Pain series by sa_hall, photo glee, geek glee, health complaints, house worry [Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος]

A grab-bag of fragments and ought-to-be-separate-entries, some fresh and some that have been lurking, unfinished, on my hard disk for a while; posted while I've got a half-hour of feeling together enough to assemble and post 'em:

About Pain, Our Society, and The Medical Establishment

sa-hall has been posting a series of articles/essays about the history and current state of treatment of (and attitudes regarding) fibromyaligia and other chronic conditions, and how the medical establishment has historically disregarded complaints that come mostly from women. Judging from the essay titles and the bits that stick out before the lj-cuts, and what I already know about the subject, there'll be a lot of information in there to make my blood boil. So while I'm bookmarking these to read carefully in the future for what useful stuff I don't already know (judging again from the teasers, it looks like there's stuff in there I really ought to check out), I'm puting that off until I'm having a less-frustrating spell so I'll be better prepared to deal with the anger from being reminded of ways doctors -- well, the medical system even more than individuals -- have screwed up, which are being recounted and explained in these entries.

In a bit of do-what-I-say-not-what-I-do, I'm going to encourage everybody else to go ahead and read this series, especially if you don't already know why I expect it to make me see red. I've been luckier than most fibro patients, in that I haven't had the "it's all in your head" speech from my doctors^[*] (only from relatives), but I have had to worry about whether asking for effective pain relief will get me branded as "drug seeking", had to cope with being generally undermedicated, and hearing (again, mostly from relatives) that since it's "only pain" I should just suck it up, stop complaining, and go back to work full-time. And I recall a recent kerfuffle on "that mailing list" after someone posted a link to (and the provocative headline of) an article implying that fibro was a fake disease made up by drug companies in order to sell more drugs.

Here's the series (including three entries that are also on the topic but aren't titled/numbered as part of it) so far -- I don't know how long it'll wind up being:

I am born

[*] Though I did have doctors not say that but still say, "I can't find anything wrong" instead of "I can't find what is wrong," before I was diagnosed, and I later had a neurologist dismiss my complaints about short-term memory because I tested in the normal range (but not in the computer programmer range, dammit, which was where I needed to be).

Way Too Easily Amused

I've been using UNIX/Xenix/Linux/mks/Cygwin/OSX/SunOS for how long? Decades, right? And after all this time I still find it oh so terribly amusing that I can copy/paste a chunk of a document -- say a web page, for example -- that's arranged rather inconveniently, type
cut ... | sort ... | sed ... | uniq ... | sed ...
and get the whole thing reformatted and rearranged the way I wanted it. *Poof* That just never gets old.

Admittedly, to go from a sorted table to a graphic showing geographical distribution did involve saving an intermediate form to a text file and whacking on it with vi to turn it into a long ImageMagick command, but I could have done the whole thing end-to-end in a single Linux command if I were showing off. At that point doing so was no longer more convenient than doing it in multiple steps.

Uncertainty About Punctuating Transcripts

As I mentioned beneath today's quote of the day, I'm often uncertain of the best way to punctuate speech that I'm transcribing -- which of the really short pauses are ends of sentences where the next sentence popped into the speaker's head as he was finishing the first, and which are supposed to set off appositive phrases and such, for example. I was thinking that it might be interesting to post a link to an audio clip, and just the words without punctuation (so the tedious part would already be done), and invite everyone to show me how they'd break the words up into sentences and clauses. (Video might provide more cues/clues, but at the moment I can't easily get video from my VCR to the web.)

So before the experiment, a bit of testing the waters: how many of y'all would be likely to respond to that with your versions (assuming that I managed to post it on a day when you had time to monkey around on LJ and the rest of your friends weren't completely swamping your friendspage)? Would today's QotD work as the sample to use (I do have an MP3 of it), or would having already seen my rendition of it bias the results too much? And, can I get away with just posting the words and asking folks to copy/paste the text into a comment and punctuate it there, or to get decent participation will I need to make the soundbite short enough that I an cover all possible combinations of punctuation for it in an lj-poll?

Or does anyone else even find the subject as interesting as I do?

Photo Projects In The Works

1) I always carry a camera with me just in case a picture jumps up in front of me needing to be taken. I've made a point of this since the day when I came home from doing stuff, set down my camera, then went back out to buy groceries, and somebody set the grocery store on fire while I was in it and my camera was still at home. There's a side effect to carrying an SLR around all the time -- people notice it (especially when I have a large-ish lens like the 100-300mm zoom on it) and start conversations about photography, often beginning by asking whether I'm a pro. The last time I was feeling well enough to go out and do some shopping, I was approached in a drug store by someone wanting a family portrait and looking for a photographer. So if all goes well (I gave her my phone number and email address), I should have a photo session sometime next month. Now I quickly need to figure out how much I should charge for this! -- I've always been better at the art and technique aspects of photography than the business aspects, and the business aspects are probably the more important ones.

2) If anyone's been looking at my long-neglected Flickr photostream or Shutterchance photoblog, they've gotten a sneak preview of this next bit of news: For quite a while I've wanted a #87 or #89 IR filter (the "black" filter that blocks all visible light), especially after I got my hands on a digital camera and after Kodak announced they were doing away with the IR film I liked, but haven't quite managed to come up with the money for one. I've also wanted a similar filter large enough to cover my flash, and/or a flash made of infrared LEDs. After rereading that web page by the guy who made IR goggles^[*], I finally got around to looking for the inexpensive filter material the author mentioned to see whether his idea of 'inexpensive' was similar to mine. (I'd also been meaning to shoot half a roll of Velvia slide film in the Hoya and get it developed, and use the unexposed half to make an IR filter, but hadn't gotten around to that either ... apparently floppy-disk material is also supposed to work.) After giving up on the world's most useless Google-maps mashup ("scroll and zoom on this map to find the distributor nearets you!" ... and there are a grand total of two distributors, on in CA.US and one in ON.CA) I found another brand for about the same cost as a couple pounds of cheese, and ordered some. So now I can play around with digital infrared once I'm feeling up to wandering out in the sunlight again.

It's not quite as opaque to visible light as advertised -- I can see red through it that I think (not sure!!)is red-red in addition to the infrared (because I was seeing it indoors on a not-especially-bright day), and there's a visible red light from my flash through the filter, but it does appear to block enough visible light to be effectively opaque for photographic purposes (film, and the digital sensors I know about, have much less dynamic range than the human eye, so if you cut out 15/16ths of the light in the range you want to block, you might still be able to notice it but the camera doesn't). I still want to build an IR-LED flash effectively invisible to humans (we'd still see it dimly in a completely dark room AFAIK, but not, I think, in a candle-lit feast hall) but the brief red glow of a xenon strobe through this filter may be dim enough to not be distracting at events, which is my primary goal wrt IR flash.

It does, of course, cut the guide-number (effective strength) of the flash waaaay down. Even if it had 100% transmission of the IR (it doesn't), converting all of that visible light to heat instead of throwing it at the subject does make the total amount of useful illumination a wee fraction of the unfiltered version.

[*] Recap for folks who never saw it or have forgotten it: the human eye can see some near-infrared^[**], just not very well, so if there's any visible light around it swamps the IR and we don't notice it. Bill Beaty made goggles transparent to IR and opaque to visible light, let his eyes adjust to the dimness, and discovered that he could see by infrared on bright, sunny days. Uh, by the way, anybody got an old pair of welder's goggles with removable lenses that you no longer want?

[**] That's "near-infrared" as opposed to "far-infrared"; which is to say, "infrared that's near visible light," rather than "nearly infrared". General English is a bit ambiguous there, though the scientific jargon isn't.

Not A Good Week

I've barely managed to get out of bed for the past several days -- the farthest I've gone has been across the street to move the car on street-cleaning days, and my 'active' days have involved bringing out the big guns medication-wise^[*]. The fridge is looking kinda bare -- I'm out of a bunch of stuff and low on a bunch else, and I'm really hoping to have a day good enough for the much-delayed trip to the grocery store before it gets to the point of asking friends to come bring me supplies. If I can medicate myself sufficiently to get to 3LF tonight (unlikely, but hope springs eternal), I'll shop on the way home. Otherwise, maybe tomorrow.

I have managed to get down and up stairs a bit, so I am not entirely limited to the snack foods kept at bedside for times like this; I just haven't been mobile as much of the day as I'd like, and stairs have involved varying amounts of pain.

I was disconcerted to notice a few days ago how badly dizzy I was. I suspect that doctors don't take me seriously when I complain about dizziness because I compensate very well for it: when my ears are not doing their job, I stay upright and convincingly steady using my eyes and proprioception; when my eyes are wonky, I stay steady using my inner ear; etc.. But the other day I closed my eyes for some reason while standing and found myself swaying and rocking perilously almost immediately. I should be able to stand up with my eyes closed without tipping over, or at least I used to be able to do so without swaying.

At least when my hands glitched today I only almost dropped the last of the coffee all over the floor. I caught the can again halfway down, so I can still make coffee tomorrow whether I get out for other groceries or not. *whew*.

[*] Not all that big -- I'm talking about Canadian OTC codeine, which I hesitate to use because the caffeine in it messes me up (and oy, my sleep lack-of-pattern has been uncomfortable and inconvenient to begin with!). Vicodin or Percoset -- roughly equivalent in potency but they work a bit better for me and don't contain caffeine -- would be better, but aren't currently available to me. Bigger guns than that exist, but I've no experience with them and think of them as kind of scary. My routine pain medication is tramadol (Ultram); small stuff like ibuprofen and naproxen are nearly useless to me on their own but do seem to amplify the effects of tramadol / codeine / hydrocodone / oxycodone.

Trouble I'm Hoping To Dodge

The city says I have to replace the window frames on the front of the house, and that they'll impose a fine if I don't. With the kind of week I've had health-wise, I've made zero progress on this project. I'm hoping like mad that they'll accept "I've been ill" as a reason to extend the deadline, that the process of getting permits isn't too Byzantine (you'd think that if the work is mandated the permits would be automatic, right? Oy.), and that the total cost is something Mom can afford.

On the plus side, if I wind up with more energy-efficient (and less arthropod-permeable) windows, that'd be a nice thing at least.

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