Lakeshore

Batman Returns — Drawn! with a really awesome alternative movie poster.

A meeting of solitudes — Roger Ebert follows up his recent post on loneliness with a meditation on the responses he received.

In Chengdu, China, Remaking Sichuan Food — Having eaten in Chengdu, hmmm. (Thanks to Dad.)

Augmented Reality Goggles — New video glasses can produce dazzling special effects, but who'll wear them? Dept. of SF come to life.

Jonathan Storm: Alaska in Her Shadow — On Sarah Palin's new reality tv show. Sometimes the jokes just write themselves, and sometimes the jokes are on all of us.

This Week in Innocence: Why the Hell is Kenny Hulshoff Still Practicing Law? — Law and order conservatism, where some innocent go to jail that the rest us might feel safer. Unless you happen to be one of those innocents, of course. Why do so many conservatives never think they will be the one indefinitely jobless, or gravely ill without healthcare coverage, or falsely arrested, or... I've argued before that the conservative mindset is fundamentally a failure of empathy. Stories like this only reinforce that view. (Via Dispatches from the Culture Wars.)

?otD: What was your favorite con badge, ever?

---

11/13/2010
Writing time yesterday: 0.0 hours (medical follies, convention time)
Body movement: 30 minute stationary bike ride
Hours slept: 6.5 hours (solid)
This morning's weigh-in: 245.0
Yesterday's chemo/post-op stress index: 5/10 (fatigue, peripheral neuropathy, emotional distress)
Currently reading: Between books

Your Saturday moment of zen.



More frost on the flowers. © 2006, 2010, Joseph E. Lake, Jr.



This work by Joseph E. Lake, Jr. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

This morning, I crossed the 50,000 word mark for November's new word count production on Kalimpura, with this morning's writing adding 2,600 words to finish up at 54,200. (Between medical needs and OryCon, yesterday entailed no writing at all.)

I'm not doing NaNoWriMo for two reasons. One, this manuscript wasn't eligible. 3,200 words of it were written in October, before my mother's health issues sidelined me for several weeks. Two, though I am not a NaNo doubter (see various kerfuffles of late), for my own part, every month of the year is NaNo, or should be.

If you're doing NaNo, I applaud you for engaging with the effort, practicing the ass-in-chair, and putting the words on the page. I'm a big fan of word count and finished drafts. After all, without that raw material, you have nothing to revise or sell.

( Collapse )

Yesterday morning I got up at my usual hour (4 am), exercised, blogged, then hit the Day Jobbe earlier than normal (5:30 am) for some critical meetings. I finally got myself over to the Witchnest about 7:30 am, where I promptly popped two Lorazepam (a/k/a Ativan) to deal with my deep anxiety about the port removal procedure.

My fear was based on the fact that this would be done in office with anaesthesia but no sedation. I didn't really want to watch a doctor go fishing inside my chest just below my line of sight.

By the time calendula_witch got me to the clinic, I couldn't walk in a straight line and my balance was wonky. In a word, I was looped. This was the first time I'd taken two of those at once, and I'm not sure I'd care to repeat the experience.

The procedure happened in an oversized exam room while calendula_witch watched. I couldn't see anything, they'd put surgical drapes around the site and besides, my eyes don't bend down that far. Thanks to the Lorazepam, I didn't much care.

Everything took about forty minutes, and involved a surgeon and nurse fishing around in my chest with four hands and a cluster of instruments. Though they had anaesthetized the area with a local, I could still feel pressure, tissues being shifted, and the occasional crackle-pop of the electric cauterizer, along with a lovely barbecue smell. calendula_witch reports being able to see wisps of smoke during the procedure.

Basically, it felt like they trenched my chest and went digging. At least one of the anchor stitches had been overgrown with a caul of tissue, and so took some work to free. When the port finally came out, they showed it to me, though despite repeated requests I was not permitted to keep it for a souvenir. Once I was closed up, the dressing was about the size of a band-aid.

My question at that point was what the heck happened to that trench in my chest big enough for four hands and instruments.

calendula_witch bundled me back to the Witchnest where I passed out for over two hours, sleeping off the stress of the procedure and the double dose of Lorazepam. We still managed to make OryCon by 2 or 2:30, and I lasted til almost 10:30, with little more than a dull ache in my chest.

So, well, I'm no longer a cyborg, nor a Harkonnen techno-serf. For now, I am free.

And shortly, back to OryCon. See some, all or none of you there.