It never ceases to amaze me that I can have 37 hot ideas for things to put in this journal, but as soon as I sit down in front of an emacs buffer to edit, my mind is completely blank. It's not as if I had stage fright -- I've already written over two dozen of these, and besides, you can ask my friends: I am a shy, private, retiring person who is grossly overcompensated. I can stand up in front of an entire auditorium full of people and happily mouth off for quite a while without so much as a piece of paper or a prescribed topic.
I only thought about including this squib a few hours ago, when I was going to sleep after spending several minutes staring at the screen with nothing to say. I'm just lucky I remembered it when I woke up.
Anyway, I'm mystified. Maybe it's the ADD: I think of
things to write here, and maybe I even take notes, but
all that stuff is visiting Arcturus at the times when I
find myself here. Argh.
(01 September, 2001)
I have a hernia. It's not a bad one, doesn't hurt, and is not a mortal danger in its current state. Nonetheless, this is maybe not a good thing to leave unattended, so I went around on the Web looking for information. I was surprised (though I probably shouldn't have been) to find that there are at least three major ways of dealing with these things.
Hernia surgery (hernia repair surgery) started as a general-anesthetic maneuver in which they sewed the tear in the muscles shut. This turns out to be a lousy approach. Recover is slow, for one thing. For another, scar tissue develops, so the patient has pain upon coughing, sneezing, picking things up, etc. For a third, the recurrence rate is on the order of 10-12%. Screw that noise!
Some decades back, a clever fellow whose name I forget (it's out there on the Web) came up with the idea of a tension-free repair, in which a mesh patch is placed against the muscle. I presume they hold the patch in position with a stitch that dissolves over time, but I'm no expert, so don't quote me. In any case, this works better, and there are various materials that people use for it.
Nowadays, a lot of folks perform this operation laparoscopically, but I've seen some articles in which there are indications that the recurrence rate may not be all that much better than it is with the old-style standard surgery, and it is apparently fairly well known that laparoscopic work is difficult, not to say dangerous in unskilled hands.
The next thing I found is that someone has come up with a local-anesthetic, outpatient version of the open surgery technique with the mesh. Here, however, something very strange has happened. Most of the comments from the medical establishment that I have found on the Web appear to claim that this technique is mostly used by specialty clinics, and that those clinics choose their patients very carefully to make their statistics look good. I find that profoundly disturbing. (At least one such clinic offers a lifetime warranty, and claims a recurrence rate of only 0.4%.)
Please note that I do not find actual studies by the medical establishment, only nasty remarks. I did eventually find one hospital that mentions using this method, btw, and I'm beginning to get a sense that some regular surgeons are using it, but that wasn't the impression I got from the Web. Worse, as far as I can tell (I haven't checked in a few weeks; things may have changed), none of the MSN sites with medical information so much as acknowledges the existence of this method!! They talk about the old general-anesthetic open surgery method, and about the variant with mesh, and about laparoscopic methods; but I have yet to see word one about local-anesthetic outpatient open-surgery methods on any MSN site. This, too disturbs me.
It seems, btw, that these methods do have two downsides,
in comparison with laparoscopic methods: patients have
slightly more pain during the first two weeks of
recovery (not an issue for me, but significant for some
folks), and there's a slightly higher risk of
complications. Frankly, for a 0.4% chance of recurrence,
presuming that figure to be real, and for decreased risk
of collateral damage during the operation, I'll take a
slight risk of complications any day, thank you.
(14 September, 2001)
If you cut off the head of the Hydra, two new ones grow in its place; a "war" of this sort is inherently unwinnable, and the President's proposed approach to the recent horror is complete idiocy.
If we actually proceed with this stupidity, it won't be long before entire nations regard us as perfectly okay to attack in any way possible, rather than just a few scattered fanatical assholes. Americans won't be safe anywhere on the planet. If you thought the World Trade Center was bad, just wait 'til we create thousands upon thousands of new terrorists by bombing the crap out of all the innocent people who happen to be in the way of the "war".
I can't really believe that he intends to do this, but it's what he says, and we will all reap the results. You would think that people would learn from things like the Vietnam war and the so-called War on Drugs, but I guess they're too stupid.
In the end, those who refuse to learn from history will have it rammed down their throats until it chokes them, and we are just about to ask for it in a very big way.
There is also the fact that a human being is a human
being. There isn't really any "them", there is only
"us". Most people don't quite seem to get that. On my
grumpier days I am entirely convinced that humans are
not fit to have stewardship of entire planets, and
that's a significant contribution to my sour outlook.
I'm afraid that this episode gets abbreviated a bit,
because the next one takes precedence.
Pseudo-mailto: jon [at] bazilians [put it here] org
Last modified: Thu Nov 1 09:01:13 PST 2001