Knitnut.net. Watch my life unravel...
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Posted by zoom! on August 15, 2009, at 10:33 am |
GC and Donna came with me for my first appointment with the radiation oncologist. We all crowded into a little examining room, which required some high-level wheelchair maneuvering on GC’s part.
A young man in a white coat squeezed his way into the room. He was a medical student and his job was to conduct the medical history interview. I was happy to oblige, since he seemed to need the practice.
Then he left and returned with the oncologist, who didn’t look like what I expected an oncologist to look like. I didn’t realize until that moment that I even had a preconceived notion of what an oncologist should look like.
He seemed to be in his late 40s with blue eyes and blond hair and a dark tan. He was pleasant and friendly and he smiled a lot, but in that conspiratorial, in-joke kind of way that made me feel like I wasn’t quite getting the joke. And when he talked? My first thought was “I wonder what language that is?”
After a few moments I recognized it as English, but with an extremely pronounced French accent. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t Quebec French. He spoke loudly and a little too fast. I found myself trying to simultaneously listen, translate, understand, absorb and respond to the information, with mixed results. At the same time, I was struck by the absurdity of the situation, and there are few things I like more than an absurd situation.
I was able to get the general gist of what he was saying. It was all pretty positive. He’s waiting for the pathology report from the second surgery, but as things currently appear, I’m looking at four weeks of daily radiation, no chemo, and possibly some ongoing hormone treatment. The radiation can be scheduled for two weeks from now…except he has to wait for that pathology report, so maybe it’s two weeks from whenever he receives it.
There was some talk of a clinical trial, which I may or may not be eligible to participate in. Something about a shorter period of radiation but at higher intensity. He kept using his hands to describe eligible breasts, while talking about ‘breast volume.’ By this time I was finding it hard to focus and my mind was drifting to completely unrelated matters, like whether his tan was natural, and why was I so sleepy, and monty python.
Finally he stopped talking and looked at me expectantly, so I figured he must have asked me a question. He kept looking at me quizzically, with that conspiratorial smile, and I kept looking at him quizzically, with my matching conspiratorial smile. Finally he picked up a hospital gown and held it out to me, and I realized he was waiting for me to disrobe.
GC and Donna tactfully decided to wait out in the hallway. I was tempted to ask them to take the little medical student with them.
It turned out the doctor needed to examine my breasts to see if they had enough ‘volume’ to qualify for the clinical trial. The examination was inconclusive. He wasn’t sure. Maybe. He looked skeptical. It didn’t much matter, since I’ve never thought of my breasts as voluminous, and besides, I wasn’t all that interested in the clincial trial.
After the doctor and the med student left, I put my clothes back on, Donna and GC returned, and we all giggled for a bit. The doctor came back and he said he’d send someone back in with some literature about the clinical trial. We waited a little while but nobody came, so we left.
When I got home I had a three-hour nap!
Posted by zoom! on August 14, 2009, at 10:30 am |
I’ve got my first appointment with the radiation oncologist this afternoon! Until then, I plan to snooze intermittently and play Farkle Pro on Facebook between snoozes.
If you haven’t seen it yet, I highly recommend watching the video on this post on Knitting is My Boyfriend. It’s hilarious.
Posted by zoom! on August 13, 2009, at 3:16 pm |
I’m a little groggy and foggy today. I don’t know why, but on Monday and again today I fell into a deep sleep shortly after waking up in the morning. I spent hours and hours sleeping on the couch. Sleeping profoundly. For no apparent reason. Fortunately it doesn’t seem to affect night sleep…I can sleep all night, most of the day, and then all night again.
The only problem is that even when you’re unemployed, you still have things you want to accomplish, and adopting the sleeping habits of a housecat is not conducive to getting things done.
The other problem is that if you sleep all the time, it doesn’t give you much to blog about. But I won’t let that stop me.
GC and I have made three visits to Champlain Park this week in a quest for a geocache that continues to elude us.
The first visit was in the evening. We looked for half an hour and then decided we needed a more precise longitude and latitude.
We went back yesterday in broad daylight, when Muggles abounded. (Muggles are ‘non-geochachers’ – you have to be discreet when geocaching in their midst, because you don’t want them to see the cache.) We also felt a bit weird about the possibility of being seen as suspicious lurkers in a children’s park. We searched uncomfortably, careful not to even glance at the children splashing in the wading pool, but we found nothing and eventually we left.
We returned after dark. By this time we were convinced – based on an online discussion log about this cache – that it was hidden in one of the evergreen trees. With the help of a flashlight, we groped all the park’s evergreen trees and came up empty-handed.
GC and I refuse to give up. Tonight we’re going to the Ottawa Geocaching Workshop at the Dovercourt Community Centre, in the hopes of gleaning more information about how geocaching works. (Afterwards we’re going to Raw Sugar to catch The Somerset Heights Literary Society.)
In other news, I took the Myers-Briggs Personality Test on Facebook today.
I’m a INTP (Introversion, Intuitive, Thinking, Perception). (You seek to develop logical explanations for everything that interests you. You are theoretical and abstract, and are interested more in ideas than in social interaction. You are quiet, contained, flexible, and adaptable. You have an unusual ability to focus in depth to solve problems in your area of interest. You are skeptical, sometimes critical, and always analytical.)
GC is ENFJ: Extroverted, Intuitive, Feeling, Judgement). (You are warm, empathetic, responsive, and responsible. (You are highly attuned to the emotions, needs, and motivations of others. You find potential in everyone, and want to help others fulfill their potential. You may act as a catalyst for individual and group growth. You are loyal, and are responsive to praise and criticism. You are sociable, facilitate others in a group, and provide inspiring leadership.)
We think it’s pretty accurate about both of us, even though it doesn’t say anything about our increasingly unnatural obsession with finding the geocache in Champlain Park.
Posted by zoom! on August 12, 2009, at 7:41 am |
Two similar things happened yesterday while we were out grocery shopping.
GC was pushing my wheelchair across the parking lot, and then suddenly he stopped. I looked up at him and he leaned down and kissed me. We both looked up in time to see a young woman with flowers smiling at us.
A few minutes later, as we were wheeling up the juice aisle, he stopped again to lean down and kiss me. When we looked up, there was another young woman standing a few yards away, rooted in place, beaming at us. Beaming!
Later we were reflecting on these two incidents, and we were surprised to discover that we had two quite different explanations of why the women smiled.
“Ask the blog,” GC suggested.
Because, as you know, the blog knows everything. It’s like the Magic 8-Ball or something.
And so, wise Blog, I am asking you: Why were the women smiling?
Posted by zoom! on August 11, 2009, at 9:25 am |
One day last year, Carl – who drives the #14 bus – asked me what I’d done the night before. I told him I’d made artist trading cards for swap boxes. He’d never heard of swap boxes, so I explained. Carl said it sounded like geocaching, a hobby he and his son share. I’d never heard of geocaching, so he explained.
Geocaching is an ongoing outdoor treasure hunting game in which participants use GPS systems to locate hidden caches. There are currently over 800,000 geocaches hidden around the world.
Like swap boxes, geocaches work on the “Take something, leave something” principle. Geocaches are less random than swap boxes though. You stumble across swap boxes, which are in plain sight in the heart of the city, whereas geocaches are hidden and you have to search for them.
You use the Internet (www.geocaching.com) to download coordinates of a nearby geocache to your GPS device. Then you get in your car and follow your GPS’s instructions until you arrive at the geocache’s approximate location. Then you get out of the car and literally search for it.
I got GC a GPS for his birthday. It tells us how to get where we’re going. It’s not perfect – it calls Merivale Road ‘Merry Valley Road,’ for example. And sometimes it tells us to make an impossible or illegal turn.
But it’s pretty good, for the most part, and on Sunday we decided to try our hand at geocaching between Ottawa and Montreal. (There are some caches right here in Ottawa too, but we had to make a quick trip to Montreal to fix GC’s Mom’s computer.)
GC downloaded some geocache locations to the GPS while I gathered up our supplies: a few treasures to trade, a bag of gingersnaps, a bottle of painkillers and a bag of knitting.
 Go Offroad. We were motoring along the highway when the GPS instructed us to take Exit 33, near Embrum. For the next ten or 15 minutes, we followed its instructions until we arrived here, where it said simply “Go Offroad.”
We’d run out of instructions. We took the GPS and the bag of things to trade, and started walking. My leg is only good for about five minutes, so we had to move quickly. We headed up that path while watching the screen and trying to figure things out. We went into the bush, looked for the geocache, fed the mosquitoes, and came up with Plan B, which was to go get the car and sit in it while we figured out what to do next.
 Our first found geocache! We sat in the car, I rested my leg, we scratched our mosquito bites and tried to understand some more stuff about the GPS. There was a checkered flag icon that (supposedly) indicated the exact location of the cache, and a number that (supposedly) indicated how many meters we were from it. But the GPS didn’t seem 100% accurate at this level of detail (ie meters), and we still didn’t know which direction it was in, or what it looked like. Eventually we got out of the car and stumbled around the forest some more. Suddenly I saw it! It was a camouflaged bucket up in a tree!
 Geocache Contents We got it down, spilled its contents on the forest floor, and knelt over it like little kids, oohing and aahing and squealing with delight. It was VERY exciting. But then the mosquitoes were messing with GC’s sanity so we took the cache to the car.
Back in the car we chose our treasure, which was a special tracked item called DanaCatDog’s Cache Racer. We have to register it on a website and leave it at another geocache as soon as possible. (It’s on a race.) We left a Wayne Gretzky hockey card in its place. We signed the geocache’s log book. Then we put everything back in the bucket and returned the bucket to its tree.
 DanaDogCat'sCacheRacer  Signing the Log Book We went to a second geocache an hour later, near the Ontario Tourism Information Station. We searched for the cache for half an hour before finding it in a peanut butter jar in a hollow in a tree!
 Hidden Cache  Found Cache
Posted by zoom! on August 10, 2009, at 9:04 am |
We were invited to an annual overnight backyard party on the outskirts of town on Saturday night!
John and Sue’s back yard is big yet cozy because it’s got all these nooks and crannies and seating areas. There’s a greenhouse that they built themselves, and gardens and benches and ponds and hammocks and all kinds of stuff.
 A stageful of talent The focal point is a stage built into a tree in the centre of the yard. John and Sue are both musically talented, and they have a lot of musically talented friends who come together for this event, along with people like me who don’t actually possess any musical talent of our own, but who appreciate it in others.
Julie kicked things off. She needed to belt out a few tunes after her Terrible Awful Day, which included, among other things, a household invasion of stinging insects.
She was followed by Cam and Geoff and Rysard and Chuck, and before long the stage was alive with a variety of musicians and instruments all jamming together in intriguing combinations.
I am so impressed by the range and depth of talent among people I know.
Take Pat, for example. She’s a bartender at Irene’s Pub and she is freakishly quick-witted. She can deliver a brilliant, hilarious and completely original monologue off the top of her head, anywhere, anytime. Last night I discovered she can do it to music too, just making it up as she goes along.
I’d love to set her up to do a daily five-minute podcast. It would take her literally five minutes a day, since she wouldn’t need to write it down or practice it or even think about it in advance. She’d just open her mouth and out it would come, a fresh, fully-formed, five-minute work of pure comedic genius.
Speaking of talent and genius, have you ever noticed that musically talented people often have an abundance of other creative talents too? Why do you suppose that is?
Anyway, GC and I left the party around 11:00, just as things were really starting to rock. That’s because I’ve had to temporarily give up my anti-inflammatory meds because of the surgery, and, as a result, I’ve had to double my painkiller intake. Under such circumstances, I suspect there’s a precariously thin line between being pain-free and being unconscious.
When I was younger I might have had some fun figuring out exactly where that line is drawn, but not so much anymore. These days I’m a very cautious party-goer. I study labels, warnings and side effects, and I feel like I’m living dangerously if I wash down a painkiller with a beer. A single yawn sends me scurrying home to the safety of my bed.
Posted by zoom! on August 8, 2009, at 8:49 am |
GC and I went to the Carnivale Lune Bleue at Hog’s Back on Wednesday night. It was a last-minute decision and we were late so we just got the general admission Midway tickets.
For the record, it’s not a very wheelchair accessible venue; we struggled a lot to maneuver my wheelchair around. To their credit, when we asked about their wheelchair discount policy, they said they didn’t have a policy but they’d start one right now. And they gave us two tickets for the price of one ($15).
 Tattooed Man This carnival attempts to recreate the 1930s style of carnival, which featured freak shows. I’ve got a special place in my heart for freak shows. I’ve read a few books about them and about the ‘freaks’ who worked the shows and were exploited by them.
Freak shows were so politically and socially incorrect by today’s standards.
Essentially if you were so disabled as to draw stares, you could either stay hidden away at home or you could get a job acting in a freak show. But you didn’t just stand around like an animal in the zoo and let people stare at you – you exaggerated yourself and acted a role. If you were a bearded woman, maybe you acted like a gorilla. If you were Siamese twins, maybe you fought with each other.
The freak shows, in spite of their awfulness, did make it possible for people with disabilities to create communities, and ironically, a sense of normalcy. Where everybody’s a freak, nobody’s a freak. They usually lived together and traveled together with the circus or the carnival.
Back to Ottawa’s Carnivale. The $15 ticket doesn’t entitle you to much. We saw the snake show, which was kind of cool even though we’d seen it last year at the Carp Fair. GC got to hold a scorpion. I stroked a python.
 Jersey Devil We visited the tiny museum tent, which had a few contraptions like a bed of nails, and a Jersey Devil and a Turtle Boy, along with photos of vintage freak show acts.
There was also a silent auction of circus photographs. The bidding started at $150 per print two weeks ago, but nobody has bid on any of them yet. (I think the opening bids were set too high.)
There were two vintage midway rides you could go on: a ferris wheel and a merry-go-round. Since we had a wheelchair, we weren’t really in a position to do that.
 $3 Freak Show That’s it for the free stuff. Everything else cost extra. For example, there was a fortune teller for $30 I think. There was a woman who would guess your weight (no thank you) for a small fee. There were a handful of games of limited skill. GC paid $2 to throw darts at stars, in the hopes of winning a Betty Boop doll. There was a small ‘world of wonders’ for $3. I would have done that one if it had been wheelchair accessible.
I’ve heard that the two big shows (Stringer for $60 and Starback for $80) are worth the money, but I can’t say the same for the Midway tickets.
Posted by zoom! on August 7, 2009, at 8:36 am |
Everything went well with the breast cancer surgery yesterday. I was lucky enough to get an early slot, so I didn’t have to lie there starving all day. GC was allowed to stay with me until surgery.
You know those shapeless blue hospital gowns? They gave me the usual gownage, but I also got great big pajama pants this time! There was room enough for me, GC and Duncan in there! (Not that we tried.) I was thrilled with the pajama pants. They were the highlight of my hospital stay.
All the staff at the Queensway-Carleton Hospital were friendly to me, except the anesthesiologist, but I’m pretty sure he’s a robot so that’s okay. But seriously, if I’m literally putting my life in his hands, the least he can do is pretend that my life matters even just a little tiny bit to him. This guy barely looked at me, never smiled, and he only talked to ask the questions absolutely required of him: Any allergies? Any dentures? Any implants? Not only did he not seem human, I got the impression he didn’t think I was human either. It was creepy.
A couple of hours after surgery he showed up at my bedside, looked at my chart, and walked away. Didn’t even glance at me. (I wonder if he chose anesthesiology because he prefers unconscious patients?)
Okay, I know I’m going on and on about him, but on top of everything else, he bruised me! In pre-op, two different nurses tried to set up my IV, but failed. I have tiny uncooperative veins that hide when people come after them with needles. The nurses gave up and left the IV for the anesthesiologist, who left a great big bruise on my arm. I would totally forgive him for that if I liked him.
When I came out of the anesthetic I was crying, which is pretty normal for me. Do you cry when you’re coming out from under too?
My left leg hurt a lot. The recovery room nurse, Claire, was lovely and calm and she kept pumping pain meds into me until it didn’t hurt anymore. They have excellent pain meds there and they’re not afraid to use them. I think I told her I loved her.
Once I was pain-free they sent me back to the day surgery unit. The nurse immediately moved my blood pressure cuff to my left arm and told me that for the rest of my life should always have blood pressure taken on the left arm, as well as any blood drawing. That’s because I’ve had lymph nodes removed from my right armpit, so there’s a risk of lymphedema.
Then they let GC come and visit for a bit. The surgeon got called away so we didn’t get a chance to talk, but she told the nurse to tell me everything went well.
GC brought me home in the afternoon and I slept for hours and hours. Then we ate Chinese food and went to bed and slept for hours and hours. And so ended another successful day on the road to recovery.
Posted by zoom! on August 5, 2009, at 5:25 pm |
 Mayor Larry and his necklace I’m taking a philosophical approach to Mayor Larry O’Brien’s acquittal on influence peddling charges. The worst thing about his lack of conviction is that, at least until the next election, we have to let him sit on the throne and wear the stupid necklace and swagger around Ottawa like he owns the place. And we have to pay for and put up with an ineffective City Council that operates in perpetual opposition to itself.
I still believe Mayor Larry was guilty of trying to circumvent democracy through the use of sleazy under-the-table methods, but was acquitted because the burden of proof beyond a reasonable doubt was not met. Fair enough. I’m sure he’s suffered sufficiently as the case worked its way through the criminal justice system. Regardless of the outcome, being charged with a crime and spending months or years dealing with it, is hugely stressful no matter who you are.
Hopefully the whole experience will have taught him something. I don’t know what exactly. Maybe something about humility or fair play or democracy or not being such an idiot.
Anyway, that’s that. It’s time for all of us to put this whole thing behind us and let Mayor Larry get back to the business of being the most inexperienced, dysfunctional and bizarre mayor since Toronto’s Mel Lastman.
(I haven’t had a chance yet to see what the other local bloggers have said about the acquittal, but I did make a point of checking the ESI site for Coyote’s reaction, and was not disappointed.)
In the good news department, I met with the neurosurgeon – Dr. Howard Lesiuk – today. I liked him a lot. He saw me at exactly 10:30, which was the actual time of my appointment, and he took the time to ask lots of questions, answer lots of questions, and explain everything thoroughly.
He said that as far as structural problems go, mine is severe and requires surgery. The procedure is called a microdiscectomy.
There’s an 80% chance that this surgery will help me, a 15% chance that there will be no improvement, and a 5% chance that I’ll be worse off after the surgery.
He was very apologetic as he told me he’s not going to be able to do my surgery until September.
September! 2009! Next month!
But then we talked about my breast cancer, and decided to wait a little longer, until after my radiation, to do the back surgery. If all goes well – ie, if I don’t need chemo and if there’s no backlog in radiation – we’re looking at surgery in October.
October! 2009! The month after next!
This is such incredibly good news I can’t even believe it. I fully expected to be told I’d be having surgery in a year or two.
I think my luck is changing. 
Posted by zoom! on August 4, 2009, at 1:41 pm |
When I said it was going to be a good week, I forgot to factor in the fact that because I’m having surgery on Thursday, I have to stop taking some of my meds beforehand. Something to do with blood thinning and internal bleeding; the nurses were very stern about it.
Yesterday was my first day without Arthrotec, which is an anti-inflammatory for my back. I’ve upped my painkillers accordingly, but I had a rough night last night. The pain is much sharper without Arthrotec, and I can’t take it again until five days after surgery.
On the bright side – I can’t help it, I always look for the bright side – the neurosurgeon will be seeing me tomorrow in all my raw unbridled pain. (Well, not all, since I’m still taking painkillers…but I’ll be in more raw unbridled pain than usual, which is a good thing when you’re pleading with a doctor to use his healing powers on you.)
You know what’s crazy? I am in pain. I am disabled. But for some reason, I feel like a fraud when I ask a doctor for help. I feel like I have to exaggerate my pain in order to compete for limited health care resources. All I want is for the doctor to do his doctor job and fix my back. If I’m successful in convincing him I’m worthy of his time and skills, I’ll probably feel like I scammed back surgery, which is ludicrous. Who would even want back surgery if they didn’t need it?
In other news, GC and I went to the National Gallery yesterday and saw the Papal Rome exhibit. The best part was when GC pushed my wheelchair up that long, long ramp going from the front doors to the Great Hall. He ran all the way up the ramp, and all the people walking down the ramp were laughing and smiling at us.
The exhibit itself was pretty good too. It’s all about papal art in the 16th century. There were some crazy popes back in the day (Pius V, I’m looking at you).
It might be interesting to rent one of the audio guides for this exhibit. I think we could have learned a lot about history and art if we’d done that. There were many intricate drawings with rich allegorical tales going on in them. We didn’t have the time or the patience to give each piece its due, and we were often drawn to the big colourful paintings instead.
More scholarly or cultured visitors might have come out of the exhibit with a different set of insights and observations, but GC and I just noticed that people back then spent a lot of time naked, and most of the men had tiny penises.
Tomorrow’s GC’s birthday and he has asked me to ask you for suggestions about how to celebrate it. He doesn’t want to make a huge deal out of his birthday, but he wants it to be fun and memorable. Any ideas?
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