604 lines
33 KiB
Plaintext
604 lines
33 KiB
Plaintext
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File: gutfull.txt
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Cont: the new me, and why I want to be rid of him
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Date: 21, 22, 23 Nov 2003
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I owe a lot to the likes of Planck, Fourier, Radon, deMarignac, Roentgen,
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Maxwell and a bunch of other people. Their legacy is the truly astounding
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ability to see through one's bones and their fleshy wrapping, and peruse
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internal workings which you could otherwise not without a big long slash
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through the external plating beforehand. Lensless RF imaging technology
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cannot answer on your behalf the question of wether or not you're prepared
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to see what it can show you, but you can't have everything.
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What on earth would the entrail-reading Romans have made of CT-scans and
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NMR?
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Haematology, while it can tell you a lot, can't give you an image. So, two
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nights ago, I swilled down an unpalatable beverage of heavy metal sulfate
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and yesterday I took all my clothes off, donned a distinctly Roman
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disposable gown and was fed head-first into an computerised axial
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tomography rig. Which is a huge x-ray machine which takes lots of
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exposures from multiple angles, which represent slices of your body;
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grunty computers take all those slices and, mainly using linear algebra
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with a few layers of other maths on top, build them into human-readable
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images of your internals in cross-section, provided these internals admit
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enough x-rays to be detectable on the other side of the rotating beam
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path (which is why I had to guzzle the astringent white radiopaque slushy
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I mentioned earlier).
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The aforementioned slushy stays in your GI tract and makes your intestines
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show up on the x-ray exposures, but it doesn't make it to your
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circulation, since the compound is deliberately chosen because it doesn't
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dissolve in your gut acids, which is good 'cos soluble barium compounds
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are hellishly toxic. This insolubility is why they also cannulate you and
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punch a load of clear orange liquid into your veins - so these too can be
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made visible to the short-wavelength eye of the machine. I did ultimately
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find out what the contrast medium was - iopamidol - and looked it up in
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the Merck. I'd have to shoot up about four kilos of it before I could be
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expected to die of poisoning, and the molecule is specifically constructed
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to be rapidly excreted by your kidneys.
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There's trefoiled IONISING RADIATION HAZARD stickers on the door to the
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room, and the radiologist gazes in on you through a VERY THICK window. You
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lie on a tray, and the tray is fed, under precise machine control, into
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the central tunnel of the CT rig, which is a floor-mounted,
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room-dominating contraption with all its interesting pieces hidden by
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beige plastic cowlings; The first run is to calibrate the machine to your
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particular radiological parameters, the actual scans happen on subsequent
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runs. The machine makes low, quiet humming sounds, inches you back and
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forth at a slow, precise rate, and you can see through the beam aperture
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that something large and heavy is rotating, very accurately, around you,
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but you'd never know it was throwing hard EM at the atoms of your body.
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The machine powered down, and like a compact disc in a very large player,
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I was gently ejected. The radiologist came out and asked me to move my
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penis - prone on my belly, it was evidently obstructing their scans. I had
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no idea it'd be opaque to that part of the spectrum. It's simultaneously
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reassuring and disconcerting to know that they can see so much stuff under
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the flimsy blue gown - but who am I to refuse if someone suggests I shift
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my dick out of the way of a beam of ionising radiation. So I shoved it
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down my leg, then he crammed a few cc's of triiodinated isophthalic acid
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up my arm.
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Most people report odd effects when shot up with this stuff. I did. My
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arsehole felt very hot for a few seconds, then the back of my throat felt
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hot, then I swore I could smell some sort of burnt, bleachy stink. With my
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guts rendered sufficiently visible to this anchored, domesticated version
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of Superman's eyeballs, the radiologist left the room and the machine
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inhaled me again.
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Then the scan started. The machine tells you to breathe in and hold your
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breath (bzzz, scans are happening), then breathe out, but it stops
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there... maybe programmers could remember to change this to something
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which instructs the scanee to breathe normally. This repeats itself a few
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times while the machine gets lots of juicy images and you turn anoxic in
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the belief that you have to have empty lungs for no apparent reason, and
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eventually give up and breathe like you normally would anyway.
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The bloke comes in and says, "We're gonna scan you again, and pay
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particular attention to your left kidney." Which it immediately occurs to
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me they wouldn't do if everything was normal and boring. Uh-oh. So they
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scan that a couple of times. Then he comes in and sends me off down the
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corridor to an hilarious old lady in a darkened room, who asks me to lie
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down and take my gown off, squirts a load of imaging gel on my gut and
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then manually moves an ultrasound probe around on my left flank.
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It felt a bit ticklish, but is way more interrogatory than your average
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massage. She did this for a LONG time, and got lots of snaps, but didn't
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say anything (and I can't see anything on the screen from where I am).
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Then she passed me a towel to wipe the goop off, and told me to go and put
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my clothes back on.
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So, clad again in my usual stuff, I returned to the outside world. I got
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the report later that day, shortly before they told me to get myself down
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to the nuclear magnetic resonance imaging crew in Kogarah. Which I did. I
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read the CT scanner's report in their waiting room. Yatta yatta neoplasm,
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renal in origin, yatta yatta kidneys still working, blah blah needs more
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investigation. I know enough anatomy and med-lingo to understand what
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they're talking about. I have cancer.
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I've met the enemy, and it is me. Well, it is _of_ me, anyway. It isn't me
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in the sense that it isn't a chunk of cells doing stuff I would like them
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to do, and it isn't me in the sense that none of it should be there
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according to one's embryological body plan. It is me in that it's
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genetically full o' my code, it is me in the sense that my immune system
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hasn't identified it as a targetable impostor, hence the normal lymphocyte
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count. Hey, maybe I can make money off it, license it and flog it as a
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cell line to mol bio companies, once they chop it out? I'm gonna need to,
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getting this fucker out is gonna cost me a pile of bux I don't have.
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Tumors are immortal, and a sample of this stuff will potentially outlast
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me. Enduring fame, in an Eppendorff tube.
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Collectively, the DNA in our cells take millions of nucleotidyl insults
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every day, but most of them either occur where they don't matter, or are
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repaired, or produce cells which commit programmed suicide (apoptosis) or
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die an uncontrolled death from regulatory failure (necrosis), or die after
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they reach their Hayflick limit (and hence are telomerase-negative and not
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immortal). Of the remnant, we get hundreds of potential tumors a day.
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Almost all of them get smashed by NK's, macrophages, and other sections of
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your immunology, which spot and kill these things which in the process of
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becoming tumors lost the molecular passwords which allow them to be
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considered part of the whole. Depending on your genes, what diseases you
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get, what chems you are exposed to, eventually, a few of these make it to
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the immortal league of extraordinary cells.
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So, it's a numbers game. Once a few of these things get their act
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together, they can grow, but they remain _diffusion limited_ and get no
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bigger until one or more of them decide to turn on their angiogenesis
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signalling. Then the adjacent arteries and veins start to supply it with
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access to the community nutrient lode pumped around your body. This it has
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evidently done. It's a big fucker, longest dimensions are 10 x 14 x 18cm,
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it's threaded through with vascular supply, some of which probably used to
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feed the nephrons in my renal cortex.
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Because it's big, and well supplied with blood (it appears, thusly, that
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I've been dining for at least two in recent months) it will enlarge,
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exponentially, and push other things out of the way (which is why my
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spleen felt enlarged - it was forced upwards from below). Because this
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growth process entails more and more cells, each with its own chance to
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forget to make adherin proteins and thence bud off and become another
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tumor, the bigger it is, the more dangerous it becomes, for reasons
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unrelated to mere metabolic load. Renal neoplasms have a noted tendancy to
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metastatise.
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I guess if you're gonna have cancer, this is one of the better places to
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have it. No limbs off. They don't have to chop any bones up to get at it,
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it isn't anywhere near your personality executes, and one is luckily
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bestowed with redundant kidneys so if you have to piss one off, you can do
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so without staring down a life of dialysis. At this stage, though, I don't
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know if it's a lone primary or a descendant of some creepy oncological
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mothership lurking somewhere else.
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NMR imaging works on a different principle to X-rays. If you think of
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X-rays in the same way as you might think of a very strong, penetrating
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searchlight, you're well on the way to understanding them. But NMR is
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totally, utterly different and exploits tricky quantum mechanical aspects
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of one's own molecular stuffing, to provide images of astounding
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resolution - down to microns in the really recent machines.
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NMR and CT-machines look pretty much the same to the people fed into them.
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They sound very different. CT is almost silent. NMR, which uses huge,
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liquid-helium supercooled, superconducting magnets and which bashes them
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with powerful changing magnetic fields applied by large coils (producing
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magnetostriction - same phenomenon which makes power transformers in the
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street produce their characteristic hum), is very fucking loud, so one is
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fitted with nonmetallic earmuffs to protect one's hearing. These double as
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headphones to enable the NMR operator to tell you when to stop breathing
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and breathe again. The headphones have no wires, since the fields
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generated by the machine would induce huge currents in such wires and melt
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'em; sound comes in through tubing, with characteristic pipe distortion.
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One has to have no metal implants, jewellery, anything, when one goes
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in, wearing another of those hospital gowns which if not done up correctly
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tends to expose one's arse to all and sundry. Funny how I care about that
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when my internal organs, which have never seen the light of day, are
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about to be displayed by proxy to the world at large.
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How it works is roughly like so. You lie down, and a pair of coils
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(presumably graphite or some other non-metal, but I really don't know) is
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placed, one below and one above the area one wants to look at. These are
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the aerials which detect the changes in alignment of your protons (and
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carbon-13 nuclei, too, but only barely) when the imposed magnetic field
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changes. They feed you into the machine and energise the electromagnet
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(which is an idiotically strong, supercooled rare-earth jobbie, something
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on the order of 20 Tesla, which would rip any ferromagnetic materials out
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of you and embed them in the machine as soon as they energised the
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magnet). Your protons become aligned with the (static) magnetic field - in
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effect turning you into a weak magnet. Then another coil is energised
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which rotates the magnetically aligned protons towards it, and when this
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second coil is de-energised, the protons want to re-acquire their
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orientation towards the big magnetic field which was turned on the first
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time, and when they do they emit RF... you can figure out where they are,
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if there is a gradient in the static field, which is of course carefully
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arranged. The machine records what the coils detect - which is an RF
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signal from your hydrogen atoms, saying what their chemical environment
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is, which relates to what kind of molecules they're in, and what sort of
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tissues contain them. Heavy math crunching (of the Fourier transform of
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the free induction decay spectrum of the alignment of your protons after
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they turn the second coil off, for each slice) gets your image.
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As the machine electromagnetically sectioned my carcass, stridently
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wrestling the raw forces of the universe, I could feel strips of faint
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warmth moving up my body ... my protons were dissipating as heat the
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energy stashed in them by the imposed magnetic fields (this must be how a
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tape head feels when it is demagnetised). It made a lot of loud humming
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tones, some very discordant. The equipment produces astoundingly high
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resolution images - I'd always wanted to be imaged (is gratuitous MRI the
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ultimate in self-obsession?) - and I have had that wish granted, though I
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hoped it might be under better circumstances. Ah, well, in 2012 we run out
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of helium; no supercoolant, no more MRI scans. Better to do it now.
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I did lots of breathing in and breathing out while the machine
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interrogated my proton distribution. A while later someone named Lynette
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told me she was gonna shoot me up with a contrast dye. This isn't an
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iodine-based material, I knew, so I asked her what it was. She said,
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gadolinium-somethingorother, and I reckon, probably gadopentenic acid
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(geez, the Merck's a handy tome) which is a paramagnetic relaxation
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agent... makes things containing it really stand out on MRI. They can't
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use a glass needle (they break) or a metal one, so they cannulated me with
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a plastic item, they shot me up with Gado', did more scans, and let me get
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up and get my clothes back on.
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I snuck a look in the room with the pictures in it, with my guts in
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cross-section on the screens, and fuck me, it looks detailed and messy.
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There's a lot more plumbing than is meant to be there, connected to a big
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... thing ... where most of the kidney was. Amazingly the remnants of the
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left kidney still works. They said they'd need a while to come to
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a conclusion on this one and they'd send the pics and assessment off
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tomorrow.
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I came home and departed with some gadolinic, slightly iodinated, dense
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barytic turds, and thought about the situation a bit. I don't know enough
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to really take a position yet. The dog is a reassuring island of blithe
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normality, tail wagging as tumor boy dismounts from his 'cycle and takes
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off his helmet.
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I told mum what the report said. "You know what a neoplasm is, don't you?"
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I asked. "It's a tumor. A big one." She got all teary. Later she mentioned
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she wondered if this was a secondary to something else, like a lung tumor
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she might have, over the years, supplied to me via my proximity to her
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tobacco habit. I told her we don't know yet, and speculation is pointless.
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I had to admit I kind of enjoyed watching her squirm for a teensy bit,
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amazed that she thought, maybe there were real consequences from her
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unapologetic, callous, fuck-you stubborn inconsideration of what people
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around her like to breathe. I ran a quick thought process, along the lines
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of, diag with lung tumor secondary to tobacco smoke exposure, strangle mum
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on the spot, go to court, and claim self-defense against proven poisoner.
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But that'd be silly. Aside from needlessly enriching bastard lawyers,
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there would be more satisfaction in letting her live out the rest of her
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life in awareness that she'd carcinogenated me. I wonder, if in running
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these sorts of thoughts, I am subtly telling myself to get my head scanned
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too.
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Dad's sort of odd. He reckons I should cut my goatee off 'cos it'll
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interfere with the administration of anaesthesia. He _very much_ gives a
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shit how I am going to present myself as a patient in the hospital where
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he works. Sends me up the road to purchase some acceptably boring clothes.
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And fucked if I'm gonna. The cash goes on Eigen: Rules of the Game;
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Lehninger: Bioenergetics; Tainter: Collapse of complex civilisations,
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second hand. They should get here in a couple of weeks.
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Today (Friday) I get a call, to go and have yet another CT-scan. This time
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they want to look at my chest. I go there, and there's a crowd of people
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in the waiting room, but they ask me to come in right away, which is
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abnormal - the immutable laws of queueing are only broken for the insane,
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the very important, or those suspected of dying, and I don't think I'm
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either of the first two. The CT-machine at this place, which is made by
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weapons manufacturer General Electric, probably sells commercially for
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several million bucks, is newer and faster than the one in Hurstville
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(and has obviously been got at by the school of design which says
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everything needs to look streamlined and aerodynamic), has higher
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resolution, is more capable of ionising my dick, and all that.
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The injected contrast agent feels just as weird as it did yesterday. Why
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does someone want to look in my chest if they've found something in my
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abdomen? Obviously 'cos lungs is where these things usually start. If it
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has, then the neoplastic freakshow in my belly is a secondary, and I'd say
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it's a good bet asbestos, or passive smoking, or something of that nature
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has finally come to collect its dues somewhere in the lobes of my
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respiratory system.
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I walked out of the nuclear medicine / CT-imaging place and walked down
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the footpath to the place where yesterday my protons learned to dance, in
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the expectation they'd have my scans and they could pass them over to me
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so I could 1) deliver 'em to dad, who referred me there and 2) I could get
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the straight dope from the enclosed report and look at the scans myself.
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If there's anything that shits me it is the _not_knowing_. But there's
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some dude at the desk, I think he's a radiologist, and he says I'm meant
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to be getting my chest scanned. Uh, yeah mate, I just did that, are the
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NMR scans available so I can take 'em over to Hurstville? He says the NMR
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scans are here, and he and another one of the diagnostic radiologists and
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some kidney-choppin' surgical dude (who dad has watched operating and
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approves), are gonna look at all of them together, including the chest one
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I just had, on Monday and come to a conclusion about what to do, so they'd
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like to keep it all together in one place.
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Um, right.
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I wander off to the carpark and ride back to Blakehurst.
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The pact of silence shits me. I've had more scans than your average
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barcode, and _know_ they know what I want to know, and aren't showing me.
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I think, am I condemned to cark it sometime in the next few months or
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what? Hmmmm.
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I decided I'd go round to Turella, bitch about the idiots two levels
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upstream of cat.org.au chopping off our web and email feeds, get pissed.
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Ooooh, Chatelle Napoleon brandy alternating with Peters Wicked Honey and
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Cashew Icecream is very fucking good. I crash in the cot of one of the
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locals, and we chat for a while. I let the oncological cat out of the bag.
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After a while, she's in the loop to the same extent I am. She invites me
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for a shag. Maybe it wasn't the best time for a shag. It's sad to be being
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shagged by someone and have them suddenly burst out crying all over you. I
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ask why she's upset and she says it's not so much that I have cancer, it's
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that I said I wouldn't bother to fight it if it's already an entrenched
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aggressive, metastatic one. I guess it would seem like I was rejecting
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everyone, by not making an effort to hang around, by choosing to let
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myself be removed from their life.
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It is in the absence of knowledge that superstition and fear fester. In
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the absence of awareness about what is going on inside, the decisional
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logic becomes simple. If it's localised, chop it out, cool. If it is
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metastatic and distributed everywhere, well, I think - it might be time to
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prep an azide milkshake, ride down to a part of the National Park that I
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like, dig a hole, climb in, and irreversibly lock my metabolism. Fucked if
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I want to be stuck in a cot somewhere, emotional football for a load of
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people crying around me as I die, all of whom think they have something
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very important to say to me, and who think we're gonna meet up again
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later. I want calm, indifferent nature around me.
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The timescale of my life looks like it might be dramatically
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compressed. Now, most people have reasons to stay. Spouses, rugrats,
|
||
|
careers, infrastructure they expect to use for their lifespans, or God
|
||
|
says they have to stay, or something.
|
||
|
|
||
|
But I look on my life so far, and wonder, is there anything which really
|
||
|
recommends me? Am I worth, in the purely economic rationalist view of the
|
||
|
world, the effort of saving?
|
||
|
|
||
|
Dad seems to think so, I suspect he's been pulling various strings to
|
||
|
get all these scans arranged with such suspicious efficiency. Why does he
|
||
|
want to save me? We get on pretty well but I am secretly convinced I have
|
||
|
been, on the whole, a nuisance to him.
|
||
|
|
||
|
What do I do that makes me worthwhile? To whom do I matter? Why should
|
||
|
anyone miss me on a planet stuffed with millions almost alike? Thousands
|
||
|
of people exist, just like me, with this same sort of predicament, and
|
||
|
quite possibly I will be saved by blind luck alone, they will die and I
|
||
|
will never hear about it.
|
||
|
|
||
|
If I am full o' metastatic malignancy, I'd only go through with the
|
||
|
nauseating bullshit associated with chemotherapeutically fighting such an
|
||
|
illness, not 'cos I feel I really have to do anything special before I
|
||
|
cark it or need to live for some additional thing I have to complete, but
|
||
|
since I feel there's something altogether wrong about my dear old man
|
||
|
having to put me in the ground rather than the other way around. I can't
|
||
|
think of any real justification to prolong my existance. I've lived long
|
||
|
enough to get grey hair, be fucked senseless, blow shit up, play god with
|
||
|
the genomes of living things, learn most of the things I wanted to know,
|
||
|
free myself of religion, despair of the future of my species, travel much
|
||
|
of the world. Some people I want to say bye to are out of the country. I
|
||
|
skipped a few drugs, though, and it's too late to whip up a batch of mesc,
|
||
|
or score a few tabs of LSD. Oh well, tough shit. I should check out the
|
||
|
Powerhouse Museum, the Bletchley Park exhibit, a few other little things.
|
||
|
Go skydiving. Get my naked arse flashed by a speed camera at 100kmh above
|
||
|
the limit. The four remaining books I want to read are already in the
|
||
|
post. Ar, bugger, I haven't finished renovating the kitchen either. Oh
|
||
|
well, tough shit, too. I've done all the good stuff, I reckon.
|
||
|
|
||
|
|
||
|
It is great a) having a molecular biological clue what I am up against and
|
||
|
b) being an atheist. Having no god to beseech or delude myself that I can
|
||
|
plead with, I can get straight to the point. Most people go through the
|
||
|
disbelief, bargaining, anger, depression, acceptance cycle, but I seem to
|
||
|
go to acceptance first, depression second, then back to acceptance.
|
||
|
Knowledge is power. Self knowledge brings power over oneself.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Wills are odd, I never thought I should write one. What stuff do I have
|
||
|
that other people would possibly want? Like I'd give a rat's what happens
|
||
|
to it if I am dead. What kind of person lives a life that leaves not
|
||
|
only nothing to squabble over, but no descendants to squabble over it?
|
||
|
Hmmm. I'll just be a job creation scheme for the Public Trustee, I 'spose.
|
||
|
Funny, when I think I'm gonna die, odd things pop out, like that I
|
||
|
have to discretely dispose of my stash of hardcore porn, so as not to
|
||
|
offend the sensibilities of the people who find it when they go through
|
||
|
the stuff I used to own. Various clandestine possessions also need
|
||
|
stashing in the ground or to be moved on to someone else.
|
||
|
|
||
|
|
||
|
I like black humour. TISM have a lot of songs mentioning cancer, and I
|
||
|
still think they're funny now I have some of my own.
|
||
|
|
||
|
"There's cancer in the south of France
|
||
|
Cancer lurks in Rome.
|
||
|
Cancer circles the while globe,
|
||
|
until it finds you home."
|
||
|
|
||
|
and
|
||
|
|
||
|
"Cancer? I dream of cancer! Cancer can eat my BONES!
|
||
|
Oh, lucky I would consider myself to be racked by cancerous moans -
|
||
|
a fate more evil, a life more lost, the devil for me foresaw!
|
||
|
Imagine the day I awoke to find the Milats had moved next door."
|
||
|
|
||
|
|
||
|
|
||
|
|
||
|
|
||
|
It's saturday morning. Rain's pissing down on the steel roof. I like the
|
||
|
sound. White noise, stochastic arrival of discrete, glistening carriers,
|
||
|
loud enough to drown out the straining engines of the local revheads who
|
||
|
emerge to do burnouts on the wet roads. I am climbed upon by the form
|
||
|
previously feigning sleep next to me, and have one of those strangely
|
||
|
distracted fucks, where everything is sort of done on autopilot and I'm
|
||
|
thinking about something else. I wonder, ferinstance, what _it_ does while
|
||
|
I'm having this shag, how does it move, what does it know about the
|
||
|
blissful fire spreadding through my pelvis when I come. I dunno. I had
|
||
|
this odd idea that there's something defiant about the reproductive act
|
||
|
when performed by a condemned individual, but then, that's crap, I thought
|
||
|
to myself. We're all condemned. Some of us just have the luxury (or curse,
|
||
|
you pick) of knowing when and how. There's nothing remotely defiant about
|
||
|
fulfilling the main purpose for which your organism exists any more than
|
||
|
one is defiant of death while breathing. At least there were no tears this
|
||
|
time.
|
||
|
|
||
|
I haven't told many people what I know: three cat people (so they know why
|
||
|
I'm off-net for a while). They all think it's a bit grim. One said she'd
|
||
|
miss me if I died. Some people don't believe it. I was massaged by a young
|
||
|
lass a few weeks ago and she too noticed the malevolent lump. I SMS'd her
|
||
|
the info and I recieved in reply from her dual-case SMS phone: "DONT FUCK
|
||
|
WITH ME PRED". I sent back "IM NOT" but only because I don't have
|
||
|
lowercase on my wankerfone.
|
||
|
|
||
|
I eat breakky, and am glad my hangover is only a little one. I am tempted
|
||
|
to fanatically read up about renal tumors, but I think it'd only depress
|
||
|
me.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Eventually I ride to Newtown, eat a ham and cheese melt and swill some of
|
||
|
the faintly burnt coffee they flog at the Old Fish Shop on King st. They
|
||
|
usually give me something other than what I ask for, but that's OK since I
|
||
|
get the mistaken order for free. The rain has turned the usual footpath
|
||
|
parade into a serried trickle of umbrellas and bipedal bedragglement.
|
||
|
There's people dressed up the way they are because, to my neverending
|
||
|
amazement, they apparently give a shit who wins the footy. I pop around to
|
||
|
Ned the Anarchist's place but he's out, driving to Wollongong, probably
|
||
|
testing the suspension with his new squeeze. So I pop back to Turella.
|
||
|
|
||
|
I fuck around there for a while, pulling files out of the server via the
|
||
|
age old method of floppy disk 'cos someone's changed the IP numbers again,
|
||
|
grrrr. I'd send mail but our provider's provider has, incredibly, turned
|
||
|
the mail system off, the idiotic bastards. I get a pile of parts to take
|
||
|
back to the shed, there's a GX150 motherboard which I consider well worth
|
||
|
the effort of salvaging and retrofitting into the ATX tall-form chassis I
|
||
|
found on the roadside last week.
|
||
|
|
||
|
I'm about to leave for Blakehurst, taking advantage of a break in the
|
||
|
rain. Ah, ya know you're appreciated when the person who shagged you in
|
||
|
the morning blew a large part of an ounce of good bud on manufacturing
|
||
|
some punchy cannabis cookies. Serious weapons in the fight against pain
|
||
|
and depression. And, a nibble tells me, rather tasty too. Newly appointed
|
||
|
a trafficker of commercial quantities of natural analgesics, I start up
|
||
|
and ride through the drizzle. Hmmm. I hope I can keep mum away from them.
|
||
|
|
||
|
I get back to the Old's place a while later. They're watching the footy on
|
||
|
TV, the volume is up REALLY loud, earthworms in the back garden are
|
||
|
doubtless clued right up about the fucking wallabies. For fuck's sake,
|
||
|
even my wankerfone has stopped telling me where I am and now, instead of a
|
||
|
suburb, displays
|
||
|
|
||
|
GO WALLAB
|
||
|
IES
|
||
|
|
||
|
by default. Puke. I wonder if brain process saturation by televised sport
|
||
|
is a treatable pathology. The game hasn't started, they're half an hour
|
||
|
into the hour of pre-match advertising bait which is now customarily
|
||
|
played before the actual footy. I turn the volume down (normally this
|
||
|
creates uproar if I do it) and have a chat to dad. He does most of the
|
||
|
talking.
|
||
|
|
||
|
"We've looked at the MRI, the CT scans, and we're gonna have a chat to
|
||
|
Peter Aslan on monday. On wednesday, you'll be on his list."
|
||
|
|
||
|
Which is dad-speak for, you'll be in hospital and they're gonna chop it
|
||
|
out. I wonder which anonymous renal patient was bumped off Peter's list to
|
||
|
accommodate me.
|
||
|
|
||
|
"Ok, so they're gonna fling the kidney, right. What I want to know is,
|
||
|
how far has it spread?"
|
||
|
|
||
|
"Looks like it hasn't. One lymph node in the hilus is enlarged, there's no
|
||
|
other involvement, the spleen's normal, the liver's normal, your lungs
|
||
|
are normal."
|
||
|
|
||
|
This should be reassuring, and is, but not completely. Maybe it's
|
||
|
metastatising and just hasn't cooked up anything detectable yet. But I
|
||
|
couldn't have hoped for a better prognostic. Tobacco, meso, and Sydney air
|
||
|
haven't got me yet. Tho, some total strangers are gonna chop me open and
|
||
|
steal my internal organ (they'll pass it on to the histology lab, then
|
||
|
it'll probably be incinerated, incorporated in dog food, or sold to a
|
||
|
biotechnology company as a renal tumor cell line), and I can't say I'd
|
||
|
recommend it as a way to lose weight. Not that at 65kg I need to. If I was
|
||
|
a blob, I'd probably never have felt this thing until it was too well
|
||
|
established to treat.
|
||
|
|
||
|
This evening, I finally got my hands on the actual MRI and CT assessments.
|
||
|
What I like about these people is they don't fuck about when they write
|
||
|
their reports - if you're getting both barrrels, they'll give 'em to you
|
||
|
straight. When three people write stuff like:
|
||
|
|
||
|
"There is a large heterogeneous soft tissue mass in the left hypochondrium
|
||
|
extending to the left loin which appears to involve the middle and lower
|
||
|
thirds of the left kidney."
|
||
|
|
||
|
"There is a mass lesion measuring approx. 14cm in size involving the
|
||
|
lateral portion of the left kidney extending from the undersurface of the
|
||
|
spleen to just above the illiac crest."
|
||
|
|
||
|
"The huge left renal lesion with multiple draining cortical veins can be
|
||
|
seen."
|
||
|
|
||
|
"There are several enlarged feeding arteries from the aorta, either
|
||
|
engorged lumbar arteries or accessory renal arteries supplying the tumor."
|
||
|
|
||
|
|
||
|
it means I'm in for a slashing... it's too big to remove piecemeal
|
||
|
endoscopically (and too risky, they might leave some in). I 'spose you'd
|
||
|
expect that, seeing as it is plumbed into the biggest artery in my body.
|
||
|
I've spoken to dad enough about accidental removal of perfectly good
|
||
|
organs, etc, that I am going to bring along a texta and write on my right
|
||
|
flank before I go in, in large letters:
|
||
|
|
||
|
PLEASE OPEN OTHER SIDE ---->
|
||
|
|
||
|
|
||
|
I slowly notice, everywhere in the patho reports, they studiously avoid
|
||
|
the use of the term cancer. Lesion, tumor, neoplasm. Has political
|
||
|
correctness reached med terminology too?
|
||
|
|
||
|
The rest of the evening is sort of mundane, how I like it. Mutant freak
|
||
|
kidney and I eat some cold fish. We go out to the shed and do some tricky
|
||
|
metalwork on the computer chassis. I love doing this, since we use these
|
||
|
as servers, and get server-level performance out of these sorts of
|
||
|
motherboard, despite their bring deliberately layed out to prevent their
|
||
|
implementation as servers since it would cut into sales of equivalently
|
||
|
performing overpriced servers with logically identical guts. I dunno what
|
||
|
mutant freak kidney thinks of it. That done, mutant freak kidney and I
|
||
|
come in and sit down to type some more of this rant. Hey, you in there,
|
||
|
you're the star in your own suicide drama! Enjoy it while it lasts, you
|
||
|
get the chop as soon as we can arrange it.
|
||
|
|
||
|
|
||
|
|
||
|
Sunday. 23rd Nov.
|
||
|
|
||
|
|
||
|
I have to sort out what the hell's going wrong with this pirate satellite
|
||
|
dish decoder. I reckon they've changed the crypto keys, as I said would
|
||
|
eventually happen. Can I be fucked right now? No. I wash a bunch o'
|
||
|
clothes to wear in the hospital. Walk the dog. Why I suddenly get so much
|
||
|
schadenfreude upon reading in the sunday rag that the Wallabies lost to
|
||
|
England eludes me. Nah. Turns out they retasked the sat; different data
|
||
|
transfer rate, different slice of spectrum, yatta yatta. Our dodgy dealer
|
||
|
knows the score, it's good, and I reprogram the thing, then wait for the
|
||
|
new codes to come down from the orbiting broadcaster.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Mum's spending a lot of time on the fone today, which (of course) impedes
|
||
|
net access here under the parental roof. She's in martyr mode. An old form
|
||
|
master of mine used to refer to such people as `the ones who have to be
|
||
|
the first with the worst'. Finally, she's Got Something Important To Talk
|
||
|
About. But worse than that, these phone calls propagate the news, and
|
||
|
prolly most people don't need to know (why is this rant on the net? Oh,
|
||
|
rank egotism, probably).
|
||
|
|
||
|
She rang up her sister, who, completely unnecessarily, skitzed out
|
||
|
immediately. Rellos I rarely hear about in places I have never heard of
|
||
|
will have detailed information about my urinary tract, what colour my piss
|
||
|
is, and from what planet originated the thing they'll chop out three days
|
||
|
from now. I got on the fone to uncle Des, and mentioned it in terminology
|
||
|
he could understand - one of my beer processing organs is about to blow
|
||
|
up.
|
||
|
|
||
|
The back lawn is carpetted in lush green grass, topped with brilliant
|
||
|
lilac jacaranda flowers, all wet from the unseasonal rain. I savour
|
||
|
walking through it in bare feet as I move things to and from the shed, and
|
||
|
the freaky colour scheme.
|
||
|
|
||
|
I move a bookshelf and a cupboard. Good - mundanity is returning. I fill
|
||
|
in the hospital admission form. I have to go get more ichor sucked outta
|
||
|
my arm tomorrow. And see if I can't score a pair of those electronic
|
||
|
noise-cancelling headphones... hospitals harbour machines going PING all
|
||
|
night, screams, moans, raugous, lunk-busting coughs, pukes, phones
|
||
|
ringing, door slamming, nurses chatting, tele-fucking-inescapable-vision,
|
||
|
and other noises I'd prefer not to hear. I want my own tinnitus and the
|
||
|
thump of my carotid arteries as the blood pounds through 'em.
|
||
|
|
||
|
|
||
|
|
||
|
I might write tomorrow, but I might not. You've suffered enough.
|
||
|
|
||
|
|
||
|
|
||
|
|
||
|
<predator>
|
||
|
|
||
|
(next in this series is conway.cat.org.au/~predator/gutting.txt)
|