No salted caramel macarons for me, then

Well. Today I went to Hutt Street on a follow-up visit to the nice surgeon who removed my gall bladder and, while he was in there, (gulp) biopsied (is that a verb?) my liver.

The good news is that there is no new bad news about the liver, and that everything that was eating at my innards has now been surgically removed and is healing up nicely. The bad news is assorted: (a) that gallstones can in fact form in the bile duct, so there's no guarantee that I won't grow more, and (b) the confirmation that the condition of my liver is not at all what it should be (NB this has nothing to do with drinking, so there) and if ignored and neglected could easily lead to something called non-alcoholic cirrhosis, which is exactly like alcoholic cirrhosis except that you didn't have any fun. And cirrhosis -- well, you know.

Now Hutt Street, as Adelaideans know, is an excellent place to have coffee and cake. I had coffee. No cake, no biscuits, no gorgeous French patisserie and absolutely, positively no salted caramel macarons. Not today, not next week, and only very occasionally as a special treat ever again. Sugar, fat and alcohol, formerly three of my main food groups, are off the menu for the foreseeable.

The bright side is that if I take this seriously, as who would not, then my days as a traditionally built lady might be numbered. Goddess knows I'm already ten kilos less traditionally built than I was when this all hit the fan two months ago. It could be the start of a whole new look.

Silver lining

Long time no post once more, as I am balancing the meeting of deadlines with the managing of health Ishews. If you ever find yourself with the sort of gall bladder that must come out, but looking at some delay as the surgeon is not available for a few weeks, look on what has for me been a very bright side: you will lose six kilos and counting.

This is because, as I was warned by a friend who's been through this particular brand of hell -- is there any other ailment that is this painful and frightening and yet this fundamentally non-serious? -- you get to the stage where merely thinking about eating anything with any scrap of fat or oil in it of any kind (and you quickly discover that this includes about 97% of the food in the universe, including my very favourite among them, cheese. Especially cheese) is enough to make your inner vulture start chewing away at your vitals again. Or, in my case, thinking about eating anything at all.

Over these last few weeks I have been reminded repeatedly of that sketch from, I think, Beyond the Fringe about the couple in the English countryside during World War 2. (In a strong West Country accent): 'I'll never forget the day that rationin' was imposed. My wife came out to me in the garden, her face ashen in hue. "Charlie," she said to me, "rationin' has been imposed, and all that that entails." "Never you moind, my dear," I said to 'er, "you put on the kettle, and we'll have a noice steamin' cup o' hot water."'

Language corner

Because of reasons, I have perforce made the acquaintance in the last few weeks of a couple of bits of medical terminology with which I was hitherto unfamiliar. Those who, like me, have always regarded medical language as technical, dry and incomprehensible may be as delighted as I am by these two dramatically emotive terms. Trauma to any bit of your body by way of injury or infection is referred to as an insult. And the word for abnormal liver function tests is deranged.

Can't give them away with a pound of tea

I've been trying intermittently to become an official organ donor for nigh on twenty years. Anyone who watched the 7.30 Report last night won't be surprised to hear how difficult and frustrating this has been. Twenty years ago some of my organs might have been worth something, but I doubt it now, although I bet my lungs are in better shape after nearly 21 years off the nicotine.

But apparently now you really can do it online. That is, if you're prepared to register in order to use their online services and wait while they post you your password by snail mail. Which might entail ringing them up to make sure the postal address they have for you is current.

Also, whoever organised that segment managed to time the running of it so that it coincided with a period of maintenance at the Medicare site.

But if you're still interested after all that, the website is here.

Apparently Australia has an unusually low number of organ donors, but my guess is because it's been so hard to register as one. Every time I filled in a card for my wallet or opted to have 'Organ Donor' put on my driver's licence, someone would immediately assure me that it didn't mean a thing. My family has discussed this kind of stuff many times and we are all in furious agreement about the virtues of organ donation, but that decision is one burden I would like them not to have to carry if it came down to it. Hence the online registration.

But I'm wondering if there are other reasons. So by way of novelty I'm going to use Blogger's poll gadget to actually do something useful and get some information on reasons. Do feel free to play.

How embarrassment

The Age is reporting today that only one out of two Australian women in their 20s is having a regular pap smear test for cervical cancer.

Why? Apparently, it's because it's 'embarrassing'.

So here's what I want to know. Are these the same young women who wouldn't be seen dead sporting pubic hair?

And if they are, why is it more embarrassing to have a clinical examination done by a doctor (you can always go to a female doctor if that makes you feel less embarrassed) than it is to have your short-and-curlies ripped out by some total stranger whose training, if any, you know nothing about, and at whose hands you could end up with the most godawful rashes and infections?

If you get cervical cancer (and don't forget what aspiring Prime Minister Anthony John Rabbit thinks about Gardasil, the vaccine that could prevent it), things will be done to you by doctors that will be infinitely more invasive, painful, time-consuming and, yes, embarrassing than any pap smear. They will be done to you in an attempt -- an attempt that may well not be successful -- to save your life.

I love Gen Y. But sometimes I don't understand them at all.

I know Florida is odd, but still

The 'Say what?' feature at the Doonesbury site offers a daily sample of demented quotations from US public life. Here's today's:

"If you voted for Obama... seek urologic care elsewhere. Changes to your health care begin right now, not in four years."

-- sign on the office door of Florida urologist Jack Cassell

I suppose long immersion in matters urological might do strange things to your temper and world view eventually, but this is just extraordinary, possibly even illegal. And Robin Williams reckons we're unevolved.

Mind you, I imagine anyone who voted for Obama would, on seeing Cassell's sign, fall over themselves to get as far away from it and him as possible, so the Pollyanna view is that it's a win-win.

Scraps (it's all I'm good for) regarding Christmas

I spent most of the weekend in bed, snoozing, sneezing, coughing, groaning, spluttering, blowing my nose, monitoring the headache and the earache and the chills and fever, drinking four-hourly Lemsip enhanced with extra lemon juice, honey and hot water, and generally wishing I were dead, a wish the granting of which seemed imminent.

I got out of bed on Friday only to put some clothes on over my aching skin and drive to the supermarket to get supplies. Having done a big shop only the day before, I had relatively few things in my trolley, and while queueing at the checkout did the usual stickybeaking at what other people had in their trolleys and made deductions or guesses about their lives. Big dog. Small baby. Type 2 diabetes.

Anyone looking at my own trolley -- big box of tissues, two packets each of Strepsils and Butter Menthols, decongestant nasal spray, three packets of icing sugar and various containers of gelatine, glycerine and glucose syrup -- would have thought 'Hmm, person with a bastard cold who has plans to make fondant for the Christmas cake.' (Or possibly 'Hmm, type 2 diabetes.')

The time in bed was not wholly wasted, as in between the snoozing and the self-pity I read two and a half novels for work, one of which, by British professor of literature Rebecca Stott, describes a character whose attitude (in 1815) to his own Judaism gave me some insight into my own secular embrace of all things Christmas.

'And Silviera?'
'He goes to synagogue. He reads the Torah. He keeps the Sabbath.'
'He believes?'
'No. Silviera has no God. He says it's a Christian obsession, this insistence on God, on belief, on talking about it all the time. For him it's the rituals, his people, l'histoire that matters. It is his anchor.'

Which is sort of more or less what I was saying in the 2007 eve-of-Christmas-Eve post at t'old blog.

It was fortunate that by 9 am this morning, when I had to meet my sisters in the city for some legal discussions about which there had previously been some, erm, dispute, a meeting the cancellation of which would have been more than my life was worth, I was starting to feel human again. (Deciding last night at 10 pm that I really had to dust and vacuum before I put the tree up was, I think, the product of a fever dream, and naturally I was so deranged by the time I had dusted and vacuumed that I was too knackered to put the tree up and went to bed instead.) I was feeling so human that I went and did a little shopping after I'd had post-lawyer coffee with the sisters and sorted out who was doing what for Christmas day lunch. From my morning in the city, I bring two questions:

1) At what stage of his or her cognitive development does a child come to be able to work out which direction an escalator is going in just by looking at it?

2) At what stage of his or her cognitive development does an adult come to understand that if you want to get into an elevator or a parking space, you need to move your arse out of the way so that the current occupant can get out?

Putting up the tree this afternoon and decorating it with ornaments some of which I brought back from Europe ten and/or fifteen and/or 25 years ago for my mother to put on the family tree, and some of which are still wrapped in yellowed tissue paper with her handwriting on it despite the fact that she died almost eleven years ago, brought a flash of insight about her: that one of the great tensions of her life was that she combined a lifelong passion for self-improvement with a likewise lifelong resistance to self-analysis. She forgave herself nothing, excused herself nothing, indulged herself with nothing and strove to strengthen weaknesses and solve problems whose genesis she wasn't prepared to investigate, never able to separate the concept of 'reasons' from the concept of 'excuses'.

So there was just this relentless drive, physically and morally, to be better: hard-working, skilled, groomed, orderly, and ruthlessly self-disciplined. The self-discipline in particular was, I think, why so many people trusted her with secrets: while she enjoyed discussing personalities, I never once heard her gossip, and while she enjoyed an occasional brandy-and-dry, I never once saw her drunk. She believed that discretion was the essence of loyalty and she consciously practised both.

Tomorrow, in her honour, the kitchen: fondant icing and gingerbread cats. There will be photos.

A better noun, a better verb: more thoughts on copy-editing

When writing first drafts I will usually bung in instructions to myself as I go along, most often [CHECK] where I have relied on memory for an author's or a character's name, or a fact, or a guess at spelling, or whatever, and [FIX THIS] where the sentence clearly doesn't say what I wanted to mean. The combination of square brackets and caps makes the instructions stand out to an eye that has learned over decades of reading plays to associate caps in square brackets with instructions to act. As it were.

Anyway, there I was a minute ago squinting at a sentence from a book review I started a few days ago, in the middle of which I had written 'The story is marked by [FIND A BETTER NOUN AND A BETTER VERB, THINK WHAT YOU REALLY MEAN] the weird Scottish combination of wry understatement and behavioural excess.'

I like that last bit, but 'story is marked' is all wrong. Both the narrative and its narrator feature this, I think, very Scottish combination, so 'story' isn't really what I mean, and that combination is intrinsic to both the story and the storytelling so 'marked' (which implies something on the surface that was put there later) isn't right either. I have to figure out a way of saying it that is both more accurate and less awkward. Which means that the instruction in the square brackets is a bit misleading. As so often, one can get hopelessly bogged down in trying to come up with a different word when what's really needed is a re-structuring of the entire sentence.

Actually I'm ahead of schedule and the reason I'm working at all is that, on the weekend before Christmas when like everybody else I'm supposed to be running around like a mad rabbit planning this and buying that and nailing down the other, I've been struck down with the most disgusting coldy fluey thing I think I've ever had, with the full range of symptoms and every one of them floridly in evidence, so I'm not fit to do anything requiring physical energy or anything requiring going out. If I get further ahead with the work I'll be freed up to do Christmasy things when I get better, which please Goddess will start happening tomorrow if not sooner. But a head full of glue, cement and cotton wool is maybe not the ideal tool for trying to re-write a recalcitrant sentence, either.

My eye keeps going back to those square brackets, though. If I were allowed to say only one thing to a class full of writing students, it would probably be that. THINK WHAT YOU REALLY MEAN.

Gah

Papa Cat got carted off to hospital yesterday after some sort of heart attackish thingy. Not very big, but there is some damage. Have spent the last 36 hours walking past and under signs saying Emergency and Resuscitation and Critical Care, writing book reviews in hospital corridor chairs using the Notes application on my iPhone, and sending texts to my sisters saying things like 'Have you got his Gold Card?' and 'I'm in the cafeteria, where are you??!'

Tonight he is, as they say, resting comfortably: under observation in a quiet ward, no surgery or anything. But a doctor saying "I've looked at his ECG's and I didn't like what I saw" is a doctor whose face not even a mother could love.

Sick as a dog

(Actually I've never understood that expression. In my experience dogs tend to be either well or dead. It's not a big liminal zone with dogs.)

Okay so I still think this lergy (see May 30 post) is not swine flu (though how would I know) but it is quite scary and disgusting enough to be going on with, with a couple of spectacularly dramatic symptoms with which I shall not disgust you. I can't actually remember the last time I was this sick but it must have been a bloody long time ago. As you can see I am up and focusing so it's not life-threatening or anything and no I'm not going to the doctor, who will only tell me to do what I'm already doing.

Only an hour and a half till the sun's over the yard-arm and I can have another hot whisky and lemon and ginger and honey, break out a new box of tissues and go back to bed. See you all in quarantine.

Uh oh

It's been a difficult couple of weeks and it's about to get worse; in addition to the usual four novels a week I have a fifth novel, a long and major one, to write a full-length review of, plus a PhD thesis to examine, and only those who have done the latter know what a delicate, responsible, time-consuming and difficult task it actually is, and one for which the pay rate works out at about ten dollars an hour, tops.

(Back in the day, you were given three months to examine a PhD thesis, on the understanding that you were a fulltime academic and would therefore be doing the work in what was laughingly called your spare time. Now it's six weeks, which in my case are shortly going to run out, and they get very snotty with you if you're late. My understanding is that this is because funding is now directly tied to 'productivity' and one of the criteria for productivity is how many finished and passed PhDs your department/school/faculty/whatevs can churn out in the shortest possible time. It's all a bit like the Soviet Union's stats for boot production circa 1946.)

And so, naturally, I am crook.

As Laura from Sills Bend would (and indeed did) say, this is crap! Who is responsible! I woke up this morning with a sore throat that has gathered strength during the day, and has been joined by sniffling, sneezing, a temperature, a head full of cement, occasional fits of faint shuddering that have nothing to do with being cold, and a general overall feeling of utter crapitude, plus a sinister sensation that my skin is hurting. That's the one I associate with flu, as distinct from just a cold, and am muttering to myself, like the old man in Simon and Garfunkel's Bookends, 'I maintain and I maintain strongly, to this minute I don't believe it's an ordinary cold.'

Naturally I plan to examine my nose for suspiciously flattened nostrils and my bottom for any sign of an incipient curly tail before I go to bed; as you can see, the squealing has begun already. In the meantime I've just finished the hot drink I made instead of dinner, which I don't feel like at all (in my case a definite sign that something is amiss): the juice of a lemon, the last of the Scotch, the last of the Ginger Honey and a slosh of water, all heated up to boiling. The good it'll do is more psychological than physical, but that is no small thing. I still feel frightful, but I care a lot less than I did half an hour ago.

Stockpiling: yes / no / oh please

It's a month since the World Health Organisation declared that the swine flu situation had reached Stage Five, the point at which the Federal Government's 132-page manual on the subject (and I hate to think how late how many public servants worked for how long to get that together and out in such a prompt response) said that Australians should begin to stockpile supplies in preparation for an imminent pandemic.

While the End of the World as We Know It scenario has thus far failed to develop, it cannot have escaped anyone's notice that there are now almost a hundred confirmed cases in Australia, with a spike expected shortly in the stats.

Over against that, some immunologists and such are saying that swine flu is actually not that big a deal, little if at all worse than just another new strain of flu. But the bloke I saw being thus sanguinely quoted didn't volunteer an opinion as to what, if not swine flu, had killed all those Mexicans.

Anyway, the manual (see para 1) appears, in its list of provisions that one should stockpile, to anticipate the scale of disaster that would see water and power supplies cut. More, erm, power to them for being cautious, but I'm not quite up to there yet. In response to that May 1 news item I linked to above, however, I have over the last few weeks been casually buying extra tins and packets of this and that, and have therefore beefed up various supplies from a list based on a quick analysis of what I couldn't go 24 hours without, much less two weeks, if push came to shove. In the order in which they came to mind:

24 hours
coffee
longlife milk (a six-pack of 200 mil cartons)
cat food
cat litter
2 x prescription meds
toilet paper

2 weeks
muesli
pasta
tinned crushed tomatoes
tinned soups
onions
garlic
olive oil
Nurofen Plus

Everything else is negotiable, but I find myself now with a freezer full of frozen green veg and a pantry full of canned beans, lentils, chickpeas, tomatoes, sweetcorn and tuna, extra boxes of tissues and aspirin, a spare new battery for the big torch, plenty of matches, all the ice-cube trays kept full, and a serious-emergency token ten-litre cask of spring water. I figure if it gets really bad I can put on a mask and gloves and go next door to swap my neighbour some home-grown lemons, spinach and herbs for eggs from his chooks.

Is anybody else stocking up? What would you need to put and keep yourself in quarantine at home?

I'm not sure 'serendipity' has quite the connotations we want

A friend and regular reader of this blog emailed me a couple of hours ago about that last post to say that he'd looked up singulars and plurals for 'remains' in Fowler's Modern English Usage, and reports that:

Fowler wonderfully says ‘plural names of diseases as mumps measles, glanders [pardon? Glanders??] can be treated as singular or plural’. But then remains are not a disease but the aftermath so not a lot of help.

I had a vague memory from a Robertson Davies novel that glanders was a disease horses get, and a vague notion that people could catch it, so, pausing only to read more news about a possible swine flu epidemic and start a mental shopping list of long-life groceries in case I have to stay inside for a month, I googled glanders (thereby acquiring my first-ever exposure to the verb 'to weaponize') to discover that both of these things are true, and furthermore that it is fatal, and that the word for a disease transmissible from animals to humans is zoonotic.

Eewww.

Uh oh

Ouchy tooth.

Just quietly and intermittently, but it's ominous. A long way back, and a long way down.

I gravely fear we may be talking root canal.

A regular dentist is something I do not have; I've been occasionally to this one and that one, and have heard good things about a third. So here is my dilemma: of three possible dentists, should I go to

-- the nice older man whose surgery is as far across town as it's possible to get without actually having to stop for petrol?

-- the young Greek woman, somewhat less far away, to whom I want to give my business because she's young and Greek and a woman, and by whom two dentist-phobic family members swear, but whose up-loud commercial-station telly, sprightly but vacuous chatter and unsympathetic hygienist all distress me, in a situation where distress is already a given?

-- the 40ish man who practices much closer to home than either of the other two but charges an arm and a leg with one's firstborn thrown in, whom I've never consulted myself but by whom another close dentistphobe swears, and who will apparently knock you out as hard as you like if you ask nicely?

Or should I just resort to prayer and my good friend codeine?