Will that be one scoop or two...

Well, just back from my appointment with the surgeon. You know, I have always been impressed with the amount of small tools dentists seem to have. As a person who has experienced dentists from both a drilling/filling perspective, and a tooth-pulling perspective, it always amazed me that no matter what the condition of a particular tooth, there always seemed to be, somewhere, just THE right tool or jig for the situation at hand.

Now, so it seems, the same can be said for surgeons doing small surgery. Here I am, coaxed once more into an examination room by an over-bustled nurse and instructed to lay on the table. She gingerly removes the bandages and packing, takes a quick look and says "I'll go get the Doctor", whereupon she exits stage left. Hmmmm, thinks I, where is she off to - I mean I did have an appointment - you know what those are - definite times set for you to show up and wait for an indeterminate time for the person with whom the appointment was made to show up at HIS leisure and convenience.

Enter (after what really was not an unreasonable time) the Doctor. Grabs a set of tweezers (or some similar devilish instrument) and starts probing and digging - so much so that my dear wife, leaning in for a closer examination of the wound actually halts the doctor from digging. He pauses, just for a moment, as if to let my wife satisfy her curiosity. He then, once she has backed off, resumes his digging and scraping and jabbing, cheerfully pronouncing (I presume to my wife) the neat stuff he is dragging out of the wound. "Piece of gauze... necrotic tissue... hmmm, an old piece of vein... (I must confess that at the last one, I kinda' wondered if I wouldn't be needing that vein to help circulate blood, or if that was old school thinking) more tissue." He stops. Takes a look around the room. Rummages in a drawer here and there. Checks the cart with all the bandages and misc. stuff. Thinks for the merest of seconds. "Be right back", he says and exits stage left.

My wife is vociferous. "You wouldn't believe what he is doing! Why aren't you screaming/writhing/rolling in pain!!!??? You should see what he dug out of there!!! "

Enter the doctor, holding a several inches long, skinny instrument in his hand. "Got it", he says with no further explanation and starts to really dig into the wound, seemingly copious amounts now of whatever's coming out. I can see it in my wide-eyed wife's expression - an absolute fascination with this new "tool" the doc is using. He finishes. Packs the wound, puts a bandage over it. States "See me in two weeks", and leaves.

My wife, still wide-eyed, says, "That was an ice cream scoop he used on you, only smaller!! More like a melon-baller!! But shaped like an ice-cream scoop." She seems suitably impressed. "He went all the way around - top, bottom, sides - DIDN'T IT HURT???" Well, yeah, especially when he went deep down toward the knee - didn't you see my other leg doing its rattle/shake & roll, my eyes rolled back so far I could see (as a newfie would say) me very own arse, and hear my poor teeth (only a very few left now) grinding and wishing to be awash in pain-killers (liquid kind, from the LCBO.)

I don't know what impressed my wife more - that I wasn't (externally) screaming, or the sight of a small itsy-bitsy teeney-weeney ice-cream scoop.

The only other news is that now apparently the picture previously posted is out of date. According to my wife, the hole is now 25% bigger 'n better.

And no ice-cream in sight...

* sigh *

Now an even BIGGER hole...

* sigh * Here I thought the last "cut" was the deepest. Wrong. Not content with the amount of DAILY suffering I was experiencing, the home-care nurses (one in particular) really started to agitate for me to see a surgeon to get the hole made even bigger (hey, with all the money wasted on e-health scandals I suppose some one figured it would be nice if all excess tax dollars ended up in the pockets of the average rank-and-file get-'er-done types instead of bureaucratic do-nothings-except over-charge and screw-up things - and oh, by the way, what about my lucrative termination-payout?)

So, off to the family Doctor (again). Except this time, he chickened out. Yup, went to the phone and called 3 surgeons (who he claims he would "let" operate on himself), one of whom was actually at the hospital in an operating room and would soon be out. So, he suggested that we remain at his (our family Doctor's office) until said surgeon was out of the operating room and could return his call so he could discuss my situation. **** pause *** After taking a breath (hence the pause) he then suggested that we (Janet and myself) spend the waiting time wisely and make haste to the hospital, go into emergency (he would call ahead to tell them we were coming) and wait THERE, at the hospital, for the surgeon to perhaps, if he had time, or was in the mood, or sensed the "emergency" of the situation, or had nothin' else to do, or was in a grouchy mood and needed to inflict further pain/indignities on human flesh to restore some humor into his life (- get the picture?) take me into a vacant room (where hopefully my brain would be in a similar state) and see my wound, evaluate it and take appropriate action/inaction with either a minimum or maximum of growling about the general incompetencies of home-care workers fresh from some conference or other so he could compare them to himself, as chopped liver.

He chose the latter course of action, all the while entertaining a "student/apprentice" with clever witicisms whilst brandishing a slicing instrument, yeah verily hacking away with said instrument into the (temporarily) quivering hunk of meat (me - or better said my leg), to the delight of Janet (ever the home-schooling Mom, she now has more knowledge than she needs about the inner structure of the leg, just behind the knee.)

What was the most telling was Janet's (almost) verbal ejaculation, "OH MY GOD!" I, having received the customary 2 injections of numbing agent, was only aware of a slight tugging while the cutter did its work. I was less prepared for the surgeon to then RAM his finger in the incision, probing into the far, far reaches of the incision into regions where there was no numbing at all. "Hmmmmm, he said. Almost feels like a foreign object in there!" Yes, you idiot! Your FINGER is a foreign object! Get IT the he** out of there!! I guess my face was pretty well contorting by then, as Janet has related to me that it did so. Well, duh...

Anyway, I now have a wound by best estimates 2 inches long, by about 1 inch deep... Ouch, it only hurts when I write, read, think about it, breath, or move in any manner, vertical, horizontal or betwixt the two. I took particular comfort (not) hearing the nurse say that the "freezing" would wear off in an hour or so, and did I have any tylenol (no) - well you'd better get some, says she. Then the final pronouncement from the surgeon to cast comfort to my soul - "See me in a week. If it isn't better, we're gonna' take a REALLY BIG PIECE out and sew the sucker up." Ya' gotta' wonder... Do surgeons get paid by the pound, or what...

Anyway, after a (what seemed to me, although I said nothing) tiny gauze covering was in place, off we went to get pain-killer (not booze, which I eluded to in an earlier blog) but tylenol, and then off we went to the Clifford's to dinner. Thankfully (mercifully?) she had chocolate cake for dessert which was desperately needed at the time it arrived because, to be frank, my leg was hurting like the dickens, blood had soaked through the gauze and into my pantleg and I could feel the odd trickle down my leg, although not as far as the ankle.

Now, to get a rough idea, put your hands behind your knee on the underside of the thigh at that area. Shake your hands. Notice how jiggly it is. Picture an open wound, all jiggly. Imagine how much it would "tingle" (which is another word for IT HURTS!) when shaken. Picture a tandem axle truck. Empty. Picture a road under the influence of "stimulus spending" - ie. small sections carved out of an otherwise (relatively) smooth service. Just to jolt some reality back into you. Picture other sections completely ripped up, exposing the nice bumpy underlaying surface. Picture a sore, stiff, just carved open leg in the (cramped) can of a truck void of any possibility of a comfy, bump-reduced ride.

Picture a young rammy driver (sorry Daniel) who delights in a pedal-to-the-metal, aim for the big-ones, my-god-will-I-make-it driving method. Ouch! Eeech! YAAAAA! HOLY MACKEREL! WHAT THE... !!! ARE WE THERE YET???? I CAN'T TAKE MUCH MORE...!!!! I WANT MY MOMMY!!! All that was just Daniel - you should have heard me...

Anyway. I survived the trip home. I survived the walk from the truck into the house, and the walk from the bathroom to the bedroom, the removing of pants down past the sore spot, the pressure of the sheet and blanket. Only one thought pulsated through my mind - tommorrow the Nurse comes. Funny, it hurts at the thought of that. More days of pain. No booze, only tylenol. No chocolate cake, only rice-cakes. Dry rice-cakes.

Now, have a look at the picture and tell me if you think that's fair. I thought so. So, bring me cake and help an old fella' cope. Thank you.

where is it you don't wanna' go...

The problem with having a big hole in your leg is the buggers won't let you heal.

Here I was, several weeks after the thing was excised out of me, having put up with "nurses" (occasionally even my wife) stuffing the strangest of stuff into the abyss, when the hole decided to start to heal, that is, grow smaller, as in it's about time i started to close this hole because i am sick and tired of things being poked into me/myself/i... anyway, THE DECISION was made (not by me) that, perhaps, it would be better if the hole was made larger again, so MORE stuff could be packed in.

Forget any thought of personal independence on this one. Off to the cackling Doctor I went, who cheerfully cut an incision with a razor blade, and used scissors to trim the skin around the hole - to prevent any quick healing, so as to promote more pain when more stuff was packed in. At least he numbed the area with 2 shots of whatever numbing agent it is that "they", in the medical profession, use before inflicting the fore-mentioned procedure. Personally, a quart of booze ingested over ice and mixed with tonic water would have been a more patient-friendly numbing agent, but what do I know...

Democracy is NOT LIBERTY

Now, before I, or anyone else for that matter, gets too hung up on the idea of "democracy", it must be noted that democracy is not the same thing as "liberty". Democracy, in its simplest terms, is the will of the majority. Perhaps the most startling example of this is the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. Was the decision to do so not based on the (some would say misguided) will of the majority? In that context was not the liberty of Jesus curtailed by democracy? Indeed, is not personal liberty at ALL TIMES, in Western Society (being understood as "democratic"), curtailed by the very notion of "democracy" in action?

The American Patrick Henry on March 23, 1775 ended a rousing speech with the famous line; " I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!" http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/patrick.asp

(As perhaps an interesting aside, the word "democracy" does not appear in the Bible. The word "liberty" appears 25 times, though there are several underlying meanings translated to the single word "liberty".)

Nevertheless, liberty must also have constraints! Another American, Dean Russell, said: "... personal freedom cannot exist without individual responsibility."
http://dev.thefreemanonline.org/columns/a-page-on-freedom-number-14/

There's that "r" word again - responsibility! The bigger question remains - responsible to whom? Polonious belched out "This above all: To thine own self be true." (Hamlet, Act 1 scene iii) http://www.online-literature.com/shakespeare/hamlet/4/

Chew on those quotes for a while - my next blog will look at some thoughts regarding true liberty, the topic for consideration will be: true liberty is living as we should not as we please.

The radicalism of democracy

"Democracy lays its stress on personal conscience; fascism on authority and obedience." - Count Coudenhove-Kalergi.

I found this quote in a book that I am reading that is basically doing a comparative analysis between protestantism (presented as the the good guys) and catholicism (presented as the bad guys.) Nevertheless, it (the quote) has a much broader scope than simply religious evaluation, and would touch on other elements of life such as family (parents saying such things as "Do what I tell you!!",) politics/government and even, I would venture, education/science (as in evolution vs creation) as well as several other disciplines that are floating around out there.

There is a danger in attributing too much positive on "democracy", in the scope of "personal conscience", as well as too much negative on "fascism" in the scope of authority and obedience. Were it all about personal, that would be anarchy, where every one would do what he/she individually considered "right" in his or her own mind. Were it all about fascism, that would be dictatorship, where every one subserves the desires of a single person or entity - regardless of whether it is individually considered "right" or "wrong". Either position - taken to the extreme - is not "beneficial" in the broad sense, as no collaboration or exchange of thoughts and/or ideas is possible.

See what is missing in either position? Responsibility. Someone, at some point in time, has to stand up and say, "Wait a minute, who do 'you' think you are?"
This can be addressed to either the individual anarchist or the dictator/flavour of the month.

As far as Christians are concerned, that moment (from the Reformed perspective) took place when Luther took hammer in hand.

For homeschoolers, that moment took place when their children were removed from "education centres" (maybe more properly called "indoctrination centres"...) and placed in home study.

For the United States, that moment took place when a bunch of guys, dressed as native Indians (for disguise to escape punishment), threw a bunch of packaged tea into the convenient harbour.

For an average Canadian citizen, that moment took place when she recorded on her cell-phone video the lethal TASER attack by several heavily-armed Police Officers on a recently arrived Polish immigrant.

For an average Canadian family, that moment took place when an agent of the state wished to interview the children, without cause, and such request was refused.

For an average Christian worshipper that moment took place when Church Elders were questioned regarding the preaching that was going on and the subsequent behaviour of the Elders in general and one Elder in particular.

For those Chinese in Tianamin Square (spelled wrong, I know!) that moment took place when one, grocery bags in hand, defiantly stood face-to-face with a fully armed and fully armoured tank to "prevent" its advance.

3John 1:11 Beloved, do not imitate what is evil, but what is good. He who does good is of God, but he who does evil has not seen God.

Think on these things, and I will continue this discussion more in part 2...

The trouble with tribbles vs radicalism (2)

Radicalism, in its loosest sense, can be defined as not doing what "everyone else" is doing. It is being apart from (not a part of) the crowd. It is independence, free-thinking, self-existing - in the sense that any gratification comes from within, and is not reliant on general approval from others. Now, it must also be stated that there is "good" radicalism, and there is "bad" radicalism.

James 4:4 says "Adulterers and adulteresses! Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Whoever therefore wants to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God."

Colossians 2:8 says "Beware lest anyone cheat you through philosophy and empty deceit, according to the tradition of men, according to the basic principles of the world, and not according to Christ."

Colossians 2:20 says "Therefore, if you died with Christ from the basic principles of the world, why, as though living in the world, do you subject yourselves to regulations–"

Colossians 3:2 says "Set your mind on things above, not on things on the earth."

So, in the context of the above mentioned verses, radicalism can be determined to be based on either "worldly" or "heavenly" values.

Christians are called to be RADICAL in their thoughts, deeds and actions! Indeed, the very thought of "democracy" stems from this foundation.

I will shortly post more to this particualr blog, but in the meantime, digest what's here so far...

the trouble with tribbles vs radicalism

The trouble with tribbles was that they reproduced indiscriminately and they consumed all edible contents available to them. ( For those ignorant among you, "tribbles" come from Episode #42 (season 2) of the original Star Trek series, entitled "The Trouble with Tribbles".)

In the show, as I recall, they were cute n/ cuddly creatures, who cooed softly when stroked, becoming a placebo for reality in the lives of those going "where no man has gone before" (changed to where no ONE has gone before in TNG - so as to offend neither the female crew/officers in the series nor the female viewers.) Their calming effect was contagious - everyone wanted one (or more).

Only when the Captain observed the disastrous effects on his crew and ship did he take a stand, and ORDERED the "removal" of ALL said tribbles from his ship into the hands of "Cap'n Cyrano", who originally profited from the sale of these creatures to the crew of the good ship Enterprise. I do not recall how Cap'n Cy disposed of the little vile-cute creatures, other than watching the final credits roll over the screen. I seem to remember that Kirk, at the behested suggestion of Scotty, did beam them aboard a locally lurking Klingon ship (the Klingons at the time being at "peace" with earth).

The point of that particular episode, as I as a sixteen-year old understood it, was that what at first glance was appealing (want to feel good, be calm, be loving, have no stress, no strain - get a tribble) may, in fact, be and/or lead to an all consuming terror based on sex and food (tribbles, being born pregnant, were full of surprises!)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f09tnRv3Udc&feature=related

What brought that episode to mind to me today (I must confess that in truth it has several times over the last 40! years) was reading a recent article by Mark Steyn in MacLeans, where he says (or warns) that "da Canadian value is that we have no values. We value all values." He concludes the article by saying "We could use some 'Canadian values' right now."

We have, in essence, all fallen for the tribbles. If it feels good for you - then do it. This transcends and encompasses all thoughts and opinions - especially those that have to do with food and sex (are they both not defined to some extent using the term "appetite"?)

Canada was declared many years ago to be "multicultural society", a term coined in particular by the Liberals under Pierre Elliot Trudeau, in the sense that since there was no presumable "Canadian Culture", immigrants were welcome to come and retain their own uniqueness within a loose Canadian culture. Other "cultures" were subsequently recognised - that is the "invisible minorities" - in particular the so-called "gay & lesbian and trans-gendered" among us. As Steyn points out, polygamists are becoming more visible, and I would add they are doing so even to the extent that so-called reformed Christians are beginning to embrace the concept of polygamy as a legitimate culture.

You see, the idea of "equality" is the first tribble, itself pregnant with other tribbles. Equality in itself is a good thing (as I suppose a single non-pregnant tribble would be.) But I would submit that equality, without limits (in other words, self-contained limitless offspring), is dangerous. (Is that the anarchist in me speaking?) As I see it equality, in today's society, is seen as part of the warp and woof of "freedom". There is, I think, an unusual finality to the concept that "I am equal" means (and ends) with the concept that "I am free." The difficulty is that "freedom" is not the end.

"With freedom comes responsibility." This well known saying (attributed to the former U.S. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt) adds a new element, and it is a great big one that can be descibed only as the "moral" element - responsibility.

And that leads us to radicalism, which I intend to explore in a later post.