NOTE: Kent Blazier was my pediatrician many decades ago. Kristy Urquhart is a high school classmate.
Tag Archives: health
Invasion of the Colon Attachers!
What the camera reported and the doctor, with assistance, addressed:
Advice to self: don’t ride in a car for 5 hours after colonoscopy — you might just spend some time in rest stops and on the side of the road vomiting!
Links for the day
BONUS TRACK
I’m taking the next few days off for a meditation retreat. Talk to you next week.
BTW, here’s the list of books I promised you last week — see if you can figure out what they are:
Random image of the day — my wife when I first met her at summer camp:
My wife more recently, the glassblower:
Up next: my grandfather’s map!
Real women wear lab coats
Thanks to Lynn and hygienists at the office of Dr. Pugh, D.M.D.; Cindy, Dori, and Dr. Kostrzewa, M.D. (general otolaryngology) at North Alabama ENT Associates; Anita Giles, M.S., CCC-A, at Physicians Hearing Center.
My teeth and gums get a full bill of health.
HOWEVER, MY HEARING NEEDS ASSISTANCE!
On this new adventure, with the (re)discovery of a “cookie bite” inherited hearing loss (see chart below for example) and, after age 50, almost deaf in some frequencies (moderate hearing loss 50-60 dB in 500-4000 Hz range), I am investigating the possibility of amplifying the sounds around me with hearing aids.
I am familiar with tinnitus from personal experience, which tells me my brain is probably interpreting lack of audio input as random noise.
I am familiar with the brands Beltone, Miracle Ear, and Siemens from experience in my family with hearing aids.
Now, I get to choose not only the level of technology I want but also the exteriour colour choice.
I familiarize myself with new brands such as Phonak and Oticon.
I read material online from “neutral” sources such as Consumer Reports and Hearing Loss Association.
Now that I’m a member, I peruse the AARP website for advice on hearing aids.
All while the spectre of the medical procedure called colonoscopy raises its snakelike camera head over me.
Happiness is hearing a pin drop.
I don’t think colonoscopies cure situational depression/anxiety. What about hearing aids?
Survival of the fittest…
…or the most economically viable, whichever is most interesting.
A young man in his mid-30s told me that getting tattoos is addictive. Yes, it hurts but that’s part of the attraction.
A bus driver who takes a bus down a neighbourhood lane at 45-50 MPH in a posted 25 MPH zone is attracted to keeping a job and delivering students on time.
Both are risk takers.
Sitting here and typing sentences is risk-free. How the words and sentences are arranged, then posted onto the Internet for reading on the World Wide Web of interfaces has a higher risk.
Hypertext transfer protocol.
How many of us pay attention to our methods of communication?
Are they pain-free? Risk-free?
- Shouting across the street to a neighbour.
- Tapping a code on a downspout to a friend in a flat three floors up.
- Spray-painting a message on a freeway bridge.
- Sending a letter in the mail.
- Satellite signals.
- Words “carved” in the foam of a head of beer.
- Written in ink on the back of a bus seat.
- Missiles launched across geopolitical borders.
Should the risks you take cost you more to participate in a society with low risk takers?
Fast/bad bus drivers, for instance — how many buses have recording devices that monitor not only the behaviour of the students but also the driving habits of the person behind the wheel, matching GPS data to posted speed limits to the speed of the bus at the time, stopping distance/slowing speed to intersections, how many times the driver has to take eyes off the road, etc.?
Do people with tattoos have a higher rate of communicable disease infection than non-tattooed people? Higher rate of addiction to destructive behaviour?
Do bloggers take more or less risk than people who do not blog?
Is there a correlation between being a team player and survival of the fittest?
Can you be one and not the other, yet the most economically viable person on the planet?
It was the cartoon versions of syphilis and gonnorhea that scarred my psyche for life
How many parsecs in par, Secretary Kerry?
The basement supercomputer has been acting up again.
Sadly, it woke me up from cryogenic sleep, where I had been snoozing for over 25,000 years, resting in SpaceShip Earth while creeping in spirals ever so slowly to my next stop on the way back home.
YAWN! Where are we?
Hmm…this looks interesting. But…what’s this?
Where are the cave people?
Where are the hunters and gatherers?
What language do they speak after we gave them a new vocabulary to go with the current (or previous, if you will) generation of central nervous system?
Looks like I’m going to adjust my future prediction algorithm slightly to accommodate the conditions that put me no longer in bottom of an anonymous hill and instead in the middle of…what do they call it? A suburban neighbourhood?
Excuse me. What is the name for this structure? A semi-d? Okay, thanks.
It’s interesting, comparing my expectations to their reality.
According to my algorithm, the newborns should have mastered their alphabets and numbering system in utero.
Instead, they’re still taking years to master the basics of innerspecies communications.
Let’s see…how is their interspecies communications?
Excuse me. What is that tree saying? ‘Go hug a root, you green environazi treehugger’? No, it’s saying that it’s hungry.
Looks like another major tweak is in order.
Oh well, the supercomputer was right. I did need to wake up just now, didn’t I?
A few twists of the dial, a few reconnections of grass and tree root networks and we’ll have Spaceship Earth back in tiptop shape before I return to the dream of dreams where I’m home, no longer managing a planet as my transportation device, quietly rubbing what you might possibly call elbows to reproduce our kind and wallowing in battery acid baths for exoskeleton rejuvenation.
Supercomputer, I’m ready if you are. The cicadas are offering their wonderful soothing bedtime music.
Three….
Two…
One..
Zzzzzzzz.
Up next
Up next, entertainment news…
In a recent off-camera, post-interview, ad hoc hominem about his career, Will Smith admitted his dream would be to remake “Six Degrees of Separation” with his son and introduce the ultimate taboo, a “banned in 100 countries” topic into mainstream cinema.
Upon hinting of this, the ultraconservative watchdogs of mass media added “After Earth” and any other film starring Will Smith to its boycott list without caring what the films are about, even if they’ll be more cotton-candy sequels quickly forgotten by absent-minded filmgoers who can’t tell you the plot of the last movie they just watched five minutes ago, let alone who starred in them.
Up next, a review of the animated short film about a young child chained to a table making New Balance shoes just so a comedy troupe can make fun of the people who buy them without knowing they’re directly funding child enslavement, entitled, “Atlas shrugs at his weight on the New Balance scales.”
Up next, down the elevator to the NeXT computer museum…where a computerised labyrinth traps the human population and manipulates their lives for our entertainment news “up next” segments.
Paying for your overweight, suicidal, smoking, drinking, drug-abusing neighbour’s insurance policy?
Comments worth repeating…
COMMENTS FROM ARTICLE IN THE NEW YORK TIMES:
- Nuschler
- Cambridge
NYT Pick
Addition to first comment.
Before my husband killed himself in November of 2009, we had made plans for our first trip to France. My spouse had been stationed three different times in Germany. He loved Europe.
I practiced my French religiously. Then he was gone. My doctor and colleagues encouraged me to still go.
30 hour trip to Paris from Honolulu. For three weeks I immersed myself in French culture…I spoke to everyone I could..in French. I dressed well, was polite, and everyone thought I was from Canada instead of the USA. (Les Etats-Unis)
I talked to shopkeepers, business men on the Metro, people seated next to me at the French Open…my spouse and I were doubles players. I talked with the doyennes at all the great museums, I sat at outdoor cafes on the Champs-Elysees for hours. I sat and cried at the Arc de Triomphe by the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier from WWI.
For three weeks NOT ONE FRENCH CITIZEN ASKED ME WHAT I DID FOR A LIVING!! Not one!! I asked them all: “Why doesn’t anyone ask me what my job is?”
And they all said: “Because your job is not who you are!!!” Here in the USA our second or third question we ask anyone is “Hey what do you do for a living? Where do you work?”
We define ourselves in America by our profession. But I am not JUST a medical doctor! You all are not JUST business men, lawyers, teachers, writers…
But here in America that is EXACTLY how we define ourselves! We lose our job? We no longer know who we are.
- May 3, 2013 at 9:09 a.m.
- Recommended by 92 readers
= = = = =
- Tim Niles
- Minneapolis
NYT Pick
Indeed, this is a complex issue. Take the nature of the economy: for a long time now we have not NEEDED 100% of the adult population to work 40 hours per week to supply all the needs (and probably most of the wants) for the whole population. We are now in more severe turbulence related to the kinds of changes to our society and individuals which this will demand. So much of the learning that we do as children and definitely as adults (with familial responsibilities) is derived from how well we interact with the mechanisms of the economic matrix; our fundamental survival and general behavior is shaped by these mechanisms. So what happens if this system of rewards and negative reinforcers breaks down? What happens if the structure of the economic system turns into something like the NBA: where you have the owners (super wealthy, enough to spend mega bucks on a game!) and the players (no guarantee of career length, but high pay and high visibility)… and everybody else can hope to be a towel boys or maybe a trainer? Some future, huh? What’s the alternative? In the present we actually have options but given the nature of money/media, it is unlikely that the matrix of the possible will be considered until a revolution occurs. Nothing like a grossly less than zero sum game to thin the herd. Suicide for these reasons is a rational decision, not frivolous. Ten million dead bodies here, ten million dead bodies there… pretty soon you are talking extinction level event.
- May 3, 2013 at 9:23 a.m.
- Recommended by 8 readers
treetrunkdings 