This is my almost-brother-in-law, Dan Sparling, boyfriend to The Sister for lo, these 23 years, and many thanks are due him for taking her off our hands. He’s spending his weekend doing the Ride for Dad through scenic southern Ontario, raising funds to fight prostate cancer.
We raise funds through large scale one-day motorcycle, snowmobile, watercraft and ATV ride events and through ongoing public fundraising throughout the year. TELUS Ride For Dad events take place in multiple cities across Canada, representing every Canadian province. To learn more about a ride in your city, please click here.
Since 2000, the TELUS Ride For Dad has donated more than 13 million dollars to the Prostate Cancer Fight Foundation, charitable number 85133 3179 RR0001, to support prostate cancer research and awareness in the communities where the funds were raised – we give where we ride!
Dan’s already met his goal of $500, but if you’re feeling generous and like possibly saving the lives of any of the prostate-having men you know and are fond of, click through and kick him a few bucks. God knows, it’s hard work touring the scenic countryside on a motorcycle on a beautiful spring day. Eh?
So it sprinkled! They earned their money! NOW GIVE THEM SOME!
“I know it’s the thought that counts, but…the money counts too!”
Normally, as you know, I am so NOT all about the self-conscious hipsters (apologies: I repeat myself) particularly those of ironic eyewear, but in this case I must give it up to Mister Paul Rudd, who suggests that on your birthday, you ask your friends to donate your age in dollars to the Cancer Society. Now, this may well bankrupt my friends, but you, according to Quantcast, are younger, and you should be doing this. I mean, if they spend that money on PBR you’re just gonna have a beer belly and a hangover to show for it the next day, right? Whereas fighting cancer provides a glow which makes one irresistable to the opposite sex (as several cancer fakers of my acquaintance know and have taken advantage of, and don’t worry, I’ve taken care of them in ways they don’t even know yet).
Am I ranting? Oh, let me rant. I beat cancer: I’m entitled to rant a bit. If you’re feeling ranty right along with me, here are some infuriating, medically-themed gossip links for you to read and ensure that your blood pressure remains elevated. If you get angry enough, it even counts as aerobic!
I wrote this when I was in the hospital with my first gallbladder attack. I was there five days, and in my memory I wrote this over the course of many, many days and recorded many, many different experiences.
I did nothing of the kind.
What I did was, write it on morphine. Holy crap, how Coleridge ever puked up Kublai Khan while on this stuff is entirely beyond me. Prolixity is not a quality it confers, lemme tell ya. But in the vague hope that you’ll find it amusing, I will copypaste it here for your enjoyment (?).
I’ve been in the hospital. Again. This time, I was supposed to pop in Friday morning and have that pesky gallbladder removed, a 90-minute procedure after which I’d be set free on an unsuspecting food chain to wreak uncontrollable havoc, in the style of Cthulhu left in charge of a daycare. SMORGASBORD!
Cthulhu says WOMEN AND CHIRRUNS FIRST
Guess what? Things didn’t quite work out that way.
The Sister informs me “that’s three for three” in the family, going in for a simple gallbladderectomy and ending up with an aerated colon in the bargain. Must be our genetic heritage of deformed gastrointestinal tracts or something (we coasters have an extra pouch to help us separate out the nutritive particles from the rainwater here). My doctor informs me she’s done over 300 of these operations, and this is the very first time she’s chopped a hole in someone’s colon without meaning to. In any case, she sewed up the hole and I am no longer holey.
As if you couldn’t tell.
That is one angry looking gallbladder
She tells me, additionally, that in her 300-gallbladder career, she’d never seen one as inflamed as mine (and remember, this woman ONLY sees unhealthy gallbladders). It was at least twice the size of an ordinary, inflamed, has-to-be-removed gallbladder. She said she couldn’t imagine how painful my attacks must have been, to which I replied that I reported them as 8/10 on the pain scale only because I’d had a bone marrow biopsy, and that was a 9. I don’t think people remain conscious through a 10.
No, sadly, they do NOT give you your Human Pearls after the operation. Gallstones seem to be a sort of cancer clearinghouse for the entire body, so if there’s cancer anywhere, it shows in your gallstones, so now they give all your lovely Human Pearls to the pathologist to brutally crush and analyze. There goes my business model, dammit.
In any case, after lying in the hospital a few days taking nourishment from a plastic bag and a hose attached through a hole in the back of my hand, getting dosed with superantibiotics (perforated colons have a nasty way of causing the worst possible infections, and are fatal quite frequently) and being bored out of my mind by my charming, sweet, but UNSTOPPABLY CHATTY roommate, I mean, seriously, I’d have my headphones on, she’d wake up, start babbling, notice my earphones were on, say “oh well, let me repeat that so you can hear” and do so, louder. Several times. All. Damn. Day. When they moved her to the physio ward it was sweet, sweet relief, anyway, after all of that they let me go, and not a moment too soon because although they did officially switch me to “solid” food two days before, the kitchen never got that notice and sent nothing but milk, tea (vile brown particle-filled stuff that would strip paint), cream soups, and cream of wheat. I tell you, I would have welcomed the synthetically cheerful jewel tones of Jello like a drowning victim welcomes a life raft. A shiny, wobbly crimson life raft filled with empty calories and pure joy.
Now, let’s back up a little (a phrase which should give one pause, embedded as it is in a blog post about the gastro-intestinal system and catastrophic colon-based events.
This is what a GT looks like, y'all. My blood is AWESOME under a microscope
“GT” is a sort of byword for a car that is sporty, racy, competitive, and stylish. So it was with not a small amount of pride that I noticed while reading my medical chart that according to a blood test from the last time I was in hospital, my “Gamma GT” levels were substantial. They were so awesome they were bolded right there on the chart, along with a whole lot of other terms like “AT” and “conjugated bilirubin” which were also in bold. And decorated with a large letter H, each of them.
which rather puts into context my medical team’s remark that, had they not tested my liver enzyme levels both when I was admitted to the hospital in November and when I was released (this figure is from the latter, when it had increased threefold) they would never have clued in that my bile duct was blocked and I had a potentially fatal, potentially SOON, situation underway.
Anyhoodle, that got dealt with. Which brung us to Friday, and from Friday the rest of this post has brung us to here. Which is about all I can think to write at this point, except that my blood is SO WAY COOLER than yours under a microscope, so suck on that while you’re watching your big screen tvs and enjoying all those concert tickets I can’t afford. MY BLOOD IS SO WAY COOLER UNDER A MICROSCOPE. Ha! Take that, Mundanes!
Blah, blah, blah. Oh, they’re all “reach out and touch someone” right up till you try to put a personal spin on it, like in my headline, and then it’s “oh, somebody needs a little time-out!”
Yes, she does. And she would like to take it at a hotel on Mustique, thankyouverymuch. You know where the Paypal button is.
In related news, apparently I function as a human voodoo doll, and the doctors at Mount St. Joseph’s are actually using me to get back at award-winning actress and international star Marion Cotillard. Behold:
This is what they did to me:
So, that’s about four inches long and three across at the widest part, and a week later it looks much the same. Those dots you see aren’t pores: they’re where the freezing went in. Over and over and over. And yes, it still hurt.
and this is what happened at the same time, somewhere in France; coincidence? Hardly likely!
While being awarded the Order Of Arts And Letters in Paris today, the French Minister pricked Marion in the chichi and pretty much made her nipple bawl blood tears.
The poor woman has tried to protect herself the only way she knows how: by getting in some spares.
I shoulda thought of that myself.
I wonder what she did to piss off the boob docs? Other than stick with her original, home-grown set. I mean, she’ll never get anywhere in Hollywood with those measly flesh pimples!
In any case, and only tangentially related to the above, I’d like to bitch about my new doctor for a second. God knows what happened to the old one; perhaps he was shanghai’d by the Meerkat Army in an attempt to learn the secrets of Operation Global Media Domination (what, whaaaaaat? I’m perfectly sober! Why are you looking at me like that?). That would explain why the hematologist who was on the case the year I had to take off work to battle Hodgkin’s Disease is also missing. Perhaps they ran away together? Won’t their wives be surprised!
So both the doctor I’ve been going to since shortly after puberty and the doctor who treated my cancer have vanished in the last year. And my new doctor is a lovely, lovely person with execrable taste in office decoration (think Dolores Umbrage by way of Olde Russia) but, apparently, absolutely no juice in the medical community.
Socialized medicine works like this, in case you didn’t know (this is where the “social” part comes from, not really the payment system, no matter what they tell you): your doctor needs to refer you to a specialist, so s/he calls up the ones s/he knows socially or who owe him/her favours and s/he gets you in fast if, in his/her opinion what you have needs quick action. And what I may have includes The Big C, and I am something like three years overdue for my checkup.
And I have been waiting since October for a referral to a hematologist, which is entirely too long. When I needed a biopsy the first time, it was a week’s wait and then the head of St. Paul’s thoracic surgery performed it (leaving, may I say, the faintest scar the universe has ever seen; the man is a genius with a scalpel). I mean, I know it takes time to get an appointment with a specialist, but they haven’t even booked the appointment, which is typically six months out from the time of bookage. I’m about ready to take up a station outside the Burrard Medical Building and ambush the next person I see coming out of there wearing expensive shoes, just on the off-chance they’re a specialist.
Oh, and the clinic that set up my tests of last week promised to get the Cancer Agency to set up another biopsy, and it’s been a week and I’ve heard nothing. I mean, it’s not like their calendars only go two weeks ahead. Time to give them a ringy-dingy, methinks, before I have to stalk the Cancer Agency too, and who has time for that?
I mean, my time is valuable. More valuable to me than theirs is, quite frankly.
raincoaster 