The Thing is gone - Good riddance to the catheter

If you hang one little boy for stealing a sheep then other little boys will not steal sheep.

Once you have committed murder it becomes quite easy to steal or tell a lie.

(I came across both of those quotes many decades ago.  The first, I thought, was quoted by Winston Churchill in his autobiographical book, "My Early Life" and was a threat uttered to the young Churchill by one of the older boys or even a master, but I cannot find the quote in an Internet search. I cannot remember the author of the second quote and, again, I cannot find the quote on-line.)

On Thursday of this week past, The Catheter,  the "Thing" with which I had become obsessed as front and centre of my life, my constant and inseparable and insufferable companion, was removed. A snip of the scissors to deflate the balloon in my bladder, a few tugs of pain - a little pressure the doctor described it as before each tug - and it was out, gone, consigned to a bin next to the bed. Night and day; chalk and cheese; just like that - tug, tug, tug, plop. What sweet, perfect bliss to pee in my pants instead of through a tube and into a bag that I had been carrying around, day and night, 24-7, for 15 days exactly. Other than when lying flat on my back I'd had an almost constant, somewhat painful, sensation of having a full bladder that urgently needed to be emptied. Walking and standing were difficult, but sitting was the worst. I was so  convinced that the darn thing must be at least partially blocked that I persuaded the home nurse, bless her, to irrigate (read back-wash) the catheter on one of her visits - to no avail. "At least we know that is not the problem," she said, putting a positive spin on it.

My heart goes out to all those poor souls for whom this is a life sentence - people in hospices and elderly patients who have no hope that this thing will ever be removed, never ever.

So, now I pee my pants. Without the catheter experience to soften me up beforehand that might have been quite traumatic bearing in mind the carrot-stick socialising process to enforce conformity (the ostracism after peeing your pants as a child was like a public hanging) but now It's quite easy, really; as easy as lying or stealing after committing murder - the more so thanks to my Depends MEN GUARDS! I can do it and nobody knows my dirty secret as I walk down the street or stand up in church to sing the hymn.

This takes me back to my Grade 2 year in school. We called it Class 2 in Natal back then. The boys' toilets were being repaired so we all had to use the girls' toilets. One little boy asked to "be excused." He was allowed to go to the toilet. I thought it would be a good idea to see the girls toilets so I also asked if I could be excused. The teacher said, "You don't really need to go. You just want to see the girls toilets." Well, now. I was crushed and felt put down. How did she know whether I really needed to go or not? True, I did not need to go, but I could go, and I would show her that she was wrong. I peed my pants at my desk in the front row of the classroom. I still remember the warmth and the wet and the smell and the thrill and then the embarrassment when the little girl at the next desk told the teacher that I had wet my pants and it was all over the floor under my desk and was still dripping down. Well, she couldn't say anymore that I had not needed to go, could she. I still relish the look of exasperation on her face. I never really got into trouble for that. She wrote a letter informing my parents what had happened. They scolded my mildly but I think they all gave me the benefit of the doubt.

Faith and Atheism

One of my FaceBook friends posted the following on his wall:

"Faith is the surrender of the mind; it's the surrender of reason, it's the surrender of the only thing that makes us different from other mammals. It's our need to believe, and to surrender our skepticism and our reason, our yearning to discard that and put all our trust or faith in someone or something that is the sinister thing to me. Of all the supposed virtues, faith must be the most overrated." - Christopher Hitchens
According to Wikiquotes this is taken from "Holier Than Thou", Penn & Teller: Bullshit!, 23 May 2005.

Before going any further let me clarify that none of my friends agrees with me on everything. Even my wife and I have some areas where we disagree but still remain the greatest of friends. Things only get tense when you don't like me or my friends based on some form of group prejudice (race, religion, sexual orientation.) And now, back to Hitchens...

I will concede that his first sentence above is a definition of faith even in the minds of some "believers". Clearly, this is the definition of faith in the minds of Atheists as this quote is held up as a quotable quote among Atheists. However, that definition is by no means universal among "believers."

While my definition of faith includes believing that which cannot be empirically demonstrated, it precludes the surrender of the mind and the surrender of reason. On the contrary, it is precisely the use of the mind and reason that enables humans to have faith and the other mammals not. Faith is a peculiarly human quality not to be found among any other species on the planet.

Deductive reasoning
Astronomers, astro-physicists and other scientists tell us that the universe is finite in space and time; that its size and age can be approximately calculated. They tell us that "before" the universe was born there was "nothing"; not even empty space. Nothing.

I am not a scientist but my mind reasons that something cannot create itself out of nothing before it exists. It is not a surrender of reason but an exercise thereof to conclude that some "thing" beyond the confines of the time and space of this universe was responsible for the coming into existence of this universe. That "Something" I choose to call the Creator.
I deal with this topic a bit more fully in my blog of 19 Dec 2010 "I am sceptical of skeptical atheism"
http://terryin-sites.blogspot.com/2010/12/i-am-sceptical-about-skeptical-atheism.html
...and its follow up on 24 Jan 2011.

In my opinion, in the face of the evidence of the finite nature of our universe, it requires a greater and more irrational faith to say, we cannot prove a creator's existence empirically therefore a creator does not exist.

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The True Cost of Things - and Who Pays?

After question period in the House of Commons yesterday Leader of the Opposition, Thomas Mulcair, is reported as saying that the government is allowing the oilsands to develop, "without applying basic rules of sustainable development, without applying the one rule of sustainable development, which is polluter pays."

"If you don't include those costs, we're doing the same thing as if we had a factory where we were pushing the garbage into a river in the back. It's not the real profit, it's not the real price."

CBC News: Is Canada suffering from 'Dutch disease'?

Unfortunately this truth is being obscured by the debate about whether and to what extent exports of crude oil from the oil sands are driving up the Canadian dollar to the detriment of Manufacturing - so-called Dutch Disease; the implication seeming to be, if it's not causing Dutch Disease to a significant degree then it's OK to dump our garbage in the river for someone else to clean up.

This is not peculiar to the Alberta oilsands, nor to Canada. It is vital to include this "garbage in the river" principle in any debate about the economic merits and demerits of different methods of energy generation and storage, particularly when people laud the "low cost" of carbon emitting power generation and how squeaky clean nuclear power is. Regarding the latter, we do not yet know how to "finally" store nuclear waste, let alone the cost.

We'll simply let my grandchildren and their generation worry about that - and pay for it!
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The UN's De Schutte: an academic or ill-informed (but not both without contradiction)

In 1966 Senator Robert Kennedy visited South Africa at the invitation of the then National Union of South African Students (NUSAS.) When Senator Kennedy was criticized in the government- controlled media for daring to comment on South Africa's problems when he had only been in the country a short time, Alan Paton responded with a parable where he compared South Africa to "a room full of people with all the doors and windows closed, and all the people smoking and drinking and talking. And a stranger from outside opens the door and exclaims- Phew What a fug in here ! And they shout at him: How do you know ? You only just came in." (In: Peter Alexander. Alan Paton: A Biography. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994, p. 343.) - quoted in http://www.rfksafilm.org/html/back.php
Of course, the apartheid regime in South Africa (and their lackey media supporters) was not the first government in the world to get prickly in response to criticism from *outsiders*, nor the only one. Hitler didn't like it either. George Bush hardly welcomed outside criticism and more recently one thinks immediately of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, Gaddafi in Libya, and the governments of China, Cuba, North Korea, Egypt, Afghanistan, India and Pakistan.
Sadly, the present Canadian Government in the persons of Immigration Minister Jason (the UN is out of line) Kenney and Health Minister Leona (He's an ill-informed and patronizing academic) Aglukkaq has shown itself to be just as prickly toward the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food Olivier De Schutter who recently blasted Canada for tolerating inequality and lack of access to nutritious diets among its poor and First Nation citizens.
Olivier De Schutter, whose damning report is based on an 11-day visit to Canada, says the country's rate of food insecurity is "unacceptable" and called on the federal government to adopt a national right-to-food strategy.
"What I've seen in Canada is a system that presents barriers for the poor to access nutritious diets and that tolerates increased inequalities between rich and poor, and aboriginal and non-aboriginal peoples," De Schutter told reporters in Ottawa Wednesday.
See CTV News:: http://m.ctv.ca/winnipeg/20120516/UN-Right-to-Food-monitor-De-Schutter-120516.html
The funny thing about truth is that it stands on its own through the shifting sands of time even though some powerful people think it can be decreed or established (or not) by majority vote. The judgement of history has never been kind to such as these.
I cannot help thinking that De Schutter is about as ill-informed about the subject of his speciality as was Bobby Kennedy or as the scientists whose jobs have been cut by a government finding its ideology at odds with the evidence from their research.
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A Bad Catheter Day Gets Worse

Be warned. The catheter doesn't make for a good story even considering the nice flexible hoses that they use today compared to the bronze artifacts of the ancient Egyptians, Greeks & Romans. Through culpable carelessness I managed to make a bad day worse than it threatened to be.

It started last night, actually. I managed to aggravate something while trying to be diligent about the twice daily catheter hygiene that the nurse had given me strict and detailed instructions about. My poor thing became quite swollen. Thank the Lord for painkillers which enabled me to sleep most of the night. It wasn't as bad this morning but I still felt like I had gone *backward* a few days and was not up to walking around outside as I had done the previous day, really enjoying the glorious weather even with a catheter bag strapped to my calf.

After lunch the serviceman came from Rogers Cable to fix our Internet which has been out of action the last three days. After nearly two hours he worked out that the whole street was out and it won't be fixed until the day after tomorrow. By the time that he left I needed to do a bit of *tending* to myself which involved standing in the bath. As I stepped out of the bath with catheter bag still strapped to one leg I managed to snare the other foot in the tubing while stepping down... As my son, Stephen, pointed out when I told him, I now have a new baseline for 10 on my personal pain scale. Fortunately the worst of the pain was fleeting and the catheter is still draining the bladder with no obvious evidence of bleeding. ...and thank goodness for pain killers.

So, if you are coming up for prostate surgery, be sure to put this high on your list of no-no's to avoid at all costs.
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In grateful memory of the first catheter patients

Sometime in your day after reading this blog please observe a minute's silence in grateful memory of those first patients who constituted the human trials for the first catheters. Suddenly the catheter occupies more of my attention than anything else in my day. I read that the Egyptions documented the use of catheters 3000 BC(E). I am grateful to be living in a First World country in 2012.
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First Pictures of Caitlyn Grace

We have a name: Caitlyn Grace McCann Boothroyd

Mother and daughter

Oma, Caitlyn, Miriam

Her Royal Cuteness

Miriam, Alan (Geoff's dad)

A Warm Welcome to Baby Boothroyd

Please join with Miriam, Geoff and Claire in welcoming Baby Girl Boothroyd into the world of their family. Born 30 April 2012 at 22:45; weight 7.5 lbs, 3.4 kg. In the end it took 3 good pushes from Miriam. Mother and daughter are both fine. Baby Boothroyd has a fine voice (I heard it over the phone) and is latching and suckling very nicely.

Baby Boothroyd

WOO-HOO !!!

We now know why Miriam and Geoff were keeping the name a secret. They didn't have one !!! For now she's Baby Boothroyd. Claire's been calling her Baby all along.