04.22.08
Posted in Random thoughts, Too Much Information at 9:19 am by ducky
I got email from a “Carlie Martindaley” today that sure looks like phishing:
Ducky <at> webfoot.com, (the email address was properly formatted in the message I got)
Hello Ducky,
I am from your Middle School years and finally got your email.
I have fallen in love with your shoes and I just wanted to know, did you spray paint them? They are so shiny, like fresh glass on a mirror, I cannot resist sending this email. Please tell your shoes, I love them, and thier laces are the most beautiful things.
From,
Annoymous
- Starting off with my email address before my name looks fishy, like a computer generated it.
- I don’t know any Carlie.
- I don’t know any Martindaley.
- I didn’t go to Middle School.
- I haven’t painted any shoes.
- I haven’t sent any old pals email.
The strange thing is that there was no call to action in the message! The only links were a mailto URL attached to my email address (I took it out for the purposes of this post) and a generic Yahoo ad at the bottom of the page.
Strange. Maybe the spambots have gotten lonely?
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01.19.08
Posted in Canadian life, Random thoughts, Too Much Information at 9:11 pm by ducky
Western medicine is amazingly good in some ways. They can sometimes cure things you didn’t even know were wrong with you.
The docs discovered my mom’s PMP on a CAT scan they did looking at what they think was diverticulitis, an annoying but generally easy to treat disease. I believe that she is totally recovered thanks to that early diagnosis. Me, I went to the doctor because I had a bump on my arm, and they ended up checking me out for cancer. (It wasn’t, but it could have been.)
I went to the doctor for three pretty innocuous things. I might not have gone if there were only one, but three together pushed me over some sort of tipping point.
- The most important thing was that a bump on my arm — which the docs had told me was fine but to keep an eye on — looked different. The skin around it was peeling slightly.
- One was that my urine output didn’t seem as “forceful” as it should. My brother-in-law had had fibroids in his urinary tract, and the thought crossed my mind that I might have something similar.
- The last one was so trivial that I honestly can’t remember what it was.
They said my bump was infected slightly. They said that when the infection died down, they could take it off if I wanted. I did and they did.
They seemed far more interested in my urine output, and that ended up causing a cascade of diagnostic tests which culminated in them taking out a polyp six weeks ago. While it turned out to be nothing, there was a non-zero chance that it could have been cancer, where early detection probably would have saved my life.
And that underperforming urine stream? That thing which seemed too trivial for a visit to the doctor on its own? It got robust again all on its own.
I am just astounded at how random life is. In only a slightly different version of the universe, I could be saying, “A bump on my arm saved my life.”
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Posted in Canadian life, Random thoughts, Too Much Information at 8:22 pm by ducky
The brain is really strange. Or maybe I should say, “my brain is really strange”.
The surgery that I mentioned in my last posting was to remove a tiny little uterine polyp. While polyps are almost always benign, I knew that uterine cancer was really nasty. (The Wikipedia article on uterine cancer seems to indicate that it’s usually only nasty if you are post-menopause, but I didn’t read that article until I researched this posting.)
So five months ago, when their diagnostics first surfaced the possibility of a polyp, I could have been really freaked out about it. Fortunately, I am really good at denial for health/safety issues: I once hid away a fear of heights, I was unfazed by a good friend’s 7 cm breast cancer tumour, and I took my mother’s PMP in stride.
Unfortunately, I am not good at denial when it comes to bureaucracy. I was actually quite anxious about the bureaucratic aspect of the prospect of uterine cancer. I was worried that if I got cancer, I would be disqualified from getting Canadian Permanent Residency. I’d have to leave Canada when I graduated, and that would put me in the US without health insurance and with a history of cancer. This seemed absolutely horrible to me.
Intellectually, I realized that it was rather stranger to be worried about losing a visa than about losing my life, but that’s how my brain worked.
Perhaps partly this is because I have seen a lot of friends and family have really seriously hugely awful bad things happen to them, and almost all of them pulled through. The friend who had that 7cm breast cancer tumour five years ago is not just alive but very active. Mom had surgery that required 40 stitches and is — as far as anyone can tell — completely recovered. A high school friend got multiple meyeloma, which is one of the deadliest, deadliest forms of cancer there is. One friend got throat cancer three years ago and is still talking. Another friend got leukemia, was in remission for three years, and has been fighting again for about two years. Even cousin Ellen was in remission for three years after (criminally) late treatment of her breast cancer.
On the other hand, I’ve seen lots of snafus with paperwork. Constantly. All the time. (Like how the Canadian government couldn’t figure out for the longest time that I spell “Kaitlin” with a “K” and not a “C”!) So in some ways, it is easier for me to believe that bureaucracies would destroy me than that cancer would destroy me.
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01.18.08
Posted in Random thoughts, Too Much Information at 10:56 pm by ducky
I had minor surgery recently that I wasn’t particularly looking forward to. It required a general anesthetic, and in my two previous experiences with general anesthetic, I had real trouble with nausea. I basically woke up, rolled over, and threw up.
This time, however, when I woke up, I had no nausea at all. I felt surprisingly good, and was actually even chatty when I woke up. I continued to be chatty and happy and only a little tired for the next few hours.
In fact, on the drive home, at one point, Jim remarked, “Honey, you’re high!” Surprised, I took stock, and had to agree. I can’t actually speak from experience — I don’t drink, and I have never taken any controlled substances that weren’t prescribed. But I could tell that I was in some kind of an altered state: I was gregarious, garrulous, and euphoric. (For those of you who know me, I should say more gregarious and more garrulous.)
What was going on?
One of the nice things about living at Green College is that there are people who can answer just about any question. Chris, one of the med students here, explained that anesthesiologists usually use usually a mixture of IV and gaseous drugs to knock people out. Sometimes, the gas can diffuse into the tissues surgery at the time of application and then come out later. (He said that about one percent of patients pass out again in the recovery room!)
One of the gases that they commonly use is nitrous oxide. So basically, I was high on laughing gas! It only lasted a few hours, but was much more pleasant than the throwing up I usually do.
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11.26.07
Posted in Canadian life, Too Much Information, University life at 7:09 pm by ducky
On the day before US Thanksgiving, I was at my lab late, waiting for my beloved husband to get done with an opera chorus rehearsal. For reasons that don’t matter, I didn’t go home for dinner. Instead, I prepared some yummy cup-of-soup for dinner, adding boiling water from the electric kettle in our lab. I immediately grabbed the cup in my right hand to take back to my desk… and slopped boiling-hot soup on my hand. It landed in the little triangle of skin between the thumb and index finger, where there is a little depression — and saw no good reason to leave. This hurt, so my body acted quickly to throw the water off of the web of skin.
Unfortunately, that meant that soup jumped out of the cup onto the floor, onto my shirt, onto the desk, onto the back of my hand, and even one little splatter onto my forehead. YOWCH!
I quickly grabbed my waterbottle and poured it over the back of my hand (watering one of the office plants in the process). It hurt, but not so much that I thought I couldn’t clean up some of the mess before going 50m to the closest washroom to run more cold water over my hand. So it was a minute or two before I ran more cold water over the burn.
It hurt, but it didn’t hurt that badly. I had never scalded myself before, but I certainly had burned myself before, and it wasn’t painful in that same league. So I ate what was left of the cup of soup and went back to debugging.
After a while, the scald started to hurt. It hurt more and more as time went on. This was really, really strange. I wondered if scalds were somehow different from “regular” burns. It was hurting enough that I was having trouble focusing on my work. “How long would it keep getting worse?” I wondered.
What really made me nervous was that I was supposed to jump in a car and go down to the US in a few hours. I have travellers’ insurance so that I can get medical treatment in the US if needed, but it would probably be a big logistical hassle. Finally, I decided to go to the emergency room a few blocks away. I felt kind of foolish for doing so, but I had never had the experience of a burn’s pain getting worse and worse as time goes on.
As soon as I got outside, my hand started feeling better. This made sense, given the cold and moist air on my bare skin. At the emergency room, they saw me quickly, told me I was fine, and sent me home. I felt relieved but somewhat foolish, but it had been really strange for the pain to increase.
I went back to the lab and commenced working again. I started typing and mousing and typing and mousing again. With my hands. Especially my right hand. And what do you think happened? The pain started increasing again in my right hand!
I felt really, really stupid at that point. It was hurting more and more because I was stretching the scalded area. Duh.
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05.27.06
Posted in Technology trends, Too Much Information at 10:29 am by ducky
Google is famous for its perks, and rightfully so. They have the best perks of any place I’ve ever worked, even better than SGI in its heyday. It seems like Google really wants to eliminate anything that might distract people from doing great things.
It’s also possible that they just want to be nice to their employees, and I found an argument for that: heated toilet seats.
While I haven’t done a rigorous statistical analysis to determine distribution, almost all of the toilets at the Googleplex that I have sampled are high-tech megafunction toilets: the kind that can spray your privates clean and then blow them dry.
The first time I walked into a stall, I rolled my eyes at how over-the-top the toilet was. I mean, how necessary is it to have megafunction toilets?
Then I sat down and discovered the seat was heated, and to my surprise, I found that I had a very visceral response. It was comforting. I suspect that the seat is set to body temperature, and I bet that I have very strong associations of comfort attached to body heat on my butt. I wanted to just sit on that nice warm seat for hours. This argues against the perks being there to improve productivity.
I haven’t tried the toilets’ wash and dry cycle yet — I’m afraid to. After all, I do need to get some work done.
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06.07.05
Posted in Random thoughts, Too Much Information at 9:56 pm by ducky
My mother has cancer. Sort of. On one of the three different oncologists that she visited, the one I escorted her to, was adamant that it was not cancer, it was neoplasty. Whatever.You’ve never heard of it. It’s called Pseudomyxoma Peritonei, commonly known as “Jelly Belly” or PMP. (Read about Pseudomyxoma Peritonei at wikipedia — they do a better job than I would at explaining it.) It is very, very rare — only 300 to 1000 cases in the US per year — so frequently mis-diagnosed. It’s so rare that there are only about six doctors who specialize in PMP in the US.
For Mom, it might have been an accident that they found it. She had stabby pains on her left side that her local doctors diagnosed as diverticulitis. As part of that diagnosis, she got a CT scan which showed the mucous. Maybe the stabby pain was a node of mucous bursting, maybe it was diverticulitis, but it is certain that she was fortunate that her local doctors recognized it.
Mom looks fine. Mom feels fine. Being a cancer patient has not become a dominant part of her self-identity, and I actually rather doubt that it ever will, except for perhaps the period while she’s recuperating at home after her surgery later this summer.
I am in denial about it — not in denial that it exists, not in denial that it needs to get treated, not in denial that the surgery recovery is going to be massively uncomfortable, unpleasant, and inconvenient, but in denial that there could be any possible long-term prognosis besides “just fine”.
Denial is a very comfortable place to be, and I plan on staying here as long as possible.
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