, allow your identity to be given to you by your Father who is in heaven, who is not in any sort of reciprocity with them, and is able to be towards them as one holding them in being and loving them, without reacting against them.'"
Alison says that to change the pattern of our desires so wholly requires prayer, a recognition of our similarity with our enemies; this will "'eventually empower you to be towards your enemy as God is. Thus you will be free of any contagion from their violence towards you'."
Alison also speaks, in Blindsided by God: Reconciliation from the underside (2006), of the Holy Spirit's power to operate "neither from fear, nor from necessity, nor from togetherness, nor from contagion, nor from hate, nor from vengeance, nor from survival, nor from any other of the structuring forces of our society. And so it enables the person who is moved by it and recreated by it to begin to swim spaciously in the midst of violence without that violence infecting them."
** Drasko Dizdar, citing both Girard and Alison in his paper "Leaving the Temple" in the Australian EJournal of Theology (2004), says:
"Humanity is, indeed, so easily misled -- and not least by those who 'come in my name, saying: I am! – leading many astray' (Mark 13:6). The contagion of violence, working through fear, anxiety, indignation, anger, resentment, vengeance, etc, infects all who are not immunised against it: 'But when you hear of wars and rumours of wars, do not be terrorised (throeisthe); this must happen, but the end is not yet' (Mark 13:7). Maintaining peaceful balance in a storm of contagious violence is Christ's gift...."
** G. B. Caird (in Richard B. Hays, chapter "Revelation" in The Moral Vision of the New Testament, quoted here) explains the contagion, expressed in the book of Revelation, this way:
"Evil is self-propagating. Like the Hydra, the many-headed monster can grow another head when one has been cut off. When one man wrongs another, the other may retaliate, bear a grudge, or take his injury out on a third person. Whichever he does, there are now two evils where before there was one; and a chain reaction is started, like the spreading of a contagion. Only if the victim absorbs the wrong and so puts it out of currency, can it be prevented from going any further."
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The work of CeaseFire seems to be to convince the victims to imitate another model, to absorb the disease, to keep each other from reacting against 'the enemy,' and thus to keep the violent contagion from spreading and eventually to free the community from the disease.
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Read the article for more details about the violence interruptors, why they turn from violent perpetrators to interruptors, how they operate (e.g., they "respond to every shooting and stabbing victim taken to the hospital"), founder Slutkin's background, the impact of CeaseFire on communities, its struggles for funding, etc.
20:40 Posted in community , crime , death , girardian anthropology , health and medicine , other people said it , politics, government and law , pop culture , theology, spirituality, philosophy , travel and place | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
29 April 2008
I said I was an addict -- I didn't say I had a problem
Watched most of the first season of House MD in the past two days:
Cameron: Is that rhetorical?
House: No, it just seems that way because you can't think of an answer. (Pilot)
"I'm bad at search parties and I'm bad at sitting around looking nervous doing nothing." (Paternity)
Wilson: You want to come over for Christmas dinner?
House: You're Jewish.
Wilson: Hanukkah dinner. What do you care? It's food, it's people.
House: No thanks.
Wilson: Maybe I'll come to your place.
House: Your wife doesn't mind being alone at Christmas?
Wilson: I'm a doctor, she's used to being alone. [House raises his eyebrows] I don't want to talk about it.
House [quickly]: Neither do I. (Damned if you Do)
Wilson: "I'm not gonna date a patient's daughter."
House: "Very ethical. Of course, most married men would say they don't date at all." (Fidelity)
"Life sucks. Your life sucks more than most. It's not as bad as some, which is depressing all by itself." (DNR)
Wilson to House: "You know how some doctors have the Messiah complex - they need to save the world? You've got the Rubik's complex; you need to solve the puzzle" (DNR)
House: How do I abuse you?
Foreman: How do you not? If I make a mistake...
House: I hold you accountable, so what?
Foreman: Dr. Hamilton forgives, he's capable of moving on.
House: That is not what he does.
Foreman: I screwed up his case. He told me...
House: He never said you were forgiven. I was there -- he said it was not your fault.
Foreman: So?
House: So, it was. You took a chance. You did something great. You were wrong, but it was still great. You should feel great that it was great. You should feel like crap that it was wrong. That's the difference between him and me. He thinks that you do your job, and what will be will be. I think that what I do and what you do matters. He sleeps better at night. He shouldn't. (DNR)
Wilson: "Did your pager really just go off, or are you ditching the conversation?"
House: "Why can't both be true?" (Histories)
"I take risks, sometimes patients die. But not taking risks causes more patients to die, so I guess my biggest problem is I've been cursed with the ability to do the math." (Detox)
"Very noble gesture. My favorite kind - dramatic, yet completely empty." (Sports Medicine)
House to Wilson: "I'm not the cancer doctor who's lying about the cancer dinner." (Sports Medicine)
House to Cameron: "I'm twice your age, I'm not great looking, I'm not charming, I'm not even nice. What I am is what you need. I'm damaged." (Love Hurts)
House (talking about himself and visions he had): "The patient was technically dead for over a minute...."
Wilson: "Do you think he was dead? Do you think those experiences were real?"
House: "Define real. They were real experiences. What they meant, personally, I choose to believe that the white light people sometimes see, visions, this patient saw: they're all just chemical reactions that take place when the brain shuts down."
Foreman: "You choose to believe that?"
House: "There's no conclusive science. My choice has no practical relevance to my life, I choose the outcome I find more comforting."
Cameron: "You find it more comforting to believe that this is it?"
House: "I find it more comforting to believe that this isn't simply a test." (Three Stories)
If you can fake sincerity, you can fake pretty much anything. (Honeymoon)
Wilson to House: "Be yourself. Cold, uncaring, distant."
House to Wilson: "Please, don't put me on a pedestal." (Honeymoon)
15:00 Posted in media, film, tv, radio , health and medicine , other people said it , silliness and humour | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
16 April 2008
Getting Cancer, the Natural (Usual) Way
An article in Slate yesterday by Darshak Sanghavi (pediatric cardiologist and professor at U. Mass Medical School) asks why the U.S. and Europe focus our rhetoric and resources on some uncommon and/or unproven causes of cancer rather than trying to prevent and better screen for the many natural causes of cancer.
In part, he says, it's because of a popular (but false) motif, that "the natural world is less toxic and more healthful than the industrial one," so that avoiding cancer, it seems, can be accomplished by buying organic, unpasteurized, and more 'natural' foods and cosmetics:
"Unwittingly, we've seriously impeded cancer prevention with this not-so-useful distinction between the natural and artificial. It's distracted us from the uncomfortable truth that most cancers are caused by the natural environment around us. As a result, we expend great effort and ink on low-yield strategies to prevent cancer, even though the better ones lie within our grasp."
Sanghavi talks about some 'artificial' sources of very few cancers (asbestos, DES, Alar, and folic acid) and a few of the most common natural causes of cancer: UV-A rays of the sun, Helicobacter pylori bacteria, Hepatitis B, the human papilloma virus, and exposure to a mold product called aflatoxin.
He ends by suggesting that we've been approaching cancer prevention as something within our individual control, just another consumer shopping challenge, when actually it's vaccines, large-scale agricultural reform, and regular screening that would reduce cancer deaths:
"Our scattershot approach to preventing cancer subscribes to the cult of personal responsibility, albeit with a recent eco-friendly twist: To really help themselves, goes the thinking, people must simply take charge of their health and avoid cancer-causing, artificial products. Somewhat insidiously, we're starting to believe that cancer mostly is prevented by informing individuals to change their consumption habits -- not by proactive, broad-based public-health measures like widespread vaccination or agricultural reform.."
13:35 Posted in death , earthcare and environment , food and drink , health and medicine | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
07 April 2008
An Energy Collage
Don't miss Jill Bolte Taylor, a neuroanatomist, talking about her stroke at TED. She's dynamic and what she has to say is fascinating for anyone with a brain, literally.
I love her distinctions between the left and right hemispheres, which are quite different from and more succinct than anything I had read or heard before about their differences. She describes the left hemisphere of the brain as working like a serial port, linear and methodical, and the right side as working like a parallel port, experiencing everything as a sort of sensory energy collage. Then (here's where it gets interesting), she says that the right side is 'in the moment' all the time, and thus in the flow of what is happening now, in flow with all other energy on the planet, so that there are no boundaries, no separation between things, and everything is present tense, sensory, elemental, energy. The left side takes this energy collage it's presented with and immediately begins a process of categorising and organising the data, relating it to the experience of the past and the potential of the future.
She also says that the left brain is where the sense of "I" originates, the ego, the idea that "I" am separate from other things: The left side is "that little voice that says to me, 'I am. I am.' And as soon as my left hemisphere says to me 'I am,' I become separate. I become a single solid individual separate from the energy flow around me and separate from you." From the right brain's perspective, 'I'm' in the flow with all other energy, not a separate entity with boundaries.
(I can't help but consider this from a Girardian perspective, from the very basic rivalry/mimesis of self and other that Girard posits and which feels true to my experience and observation -- why does the left brain have so much authority for most of us, for culture? Her comments also make me think of G-d's "I am that I am" or "I shall be that I shall be" when Moses asks G-d's name -- is that a separation-making statement or is it an expansion of self into all things?)
Jill's stroke affected her left side, shutting it down, so that even in the early minutes of it she couldn't see where her arm ended and the wall began, because there weren't boundaries between the two: "Because the atoms and the molecules of my arm blended with the atoms and molecules of the wall. And all I could detect was this energy." She couldn't read her business card because she could only see the pixels that make up the lettering and numbers, and she couldn't make meaning of the pixels. She spent a lot of time trying to match the shape of the squiggles she could see on the card to the shape of the squiggles on the telephone dial (so she could call her office for help). This reminds me of dreams I've had, with episodes exactly like this.
Her description of finding nirvana in the hospital -- a huge feeling of expansiveness, an overwhelming sense of peace -- reminds me of how people sometimes talk about the psychosis that is mania; and it also reminds me of how I have felt near the ocean, on the beach sifting sand through my hands, watching birds, in gardens, meditating, dreaming, writing (even though it's using language, that left-brain tool), looking at art (there was a modern painting on the lower level of the National Gallery's East Wing that affected me this way in February, and I don't know what it was called or who painted it), listening to music, watching movies, in conversation with someone, making love. It's how I almost always feel when travelling on the train, like I am big and don't know or care where I end.
Jill's talk ends this way:
"So who are we? We are the life force power of the universe, with manual dexterity and two cognitive minds. And we have the power to choose, moment by moment, who and how we want to be in the world. Right here right now, I can step into the consciousness of my right hemisphere where we are -- I am -- the life force power of the universe, and the life force power of the 50 trillion beautiful molecular geniuses that make up my form. At one with all that is. Or I can choose to step into the consciousness of my left hemisphere. where I become a single individual, a solid, separate from the flow, separate from you. I am Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, intellectual, neuroanatomist. These are the 'we' inside of me.
"Which would you choose? Which do you choose? And when? I believe that the more time we spend choosing to run the deep inner peace circuitry of our right hemispheres, the more peace we will project into the world and the more peaceful our planet will be. And I thought that was an idea worth spreading."
A powerful message.
The transcript is here but the video is better.
Jill's website is here.
(For 'Six Feet Under' fans: Jill had the same kind of stroke that Nate Fisher had, due to an AVM)
20:35 Posted in community , dreams , girardian anthropology , health and medicine , neuroscience, psychology, the mind | Permalink | Comments (1) | Email this
02 April 2008
Druids Back in the News
At long last.
In the Guardian: "The Lourdes of ancient Britain? Dig aims to reveal Stonehenge's purpose":
"The first excavation for more than a generation at Stonehenge began yesterday, looking for evidence that the most famous prehistoric monument in the world was the Lourdes of the bronze age, where the sick and troubled sought healing from the supernatural power of bluestones brought from west Wales. ...
"Special permission had to be obtained from English Heritage, guardian of the stones, and the government for the first excavation since 1964. Druids were also invited to give their blessing to disrupting the long sleep of the stones."
You can follow the dig at the BBC or at Smithsonian. And more on Stonehenge itself at the Guardian (interactive).
As long as we're on the topic, check out Eddie Izzard on Stonehenge. "Building a henge, are we? That's a fantastic idea!" (although apparently a 'henge' in itself is actually the mound and ditch, sans stones.)
09:25 Posted in health and medicine , theology, spirituality, philosophy , travel and place | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
31 March 2008
New York Stories: The Death Stakes, Table Waiting, and Driving in the City
Several today:
In the NYT, an article today about people who eschew public transportation in NYC, although "80 percent of the people who drive into Manhattan during the workday already have access to mass transit that would take no more than 15 minutes longer." Some of the reasons for driving even with cheap and reliable public transportation available: include enhanced freedom and flexibility; "the ability to avoid dealing with other people;" the car is more comfortable (plusher, wired for sound and ... video?); dislike of waiting, standing, and "the hassle" of the subway (prefering the hassle of driving, finding a place to park, having to feed the meter multiple times); a desire for a few minutes more sleep; dislike of walking; and transporting a dog.
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In the Telegraph today, Phoebe Damrosch provides tantalising bits of her experience as a head waiter in a posh and celebrity-frequented NYC restaurant. Her book about it, Service Included: Four-Star Secrets of an Eavesdropping Waiter, was published in September. Training for the job was a rigorous 3-month indoctrination into rules, cooking procedures and ingredients, "philosophies, uniforms, elaborate rituals and an unspoken code of honour."
Allergies were ubiquitous: "When we learnt in the pre-shift meeting that, due to a serious allergy, the host [a famous comedian] requested there be no truffles on the menu, a colleague leaned over and whispered, 'What percentage of the population even knows it's allergic to truffles?'" and "Celebrities love to be allergic to things, including any or all of the following: nuts, fish with scales, fish without scales, shellfish, all fish, wheat, dairy, sugar, chocolate, egg yolks, duck eggs, onions, garlic, pineapple, mango, peppers, fennel -- the list goes on. Either that or they are so bored by good food that they have to spice it up by asking for an all-mushroom tasting menu (as a famous newsreader did)."
More at Super Chef, The Amateur Gourmet, NYT review.
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This one's not about NYC per se :-) but after watching a few episodes of The Real Housewives of New York City -- where there's pathetically cut-throat competition to look young, to seem hip, to have status -- I feel sure it applies. It's Michael Kinsley in The New Yorker writing about the competition among Boomers, in particular, for "longest life" and "shortest death." (Kinsley himself is 57 and has Parkinson's disease.)
"What's more, of all the gifts that life and luck can bestow -- money, good looks, love, power -- longevity is the one that people seem least reluctant to brag about. In fact, they routinely claim it as some sort of virtue -- as if living to ninety were primarily the result of hard work or prayer, rather than good genes and never getting run over by a truck. Maybe the possibility that the truck is on your agenda for later this morning makes the bragging acceptable. The longevity game is one that really isn't over till it's over."
"And even if you add a few years through your own initiative, by doing all the right things in terms of diet, exercise, sleep, vitamins, and so on, why is that to your moral credit? Extending your own life expectancy is the most selfish motive imaginable for doing anything. Do it, by all means. I do. But for heaven’s sake don’t take a bow and expect applause."
He also points out that it's not a zero-sum game; if I die young, that doesn't mean you live longer. What's odd is that it seems like a zero-sum game. Reading the obituaries can imbue the completely false belief that because these folks have died, and particularly if they are younger than I am, then I'm spared. I'm alive, they're dead, I win. Weird. Kinsley does compare the competition to live longest to a tontine, an estate-planning device well-known to Agatha Christie fans, where "the amount you got back depended on how many of your fellow-investors you outlived." In this case, outliving someone else doesn't ensure that you will be long-lived (much less happily lived) but you'll be rewarded with a warm feeling of having out-endured your friends, enemies and peers, even as you miss them and wish they were still around.
As far as the short death goes, I must be the orderly type: "Or, if you’re the orderly type, you might prefer a brisk but not sudden slide into oblivion. Take a couple of months, pain-free but weakening in some vague nineteenth-century way." Sounds good to me. Of course, Kinsley reminds us, "The government statistics on how people die are lavish and fascinating. Let's forget for a moment that it's a catalogue you can't really shop from" (other than the suicide option).
Kinsley says, "I was around fifty when I went public about having Parkinson's, and the effect was like turning sixty." I love that sentence.
He goes on, "A person who is sixty and healthy almost surely will live many more years. But sixty is about the age when people stop being surprised if you look old or feel sick or drop dead. (It's another decade or so before they stop pretending to be surprised.)"
He says that "only in life's last chapter do the differences [in how old we feel and are perceived to be] get enormous. We are not shocked to see a seventy-one-year-old hobbling on a cane, or bedridden in a nursing home, and we are not shocked to see a seventy-one-year-old running for President. The huge variety of possible outcomes -- all of them falling within the range considered 'normal' -- makes the last boomer competition especially dramatic. So does the speed at which aging can happen. Sometimes it's even instantaneous. Fall, break your hip, and add ten years."
11:45 Posted in books and reading , death , food and drink , health and medicine , travel and place | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
13 March 2008
House (TV)
Hate Hugh Laurie's 'American' accent but love the Fox TV show 'House' he stars in. It's a medical show, but really more of a detective show, as House and his interns hunt for the right diagnosis for baffling symptoms, and a character-driven soap opera, combined with quick, witty dialogue and an unrelenting engagement with truth and lies.
You can watch whole episodes, and clips, online, at Hulu -- excellent quality but only a few episodes; I watched the season 4 Christmas show, "What A Wonderful Lie," last night, before that episode 'expired' (why??) -- or at TV.com if you have iTunes (oops -- since Dec., the episodes are no longer available via iTunes), or HouseMDvideos (some have Japanese subtitles and the quality is middling). You can also rent the first three seasons through your local or non-local dvd rental store.
Each episode is reviewed in detail for medical correctness here -- don't look if you have illusions about it -- and they also rate the show's soap opera quality (i.e., how compelling the narrative is, depth of character development, etc.).
If you haven't seen the show, I recommend "Don't Ever Change," still up at Hulu. ("It's A Wonderful Lie" was better, though, IMO.)
This user-created clip at YouTube, pairing The Fray's "How to Save A Life" with shots of House doping and Wilson wanting to help, unable to help, is also worth the watch if you're already a fan.
Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" is connected with House clips by several users, including one about House and Stacy and one about House and Wilson (both with Rufus Wainwright singing).
(Dr James) Wilson: What's with the Secret Santa? You trying to bring them together?
(Dr Gregory) House: I want to drive them apart.
Wilson: With gift-giving?
House: Conflict's built right into the name -- Santa's about sharing, secret's about withholding.
House: Gifts allow us to demonstrate exactly how little we know about a person, and nothing pisses off a person more than being shoved into the wrong pigeon hole.
(Have I mentioned how fab Hugh is singing 'Mystery'?)
Wilson: "You can be a real jerk sometimes, you know that?"
House: "Yeah. And you're the good guy."
Wilson: "At least I try."
House: "As long as you're trying to be good, you can do whatever you want."
Wilson: "And as long as you're not trying, you can say whatever you want."
House: "So between us, we can do anything. We can rule the world!"
Wilson: "You're my friend."
House: "Oh, jeez. Have some backbone. If you think I'm wrong, do something."
Wilson: "Wait, you're getting mad at me for sticking up for you?"
House: "You value our friendship more than your ethical responsibilities."
Wilson: "Our friendship is an ethical responsibility."
< Photo c. 2005, Dean Headner/FOX >
11:00 Posted in media, film, tv, radio , health and medicine , neuroscience, psychology, the mind , other people said it , pop culture | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
04 February 2008
What I Killed Today
That's the name and content of the website of a female, vegan veterinary technician: "I work with a lot of injured wildlife. Also not wild animals that are just in a lot of pain. Sometimes I have to euthanize them. I decided to record each animal I euthanize here."
via TMN
18:55 Posted in animals , death , health and medicine , lists , websites with narrow focus | Permalink | Comments (1) | Email this
02 February 2008
What I'm Reading: Cancer causes, friends, redirected aggression, banishing plastic bags
OFFLINE: I'm reading