Well, there goes a week and half a kidney I will never get back. It was almost a week exactly from the time I rolled my smallest luggage bag from a friend’s car into The Methodist Hospital until I crashed on my couch with a fresh pain bottle of pain pills and my dog asleep on the floor next to my unpacked bags. What a wicked scar this is under my left rib cage.
It was a week where I managed to stay completely away from political developments. Almost. A well-wisher did manage to slip in on June 30th that Norm Coleman conceded to Senator Al Franken. When I did get detached enough from my own health issues to actually turn on a television, the hot news was Sarah Palin giving her own state the middle finger. For about an hour, that was all anyone on the squawkbox talked about, then I remember changing the channel from MSNBC to something else…probably something deep. like The Family Guy, or Wimbledon tennis.
I haven’t watched much news since getting home, either. Just not feeling it yet.
The surgery itself? It went well. I had an epidural thingee that kept me pain free for the first three days post-op. After that? Well, if I have any say, the three days after the epidural came out sucked bad enough to be forgotten and completely erased from the historical record. I have written letters to the major news networks and the Pope requesting this, but no one except FOX News and some sci-fi people seem interested.
Thanks to everyone for all the awesome love and well-wishes. It’s good to be home.
We are going to end up with legislation that will be labeled “health reform,” but the twin crises of rising costs and inadequate insurance will still be with us. Congress and the President will walk away, pretending that they did something, and it will take years or decades of more suffering and hardship before our leaders revisit the problems and finally do the right thing.
Sheer madness!
I was reading over at DailyKos about the responses of the American Medical Association in the health care reform debate:
While committed to the goal of affordable health insurance for all, the association had said in a general statement of principles that health services should be “provided through private markets, as they are currently.”
Let’s translate that:
While committed to the goal of affordable health insurance for all, the association had said in a general statement of principles that health services should be “provided through a few large corporations,as they are currently.”
Much more accurate, don’t you think?
I decided to get a pair of binoculars, cheap ones. I lost the last set somewhere and I wanted something for staring a little more closely at critters, the moon and such. So, I wandered into the closest Academy Sports & Outdoors where it turns out the binoculars are displayed near the handguns. As the counter guy handed me the various models of cheapo binoculars, three people came in separately asking for various calibers of handgun ammunition. None of them were in stock. A quick inquiry confirmed that this was a recent phenomenon… you know, since the election. Yes, here in Texas, there are a bunch of nuts worried that someone is coming to take their guns away.
We are a fucked up group down here sometimes.
They’ve demonstrated that a chemical called BPA used in the manufacture of hard-plastic polycarbonate water bottles leaches into the water being carried around by us humans. Apparently, now they can measure increasing amounts of this BPA stuff in our urine if we use these bottles for even a short time, like a week or so. Problems associated with BPA in humans include issues with reproductive development, endocrine issues such as diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. Canada has already banned the use of BPA in the manufacture of baby bottles.
Now, to be clear, the article isn’t talking about the Evian or Desani bottles, that’s a different kind of plastic widely regarded as “safe”. The subject here is hard plastic bottles meant for re-use. I used to get the big 5 gallon bottles of water delivered to my house, and some people thought I was being a snoot because I would always order the glass bottles. I thought it tasted better (and it really did!). I’d bet that due to issues with recycling and landfills, people have probably been using more of the bottles made from the hard plastics so they could wash and reuse the same one. It really makes sense if perhaps you have a water filter at home and you wanted to stop spending money on bottled water. Just buy the hard “reusable” bottle in your choice of designer colors and fill it up every morning. Sounds good, but maybe not so good for you. Here’s some information from the NRDC about the different plastics used for water transport. Interesting stuff.
(And I’m still not convinced we aren’t leaching crap into our system from the water bottles we purchase at the convenience store either!)
Via Swamplot, I learn that there are cameras in the urinals at Houston’s Hobby Airport. They sense when to flush the toilet, and are also used for security purposes.
Automatic infrared flush sensors also provide video monitoring for security purposes.
The urinal advisory was noticed at Hobby Airport by Snapstream CEO Rakesh Agrawal, c’mon have a look!
Very creepy. Athenae speculates it was part of the Larry Craig Terrorist Surveillance Act. How far behind can foreskin profiling be?
Via slashdot
“I’m a guy who doesn’t see anything good having come from the Internet,” said Sony Pictures Entertainment chief executive officer Michael Lynton. “Period.”
At a breakfast cohosted by the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University and The New Yorker Thursday, Lynton wasn’t just trying for a laugh: He complained the Internet has “created this notion that anyone can have whatever they want at any given time. It’s as if the stores on Madison Avenue were open 24 hours a day. They feel entitled. They say, ‘Give it to me now,’ and if you don’t give it to them for free, they’ll steal it.”
How do you say this, let me see…. I believe the phrase is “fuck you”. Get a clue, dude. Ya can’t stop what’s coming.
Just got back from a doctors appointment, related to the medical issues earlier mentioned. Details later, but I will say now that the differences of opinion between two medical professionals looking at the same images can be very interesting, to say the least. The same problem exists, it’s just the proposed solutions and the reasons for it differ. And I trust the second opinion more.
Knowing most people don’t get second opinions on major medical issues as often as they should, my mind boggles a little.
Dane Cook is not a bad ass, he is not “on the edge”, he is a hack.
Thank you.
UPDATE: The stalkers wouldn’t even say they were with FOX News when asked. So they are liars, too.
I guess they don’t really know what racism is. A small hint that might address a small piece of the debate: just because you don’t think you’re a racist, that doesn’t mean you aren’t promoting racism. Now go look at the signs at your rallies.
(h/t kos diarist vyan)
Back to work, yes. Full strength, no.
Thanks to all for well wishes. I am still here, shall return, etc.
Peace and love.
I am tired. I think I shall let Gabby handle the remote tonight. Good thing she isn’t into Animal Planet.
Going home.
The whole thing is hitting me hard in one way. I have worked so hard for so many years to manage the asthma without radical hospital interventions. I have over a period of the last 19 years avoided the ER for asthma. I have weaned myself off of awful drugs like theophylline and minimized the necessary evils of corticosteroids as much as possible. I stopped taking leukotriene inhibitors (”Singulair”). It hasn’t been easy and it has taken a long time, but I felt like I was doing very, very well on a minimum of medications. Until this last couple of weeks.
And it all seems a little lost now. The asthma itself doesn’t even seem the same, it’s like I am fighting a whole other creature. I could do without the extra effort, but it seems that isn’t something I have much choice in. I am fighting the enemy in front of me and I shall move past this one as quickly as I can to move on to other pressing issues.
So it goes.
Should be leaving the hospital soon, today. I have been in here since Sunday afternoon with asthma. Will need to rest for a while, no working. The asthma issues are not completely resolved and I get tired way too easily, so I still need to mend… and I will mend at home. The whole twist to this hospital episode is that a lung CT scan unexpectedly revealed a mass in my left kidney, an “incidental” finding. That scan was probably not necessary, it was done out of an “abundance of caution”. So, as far as being a potential “cancer patient” goes, well, it will not likely involve a whole lot of drama.
Once my strength is back, I will deal with the mass in my left kidney the urologist is 95% sure it is “the real deal”, meaning a “renal cell carcinoma”. It is a small mass (<4cm), well-encapsulated, and of the type that is very unlikely to metastasize. I am not worried about getting it taken out until I fell strong enough for the procedure.
I will likely treat this by being scheduled for a nephrectomy. They will do a frozen section biopsy intraoperatively to determine if the mass is not malignant, despite the presentation. Based on that, the kidney removal will proceed laparascopically. The location of the mass makes it unlikely that a partial nephrectomy would be feasible, but that too may change based upon what is seen when they get in there with the laparascope. I’d prefer a partial nephrectomy if it can be done, but maybe that’s just because I don’t like to throw anything away. The urologist is “doubtful”. My right kidney is fine, I’ll try to hustle for another half-century or so with just that one.
That’s the scoop. I shall go home, rest, and breathe for a while.
(2) Kudos to The New York Times and Scott Shane not merely for amplifying a key fact about the OLC memos — that 2 of the detainees were waterboarded a total of 266 times — but, even more notably, for crediting Marcy Wheeler as the person who discovered that fact and first broke the story. Ironically, establishment journalists often complain that bloggers are “parasitic” on their work, yet many feel no compunction about simply copying what they read on blogs without any credit whatsoever. Some reporters are conscientious about crediting blogs — Shane is one of them — but it’s far more common for them to use the work of bloggers with no credit. Marcy is one of the smartest, most knowledgeable and most diligent writers around, and it’s excellent to see her get just some of the credit her work deserves.
Having met Marcy Wheeler and some of the FDL crew at Netroots Nation, I must say that I am so glad to see her getting more of the kudos she deserves.
