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!
Tag Archives: medicine
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?
It was the cartoon versions of syphilis and gonnorhea that scarred my psyche for life
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
Yesterday’s Today is Tomorrow
For a brief moment, I was a kid again.
Yesterday, in preparation for watching a film at the cinema about a cartoon character known as Iron Man, I scrolled through websites detailing a few storylines that encompass worlds and universes in one comic book series or another.
Although I was never geeky enough to keep track of comic drawing styles, character bios or inside jokes, I knew enough about the fantasy lives of fellow classmates who did that I could briefly carry on a conversation with those who read not only comic books and watched Saturday morning cartoons but who also consumed novelisations and books containing specifications of spaceships, weaponry and superhero powers.
A few of them transitioned to board games like Dungeons & Dragons — I detailed those people in a previous novel or blog entry and won’t repeat myself here — because fantasy and science fiction computer games didn’t exist, unless you can stretch your imagination and say that Pong was a game between gods sending universes back and forth across matter/antimatter timelines.
For the most part, our schoolyard games were either cowboy-and-Indian or space cowboy-vs-evil alien shoot ’em ups and chases.
2001: A Space Odyssey was released when we were too young to care and Star Wars arrived in our high school years when most of us already had well-established hobbies to occupy our thoughts. Star Trek was an after-school show that, along with Batman and Wild Wild West, captured the attention of the average nerd in our early teens.
Now that I’m a middle-aged white guy who’s more likely to die of suicide than a car wreck, I can either further regress into a childhood I never really had or I can progress into an elderly adult I haven’t yet been, avoiding the mental illness pitfalls that lead to premature death.
To end today’s blog entry, I’ll provide an untraceable source of a quote by a semi-famous author:
“My dear,
Find what you love and let it kill you. Let it drain from you your all. Let it cling onto your back and weigh you down into eventual nothingness. Let it kill you, and let it devour your remains.For all things will kill you, both slowly and fastly, but it’s much better to be killed by a lover.
Falsely yours,
Henry Charles Bukowski”
Happy days
Thanks to David and Penny at Thai Garden; Harold, Joe, Jenn and Abi at KCDC; Chris A at Carmike; India Cafe; Courtenay, Rory and Casey at Gleneagles Medical Center; Huntsville police/emergency; LifeSouth.
Right on cue, take the queue to the left
Cue the medical expert(s) who will say the reason we all have mammary glands is that we’re bisexual by nature, if not nurture, thus giving reason and pause to consider why the LGBT movement has been gaining traction in mainstream culture lately as we shift gears in our subcultural races.
treetrunkdings 