Computed Tomography

I'm lying on my back, double wrapped in hospital gowns, feet pointing toward the donut-shaped hole in the middle of the CT Scanner. An IV has been inserted in my left arm and my stomach is full of a barium sulphate suspension that I'd been sipping away at for the past hour.

"I know you've been through this before," the technician was saying. "But if you have any sign of an allergic reaction, a rash of any kind, call us. If you have trouble breathing call 911 right away, any delay could, you know, kill you."

"I promise." I told her. "I'm here cause I'm not interested in dying. At least not yet."

She nodded. "Now you remember from last time, when the machine tells you to breathe, you breathe and when it tells you to hold your breath, you hold your breath. And then at one point I will be injecting a dye into your left arm and you will feel a warmth spreading through your body and might feel as if you have to pee. But that feeling will pass quickly."

"Oh yes, I remember that feeling."

"And half way through, I will be coming out to give you three spoons of a white pasty substance. Did you have any trouble swallowing that the last time?"

"Well, I didn't like it. But I had no trouble swallowing it."

"The last spoonful, I need you to hold in your mouth until I tell you to swallow, okay?"

"Got it."

"Alright," she said. "Let's get started."

And the table I was on began to rise higher up toward the opening in the middle of the machine. Then the technician scampered for safety and the electric motors within the scanner began to hum.

It was 8:20 am at Princess Margaret Hospital and my first test of the day was underway. After five weeks of combined chemo/radiation I was soon to discover what impact, if any, that harsh therapy had had on my esophageal cancer.

The possibilities were that the treatment had had no appreciable impact whatsoever; that the tumor had grown despite weeks of being bombarded by radiation and poisonous chemicals; that the tumor had shrunk but was still very much alive and active; or that it had been killed leaving a mere husk left in my throat.

I was voting for the latter, but I would have to wait for the results until my meeting with the oncologist next Thursday.

It was shaping up to be a long week.

After a while the machine ceased running me through the hole in its donut, where my body was being dissected by x-rays, sliced into tiny increments, and the technician reappeared before me, a white plastic spoon in her hand.

"Alright," she said. "Time for the white pasty stuff."

She pushed the spoonful into my mouth.

Yuck.

It was going to be a very, very long week.

No Friday Shootout This Week

Sorry.

I have an absurdly early morning appointment at the hospital for a CT Scan and other follow up tests to see what effect 5 weeks of chemo and radiation therapy have done to my cancer.

Hopefully I will be back to posting a Friday Shoot Out next week.

Some Thoughts On Violence

It is quiet in the house in the early morning.

Both Linda and Lindsay are still asleep and the only sounds are the song of the birds outside the windows and the occasional car passing quietly by.

In many ways it is a very normal morning. I am getting back to meditating and have begun some mild exercising. Later I will take Lindsay for a run. After that, the day is open for whatever experiences come my way.

But then I read the newspapers, which are full of stories about the violent attack on a group of women in a Pittsburgh exercise class. While, here in Canada, we have just "celebrated" the first anniversary of the terrifying slaughter of Tim McLean, a 22-year-old travelling carnival worker who was riding a Greyhound bus to Winnipeg to visit relatives, only to be stabbed repeatedly and beheaded and partially cannibalized by a fellow passenger.

The stories are a raw and ugly disturbance to the tranquility of the day.

Being alone, I have time to think about these stories, although it is a hard thing to get my mind around. The very grotesqueness of the stories repels serious thought. That a group of women, their backs turned to the door, and the intruder, can be mowed down in a hail of bullets from the gun of a suicidal loner, or that a man can go from slumbering peacefully on a bus to being stabbed 50 or 60 times with a butcher knife and then beheaded is the stuff of horror movies, not real life.

The Newspapers are filled with detail and are light on opinion. In the case of McLean, they focus on the innocence of the man, an adventurous, hard working, personable young man who was not one to cause offense. Who had, like the women in Pittsburgh, no relationship with his killer whatsoever. Who, in fact was asleep at the time the attack began. Who appears to have been chosen at random for this attack.

They talk of the calmness of his killer, who went about the task of killing McLean in a "robotic", methodical fashion. They give details of the killers past life. How he immigrated from China five years ago, is married and worked at McDonalds and had delivered newspapers for a living. How he told McDonalds he was going to Winnipeg for a job interview but told his wife he was going on family business. How he has no criminal record and no history of violence. How he was found not guilty for his actions due to insanity and was sentenced to life in a mental institution.

The Newspapers call for a re-examination of safety procedures for greyhound buses but are hard pressed to explain how similar procedures could be applied to the similar buses that ply our City streets. Do you change and make more complex an entire way of doing business based on an act that is unprecedented? How likely is it to be repeated? Will we now be faced with hoards of copy cat killers vying to outdo each other?

Or will Health and Fitness Clubs require x-rays of sports bags and body searches for weapons.

Do our immigration laws need to be changed? Do we lure people here with promises of shiny futures and then put them to work at McDonalds and delivering our papers? Are violent Hollywood films to blame? Do they cause violence or act as cheerleaders for violent actions? How long will it be before either of these stories appears as a movie of the week or as fodder for CSI? Do we glorify the perpetrators of such vicious crimes by slapping their names and photos over Newspapers and TV stations across the country? Is the butchery of another human being a cheap and easy way into the history books?

And does even asking questions such as these remove the blame from his killer and place it unfairly on us?

Should we bring back the death penalty here in Canada? Although that doesn't seem to be working so well at curbing violence in states such as Texas.

Were both killers mentally ill? Could such acts ever be the work of sane men? Where mass acts of violence are committed by guns, I've noticed the killer, or killers, usually ends the experience by taking his own life.

I have no answers that aren't trite. I'm against violence. I'm against the proliferation of handguns. I'm against the glorification of violence. I haven't used either of the killers names in this post. But I refuse to live in fear because of statistically rare if horrific acts of violence and generally oppose the curtailment of my freedom through imposing even more and more restrictions for my safety.

What do you think?

Meditation (Part 3)

The Park has a sadly neglected look, like a man badly in need of a haircut. The Outside Workers for the City of Toronto have just ended a six week strike and will soon be back grooming the grounds once again. But for now, the grasses and clovers and wild flowers have grown throughout the park in wild abundance.

The sun shines down on the park, a rarity in this cold and rainy summer of 2009. A squirrel stops its constant search for food, its long ears flickering in search of distant sounds. Far away around the bend it catches the first faint echos of human speech. And laughter. And the sound of dogs.

The squirrel does a last reconnaissance and then scampers for the safety of a nearby tree.

Around the bend come the dog walkers. Two women, four men and seven dogs of various breeds. They walk this trail on a daily basis, the humans keeping up a friendly banter while the dogs bask in the exotic fragrances of the outdoors.

Ahead of them, a black waggy tailed dog comes flying over the crest of a low hill and prances through the long grasses toward them.

"Lindsay!" exclaims one of the men, through a thick grey beard. "How are you doing girl, I haven't seen you for a long time!"

Lindsay's entire body is wiggling with excitement and the joy of greeting as she accepts pats from the humans and polite bum sniffs from the pack.

"Where's Barry, girl. Did you loose him?"

And as the humans look back down the trail, they see a hat emerge over the crest of the hill, followed by a head and then the long and lanky build of a tall thin man moving with painful slowness.

"Whoo Hooo", calls one of the women, "Barry you've been loosing some serious weight. You're looking hot man. You're gonna have to give me some tips!"

The other woman nudges her, "He's got cancer, Marge! The guy's got cancer."

"Oh crap," says Marge, as Barry reaches them. "Sorry Barry I didn't know."

Barry laughs, "That's okay. How could you know. And anyway, thanks for the compliment."

"Haven't seen you for a while," the heavier of the men comments.

"No, I've just been through chemo and radiation therapy and it completely wore me out. This is Lindsay's first run in about three weeks."

Lindsy has spotted a squirrel in a distant tree and has gone racing across the park to investigate. The attention of all the other dogs in the pack are riveted on Lindsay, but they stay restlessly around the feet of their stationary humans.

"Well she certainly seems happy to be out." Marge comments, watching Lindsay scampering toward the distant tree.

"Say," the other woman asks, "how are you doing with that meditation. Weren't you starting to meditate last time we talked? Did you find that a help while you were going through chemo?"

Barry looks embarrassed. "No. Not at all. No help whatsoever."

"Really?" comments the man with the grey beard. "Cause I've read some great things about meditation recently and how helpful it is to cancer patients."

"Well, I'm sure it is, "Barry agrees. "But there's a fatal flaw in some of those studies. Reya Mellicker had warned me about it. She'd told me not to start meditating right before a predictable crisis. And chemo and radiation are predictable crisis, trust me on that."

"I don't understand, if meditation is such a great help, why wouldn't you?"

"Because there's no time to make meditation a habit in your life. When the crisis hit, I never gave meditation a second thought. Stopped doing it completely. Meditation is a discipline and I wasn't disciplined. I was also drugged to the hilt. At one time I was taking up to ten different drugs a day. All with strange side effects. I couldn't have meditated if you'd paid me."

"Geeze, that's too bad." said the man with the grey beard.

The pack is starting to get even more restless and bored with the conversation and is heading off along the path ahead of their humans. In the distance, Lindsay has decided the squirrel isn't worth the effort and is prancing back toward us.

"I've got a month or more now before surgery, so I've started again." The humans are starting to wander off after their dogs. "I'll let you know how is goes."

"Do that," Marge calls back. "take care."

Lindsay is dancing delightedly around Barry's feet and he turns his attention toward a distant bench, where he can sit in the sunshine for a few minutes to regain his strength.

It feels good to be out walking Lindsay again.

As they wander off, the park returns to silence. And a little grey squirrel climbs cautiously down from its tree and goes back to searching through the tall grasses for food.

Smile, It's Good For Me

Linda and I have just finished a picnic of sorts on the grounds of the University of Toronto, Scarborough Campus. It was part of a "get Barry out of the house and into nature" project. And it was working fine.

I looked across the manicured lawns dappled by the shade of oak, maple and pine trees and decided I couldn't resist going for a walk. So Linda took my arm and we set off for the tree line of the distant forest.

No longer hampered by vertigo, I am still very weak and our progress is slow.

"I feel like a sloth, " I told her. "A three toed sloth."

Linda gave me an appraising look. "Now that you mention it," she said. "I can certainly see the resemblance."

And she smiled. And my heart grew three sizes that day.

They say misery loves company, but the same may be even more true of happiness.

In a study published by the British Medical Journal, scientists from Harvard University and UC San Diego showed that happiness spreads readily through social networks of family members, friends and neighbors.

Knowing someone who is happy makes you 15.3% more likely to be happy yourself, the study found. A happy friend of a friend increases your odds of happiness by 9.8%, and even your neighbor's sister's friend can give you a 5.6% boost.

"Your emotional state depends not just on actions and choices that you make, but also on actions and choices of other people, many of which you don't even know," said Dr. Nicholas A. Christakis, a physician and medical sociologist at Harvard who co-wrote the study.

The research is part of a growing trend to measure well-being as a crucial component of public health. Scientists have documented that people who describe themselves as happy are likely to live longer, even if they have a chronic illness.

A happy friend who lives within a half-mile makes you 42% more likely to be happy yourself. If that same friend lives two miles away, his impact drops to 22%. Happy friends who are more distant have no discernible impact, according to the study.

Similarly, happy siblings make you 14% more likely to be happy yourself, but only if they live within one mile. Happy spouses provide an 8% boost -- if they live under the same roof. Next-door neighbors who are happy make you 34% more likely to be happy too, but no other neighbors have an effect, even if they live on the same block.

"We suspect emotions spread through frequency of contact," Fowler said. As a result, he said, people who live too far away to be seen on a regular basis don't have much effect.

The one exception was co-workers, perhaps because something in the work environment prevented their happiness from spreading, the study found.

I wonder what percent my happiness has increased being surrounded by happy bloggers?

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Much of the information for this post came from a Los Angeles Times Article by Karen Kaplan December 5, 2008.

Princess Margaret Hospital

I've been talking about the Princess Margaret Hospital, where I've been receiving my cancer treatment, for some time.

Today I thought I would just share a couple of videos about the work they do and the aspiration they have.

Both videos are very short, blink and you'll miss them.

Friday Shootout--Outdoor Food

Patty and Reggie Girl have organized the Friday Photo Shoot Out asking us to post photos of our local community every Friday. From a handful of participants it has grown into a world wide phenomenon with over 77 contributors. This week's theme, chosen by girlchef, is OUTDOOR FOOD.

There are links to many of the Friday Shoot Out participants from literally around the world at the bottom of my left panel. For a comprehensive list see Patty's blog. Maybe you'd like to join us as well and post photos of your community? Click here for everything you need to know to join the Friday Shootout Gang. Next weeks theme is POWER--How is your community powered.

I live in Toronto, in the Scarborough area of Toronto, in the West Hill area of Scarborough. So West Hill will be the focus of my photos.

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The following photos were taken at our community picnic last September. My community association in cooperation with Toronto Parks Recreation and Forestry, hosts a free community picnic every year, complete with games for the kids, jumping castles, displays and free foods.










And yes, that strange looking guy in the white coat, white gloves, white hat and sun glasses is me. Taking my turn at cooking hot dogs.







And finally, a small shot of me finally getting to eat after cooking and serving over 700 burgers and hot dogs. Ah, the joys of being president of a Community Association!