Category Archives: Writing

Writing

Adventures in Hospital

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Recently I went to see the doctor because of some digestive problems and a history of bowel cancer on my mothers side of the family. Fortunately she told me that the symptoms didn’t match bowel cancer but they did sound like they could be gallstones and so sent me for a blood test. That indeed showed markers for liver problems (plus I’d got some jaundice in the meantime) and so I was given a referral to the Anglis Hospital for a CT scan. I was a little ill a few nights before the scan was due so in the morning we phoned up to see if it would be possible to get the scan done sooner and they told us to come down that morning to see what they could do.

What they did was to do an ultrasound and confirm it did look like gallstones but they decided it would be better if I went for an MRI instead of a CT scan and so set the wheels in motion to get me down to Box Hill hospital for that, as well as a possible ERCP. That first night I felt a bit of pain in the abdomen (the first I’d really felt) and the next morning resulted in some worried looking doctors talking to me about how a marker for pancreas function was an order of magnitude (or more, can’t remember the numbers) higher than it should be. This was indicating that there was likely a gallstone stuck at the exit of the bile duct, just after the point where the duct from the pancreas merges with it and so the stone was causing both liver and pancreas problems. The following day I was shipped down to Box Hill and had an MRI in the morning which did indeed show a number of gallstones both in the gallbladder and stuck at the exit of the bile duct and thus on the Saturday morning I ended up in surgery for an ERCP. That procedure resulted in them being able to get about half the gallstones stuck at the exit out and they put a stent in to help it drain but because they’d not managed to clear the whole thing I’d need to come back in a weeks time for another ERCP.

Fortunately in the second ERCP they were able to clear the bile duct entirely of stones and enlarge it to help keep it free from other stones until they could schedule a gallbladder removal. In the meantime I was told to avoid fatty foods as well as spicy foods, onion, alcohol, cauliflower and cabbage (a superset of the information I was given by various people) which has meant a significant change of diet (with some great help from our local Thai and Vietnamese restaurants).

So today (May 12th) I’m going back into hospital again, this time to have my gallbladder removed via keyhole surgery. This will mean an overnight stay and then I should be home on Friday but I suspect I won’t be in a position to be able to do much other than tweet from my mobile for a few days afterwards so you’ll need to keep an eye on my Twitter feed if you want updates. That also means I won’t really be in a position to approve comments here unless I get the WordPress app for N900 working..

Catch you all in a few days!

A Weekend at Welshmans Reef

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Donna and I went up to Welshmans Reef near Maldon in the goldfields area of central Victoria to visit some friends who’d moved up there a few months ago. They’ve got a lovely old miners cottage which they’ve been working hard on doing up (we were their first visitors) and Donna and I had a great time up there. Being so far away from any sizeable city means there is very little light pollution and so we were treated to a wonderful view of the Milky Way with the various dark nebula being easy to see, especially the Coalsack. I also saw, for the first time, both the Large and Small Megellanic Clouds. No astrophotography I’m afraid as I’d forgotten my Nikon and so only had my Nokia N900 with me!

We took a couple of trips in to Maldon and saw the sunset from the old poppet lookout tower on Mount Tarrangower on Sunday night:

Sunset from Mount Tarrangower, Maldon

plus their Easter Parade on the Monday afternoon which had some great vintage vehicles and Ned Kelly on a Harley Davidson, but we couldn’t hang around for the raw egg throwing/catching competition. 😉

Vintage Mt Evelyn Fire Truck and Ladder from Maldon Easter Parade Ned Kelly on a Harley Davidson at the Maldon Easter Parade

Instead we took a trip over to Porcupine Flat nearby to see the bucket dredge and dragline crane that were there:

Bucket Dredge at Porcupine Township, near Maldon Caterpillar tracks on old crane at Porcupine Township, Maldon Old crane at Porcupine Township, near Maldon

So a great time away and nice to have a chance to stop and smell the flowers somewhere nice and quiet.

Flower on friends property at Welshmans Reef near Maldon

A Video for Earth Day – Carl Sagan’s “Pale Blue Dot”

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For Earth Day, here is a video of images of Earth accompanying Carl Sagan reading his Pale Blue Dot text.

Here’s the text, courtesy of the Planetary Society which Carl Sagan helped found.

Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there–on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

Have a good Earth Day.