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Posted by Zoom! on August 8, 2007, at 8:04 pm |
The mysterious hematologist says I’m becoming more normal.
With the help of mega-supplementation, my iron and Vitamin B12 are creeping back up. Not only that, but my allergy to the cold (AKA Cold Agglutinin Disease and/or Cold Antibody Hemolytic Anemia) might be more of a theoretical problem than a real one, because my temperature would have to drop four full degrees before my body would start killing off my blood cells. He thinks it’s happening in the lab as my blood cools down, but is unlikely to happen in my body because I’ll probably never get cold enough to trigger the autoimmune response.
So the whole thing – this whole two-and-a-half-years of specialists’ appointments, blood tests, ultrasounds, EKGs, CT scans and bone marrow biopsies – might all have been over a routine blood test that only appeared to be abnormal. It’s possible I was perfectly normal all along and my blood was just pretending to be weird.
On The Other Hand, the mysterious hematologist wants to see me again in three months, because my newfound normalcy needs to be monitored to make sure it’s real.
Who knew blood could be so tricky?
Posted by Zoom! on August 7, 2007, at 9:22 pm |
 In case you were wondering, I haven’t disappeared entirely. I just spent the long weekend at my Mom’s cottage/house up near Wakefield with my sisters and brother and some of their assorted partners and children.
My mom and one of her exes own this place together and they take turns living in it. The old cottage is in the foreground, and the new house is being built in the background.
My mom’s living in the new house now. She’ll live in it year-round for the next ten years, except for every second summer, when he’ll have it and she’ll travel to Africa. Then he’ll live in it year-round for the following ten years, and she’ll have it every other summer.
This past year has been devoted to building the house and bitching about the violent alcoholic bipolar contractor who flew into a rage and quit before the job was finished. My mom inherited his helper, who was apparently incompetent but nice, so she kept him around. Consequently, many things were installed upside-down and backwards and inside-out and in the wrong places.
But it’s a very, very nice house, all things considered, and will be even nicer when the outside of the building is put on and the mistakes are all fixed.
This winter the old cottage will be torn down and carted away across the frozen lake. So sad.
 This is the kind of weekend we had. That’s my mom playing Scrabble with my brother Rob. We had two Scrabble boards going at once: one for the amateurs and one for the professionals. There was also much eating and drinking and general merrymaking, along with a little fishing, some stick-throwing for my mom’s dog Kenya, and a few handyman projects for the menfolk.
There should be more weekends like this, but summer’s so short. By the time I get myself into the swing of summer each year, the seasons start changing again. I noticed some red-tinged leaves on a maple tree today….
Posted by Zoom! on August 4, 2007, at 11:22 am |
One of the reasons I like walking to work at this time of year is so I can peek at all the lovely gardens along the way, and get some inspiration for my own garden.
A couple of months ago I posted pictures of my garden in the hopes that someone could idenitfy the strange things growing in it. Annie kindly did so, though the news was not good: most of what was growing was invasive weeds (Virginia Creeper in the back and Goutweed in the front).
Several people suggested that since it’s my first year in the house, I should stick to container gardening this summer while waiting to see what was already planted by previous owners. I thought that was an excellent idea.
I did try to defend myself against the invasive weeds by hacking away at them periodically and not letting them climb my house or come in my windows.
I adopted a live-and-let-live spirit about everything else that was sprouting in my back yard. Bear in mind that my back yard is very, very small and has no grass whatsoever. Flower boxes line the fences, and tiles cover the ground.
So, while I was busy defending myself from the invasive weeds, the non-invasive weeds completely invaded my back yard. Is this freaky or what? Check it out.
This state of affairs even extends beyond my back yard and into my parking space outside the gate. There are weeds literally taller than me growing out of the cracks in the pavement in my parking space. You see that black car? It’s my neighbour’s car, in his bare-naked weed-free parking space.
I know it’s too late for this year, but should I be weeding my pavement next year? Is that normal? Do people do that?
Posted by Zoom! on August 1, 2007, at 9:53 pm |
 I went to the Homelessness Action’s “Lunch and a Nap with Mayor Lar” today.
Hmmm. I’m kind of torn about what to say here. I like these people, I applaud them for tackling this issue, and I support their cause. But in my humble opinion, they need to get a bit more organized and learn a little more about how to run an event. I say this because the event lacked momentum. People did show up, but I think most left quickly because it appeared nothing was happening. And that’s because, well…how can I put this? Nothing was happening. The nap, I’m afraid, was a bit of a snooze.
There was lunch, but nobody pointed it out and I didn’t see many people eating.
This homeless doll kind of freaked me out.
 I was happy the Raging Grannies arrived, first because I love them and second because their very presence creates some energy. They added some colour and music and a much-needed focal point.
 Unfortunately Mayor Larry O’Brien didn’t come swaggering out for his afternoon nap. It was reported he was upstairs in that room behind the closed blinds, with 19 other mayors from across Ontario. And they weren’t talking about building affordable housing for the homeless.
 I’ve been trying to figure out why this event was billed as an afternoon nap with the mayor. I should have asked while I was there, but I didn’t think of it. Perhaps it was inspired by this Dilbert comic. (Or maybe not. Maybe homeless people don’t find Dilbert all that amusing. I’ve been told engineers don’t either.)
Posted by Zoom! on July 31, 2007, at 10:07 pm |
 Let’s just say the Mayor started it when he told the residents of Ottawa that homeless people were like pigeons, and if we would just stop feeding them they would go away.
I’ll be at City Hall at lunchtime. I don’t have any dancing shoes, but I do have a blankie.
On a related note: If the Mayor doesn’t like the idea of poor people eating, I wonder if he has plans to keep them from breeding?
Posted by Zoom! on July 30, 2007, at 7:41 pm |
Well, my vacation’s over, so it was back to the grind for me today. No more sleeping in till 9:00, no more naps, no more…hmm. No more what exactly?
I have to admit I kind of frittered away this two-week holiday. I didn’t actually do much, other than recover from Bluesfest. I played a little guitar. I ate a lot of fruit. And I finally found something worth doing on Facebook.
I’ve been on Facebook for a few months, but I just didn’t get why people liked it. I kept reading on other people’s blogs that they were trying to cut back on their Facebook time because it was a big addictive time-waster for them.
God knows I have an addictive personality, so how come I wasn’t getting hooked on Facebook?
I kept going back there and poking around, thinking there must be some whole other layer of Facebook that everybody else knew about but I hadn’t discovered yet. I watched to see what other people were doing, and it seemed they were all ‘poking’ each other and ‘tickling’ each other, and joining groups and leaving groups and posting photos of themselves drinking or looking in the mirror. And every time I went there, I’d run out of things to do after about five minutes, and then I’d get bored and leave.
I did run into a few people from the past, and that was kind of cool at first. But then it just felt kind of weird, like standing around awkwardly at some contrived intersection of the past and present, wondering what you’re supposed to do next.
Anyway, I’m not here to complain about how I don’t fit into Facebook, I’m here to tell you I finally found my Facebook niche. It’s Scrabble! I finished off my vacation with two days and 23 games of Facebook Scrabble. Sometimes I had half a dozen games going at once: I felt like that chessmaster who plays everybody in the room simultaneously, except he wins all his games.
 I’m a pretty good Scrabble player but my stats aren’t great because I mostly play with Debbie and Robin and they’re both phenomenal players. However I do beat all the strangers regularly, as well as my little sister Kerry.
Kerry lacks that cut-throat competitive gene that the rest of the family shares. You can tell she spent too many years playing those cooperative hippie games with her children. She sees a Triple Word Square and immediately sets it up perfectly for me. She doesn’t care who gets it, as long as it doesn’t go to waste. I beat her 419 to 189 the other day.
At the other end of the competitive spectrum, I’m playing someone who refuses to end the game because I’m just one tile away from winning and she doesn’t like any losses in her stats! (Do you think it’s petty of me to be pissed off about that? Because I am.)
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Posted by Zoom! on July 29, 2007, at 11:29 am |
Do you hate Rogers as much as I hate Rogers? I’ve hated Rogers so long I can’t even remember why I started hating them in the first place.
Even though I hate them, I still get lured into using their services every now and then. It probably has something to do with my competing hatred for Bell.
Recently I enjoyed a fairly amicable run of Rogers cable TV service. When I moved into my house last year, a guy showed up at the door and offered me a deal on cable: something like 950 digital channels for $50 a month for three months, with free installation and a free box and extra connections so I could watch TV in every room if I had lots of TVs.
After the three months ended, the price soared to almost $100 a month, so I called them up and arranged for fewer channels. This left me with about 50 channels for $50. I don’t remember really, I’m guessing. But it was something like that.
And then one day I realized I didn’t watch a whole lot of TV, so I asked them to cut me back to Basic Cable. I think that left me with about 29 channels for $35.
Last week I realized I don’t watch TV at all anymore, so I called them up to cancel altogether.
First I had to talk to the boy machine that asks questions and you answer and then it repeats your answers and asks you if it heard you right. Then that machine transferred me to the girl machine that asks questions and you enter your answers on the numeric keypad. Then that machine transferred me to the human being.
The human being asked me the same questions the machines asked me, like my phone number and the purpose of my call. When I told her I wanted to cancel my service, she said “I’m very sorry to hear that, can I ask why?”
“I don’t watch TV,” I replied.
“Oh,” she said sadly, “Well then I guess there’s nothing we can do to change your mind?”
“Like what?”
“Oh, I could reduce your rates,” she said.
“Really?” I said, “By how much?”
“I could reduce your rates by 10 percent,” she said hopefully, “Would that help?”
Well, you know, that might help if I were cancelling because of the cost, but not so much if I’m cancelling because there’s never anything good on. So I declined Rogers’ very generous offer and proceeded to cancel my cable.
But for those of you who do watch TV, I think you should take this opportunity to call Rogers and tell them you want to cancel. I’m going to call Bell next to cancel my phone and Internet access – I could save $108 a year if they offered me a 10% rate cut. (But if you don’t see me for awhile, you’ll know my plan backfired.)
Posted by Zoom! on July 27, 2007, at 10:55 pm |
 Part Two was the Open Mic – questions and comments from people in the audience. It was actually pretty interesting, because there was a real mix of attitudes and opinions. Until this point, I got the sense this was one of those “preaching to the choir” things, since everybody seemed to agree with each other.
There were several representatives of various Neighbourhood Watch programs, and they had concerns about carelessly discarded crack pipes and the dangers they pose to children and pets. Someone asked how many innocent children had been infected with HIV or Hepatitis via city-supplied crack pipes. (The answer was no known cases in all of Canada.) At this point Kathleen Cummings asked that value-laden terms such as “innocent” be avoided, as this was a health and human rights issue rather than a values issue.
It was pointed out that the crack pipes from the kits are easily recognizable and therefore avoidable, as opposed to the homemade pipes which are often constructed out of soft drink cans and so on.
One man got up and likened the crack pipe program to driving robbers to and from banks so they wouldn’t get hurt in transit. He also claimed the crack pipe program was illegal, and read a section from the Criminal Code to support his contention, and he insisted that the solution to the drug problem was for society to provide more support to ‘traditional families.’ He was informed that city lawyers deemed the program to be legal, and written proof of this was offered to him.
Another man – a resident of Sandy Hill – indicated that his property has never been damaged or littered with broken glass by anybody other than university students. He also pointed out that the public health benefits of the program apply to all of us, not just to addicts. And he concluded by saying that while we don’t have to like harm-reduction programs, the evidence shows that they do work.
The www.freecrackkits.org guy was there. He’s a school teacher and he’s trying to publicly fundraise enough money to replace the city’s share of the crack kit program.
A man stood up and spoke for quite awhile but I couldn’t really follow what he was saying. He was finally asked to sit down because time was running out.
A Green Party representative spoke and said he would be advocating to his Party that it officially endorse the program, along with other elements of a drug strategy, such as treatment facilities and needle-and-pipe recovery efforts.
Another man identified himself as a homeless crackhead who has been addicted to drugs for 20 years. He wanted people to know that not all addicts are irresponsible about disposing of their pipes and other equipment.
Someone in the audience demanded to know why he didn’t just quit.
“I would love to quit,” he said, “and I’ve tried.” He then went on to say that the courts should stop imposing conditions on long-term addicts not to carry drug-using equipment. These conditions, he explained, are why a lot of equipment gets discarded, often in a hurry.
Anyway, I learned a lot, and I was happy I went.
 Oh – and here’s something just for Megan, who was disappointed she wouldn’t be able to attend because she was out of town. Just before the meeting I stopped to chat with the Homelessness Action Group camped out by the Human Rights Memorial, and they showed me this little bat who lives right behind them, on the walls of City Hall. I know how much Megan loves bats, so I took a picture of him for her.
Posted by Zoom! on July 27, 2007, at 6:40 pm |
 I’d estimate the turnout at about 200 or so. Even though it was held in Council Chambers, as far as I could tell there weren’t any councillors there.
My note-taking skills are rusty. I’d try to write something down verbatim because it was so interesting or eloquently stated, but by the time I’d faithfully recorded the first half, the second half had evaporated from my memory. This happened repeatedly, so I ended up with a notebook full of eloquent yet incomplete thoughts.
There were five speakers, followed by a question/comment session from the audience. The five speakers included the researcher who conducted the study on whether the program works or not (Dr. Lynne Leonard), the Executive Directors of Bruce House (Jay Koornstra), the AIDS Committee of Ottawa (Kathleen Cummings ), and Ottawa Inner City Health (Wendy Muckle), and a young woman who is a former addict (Kristin).
I’m just going to list some of the things that struck me as interesting. I hope between my incomplete notes and my incomplete memory, I manage to produce an accurate, if incomplete, account. (But please let me know if you were there and you remember some things differently than me.)
Dr. Leonard did a Powerpoint presentation of the results of her research, which tracked the drug and equipment using habits of Ottawa addicts over a period of time. In short: The crack pipe program reduced equipment-sharing between users; the availability of clean crack pipes resulted in increased smoking and decreased injection of drugs. From a personal and public health perspective, this is an improvement.
Wendy Muckle, a street nurse, talked about the difference between supporting drug users and supporting drug use. She also noted that most addicts DO stop using drugs at some point. She said we have the ability to reduce the spread of HIV and Hepatitis C, and therefore we have the responsibility to do so.
She also – and I wish I’d captured this better, because it might have been the crux of the whole matter – suggested that City Council pulled a fast one on all of us by pitting homeowners and business against current drug users and those who work with them. She said it was a tactic that diverted attention away from Council as it abrogated its responsibility for poverty, housing and health in this city.
And finally she emphasized that crack pipes are a health device, not a solution to the drug problem, and she’s sick of all the talk about crack pipes. Crack pipes are neither the problem nor the solution, and she wants to get back to talking about real solutions to what’s going on in this city.
Kristin is a young woman who was born addicted to drugs and who has had her own struggles with drugs over the years. I think she said she hasn’t used drugs for several years now. One of the most powerful things she said was, by way of analogy, “Would you deny a sixteen-year-old a condom because you don’t think he should be having sex yet?”
Kathleen Cummings, Executive Director of the AIDS Committee of Ottawa (ACO), and also a former addict, put aside most of what she was planning to talk about to voice her outrage about something that happened several minutes earlier on her way to the washroom. I hope I got this right.
A reporter stopped her and told her that a city councillor had suggested that the ACO’s funding from the city might be in jeopardy next year. It’s an old trick, silencing the dissenting voices by threatening to withdraw their funding. I don’t think it’s going to work on ACO. Cummings was angry and she didn’t strike me as the type of woman to be silenced by anger or by threats.
She was passionate and eloquent. She talked about freedom of speech and then about harm reduction. “Harm reduction,” she said, “Is about meeting people where they’re at.” She went on to add that harm reduction is also about detox, housing and treatment. And she talked about City Council’s failure to meet the needs of its constituents.
The Moderator was interesting too. I didn’t quite catch his name – maybe Brian? He talked about being diagnosed with HIV 22 years ago and being outraged years later to discover that the Canadian government, during the era in which he was infected, had been confiscating and destroying educational material aimed at gay men to protect them from the spread of HIV.
Essentially, there’s a history of vulnerable groups being denied health protection by governments for moral reasons.
Okay, that’s it for now. I’ll write more later about the Question and Answer portion of the evening.
Posted by Zoom! on July 27, 2007, at 9:43 am |
I think Ottawa must have struck a nerve with Christina Blizzard, given that she felt it necessary to write a second column defending her right to write the first column.
Apparently she got ‘countless’ e-mails from people who agreed with her. (This on the heels of having witnessed ‘countless’ people sitting around downtown Ottawa smoking crack in broad daylight.)
In her new column, she says that people who work in the National Defence Building seem to be under siege by crack addicts. No kidding? You’d think they’d be a little embarassed to admit that, being National Defence and all. But then again, you’d think a columnist might be a little embarassed to admit she can’t count very high.
(By the way, my original post about Blizzard’s original column was featured over at No Excuse: The Poverty Project Blog, and Bill described it as ‘the most gentle evisceration’ he’d seen in a long time. I love that. I tried to stay gentle this time too, and I apologize in advance for the hint of sarcasm that snuck in here.)
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