01.19.08
Posted in Canadian life, Random thoughts, Too Much Information at 9:11 pm by ducky
Western medicine is amazingly good in some ways. They can sometimes cure things you didn’t even know were wrong with you.
The docs discovered my mom’s PMP on a CAT scan they did looking at what they think was diverticulitis, an annoying but generally easy to treat disease. I believe that she is totally recovered thanks to that early diagnosis. Me, I went to the doctor because I had a bump on my arm, and they ended up checking me out for cancer. (It wasn’t, but it could have been.)
I went to the doctor for three pretty innocuous things. I might not have gone if there were only one, but three together pushed me over some sort of tipping point.
- The most important thing was that a bump on my arm — which the docs had told me was fine but to keep an eye on — looked different. The skin around it was peeling slightly.
- One was that my urine output didn’t seem as “forceful” as it should. My brother-in-law had had fibroids in his urinary tract, and the thought crossed my mind that I might have something similar.
- The last one was so trivial that I honestly can’t remember what it was.
They said my bump was infected slightly. They said that when the infection died down, they could take it off if I wanted. I did and they did.
They seemed far more interested in my urine output, and that ended up causing a cascade of diagnostic tests which culminated in them taking out a polyp six weeks ago. While it turned out to be nothing, there was a non-zero chance that it could have been cancer, where early detection probably would have saved my life.
And that underperforming urine stream? That thing which seemed too trivial for a visit to the doctor on its own? It got robust again all on its own.
I am just astounded at how random life is. In only a slightly different version of the universe, I could be saying, “A bump on my arm saved my life.”
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Posted in Canadian life, Random thoughts, Too Much Information at 8:22 pm by ducky
The brain is really strange. Or maybe I should say, “my brain is really strange”.
The surgery that I mentioned in my last posting was to remove a tiny little uterine polyp. While polyps are almost always benign, I knew that uterine cancer was really nasty. (The Wikipedia article on uterine cancer seems to indicate that it’s usually only nasty if you are post-menopause, but I didn’t read that article until I researched this posting.)
So five months ago, when their diagnostics first surfaced the possibility of a polyp, I could have been really freaked out about it. Fortunately, I am really good at denial for health/safety issues: I once hid away a fear of heights, I was unfazed by a good friend’s 7 cm breast cancer tumour, and I took my mother’s PMP in stride.
Unfortunately, I am not good at denial when it comes to bureaucracy. I was actually quite anxious about the bureaucratic aspect of the prospect of uterine cancer. I was worried that if I got cancer, I would be disqualified from getting Canadian Permanent Residency. I’d have to leave Canada when I graduated, and that would put me in the US without health insurance and with a history of cancer. This seemed absolutely horrible to me.
Intellectually, I realized that it was rather strange to be worried about losing a visa than about losing my life, but that’s how my brain worked.
Perhaps partly this is because I have seen a lot of friends and family have really seriously hugely awful bad things happen to them, and almost all of them pulled through. The friend who had that 7cm breast cancer tumour five years ago is not just alive but very active. Mom had surgery that required 40 stitches and is — as far as anyone can tell — completely recovered. A high school friend got multiple meyeloma, which is one of the deadliest, deadliest forms of cancer there is. One friend got throat cancer three years ago and is still talking. Another friend got leukemia, was in remission for three years, and has been fighting again for about two years. Even cousin Ellen was in remission for three years after (criminally) late treatment of her breast cancer.
On the other hand, I’ve seen lots of snafus with paperwork. Constantly. All the time. (Like how the Canadian government couldn’t figure out for the longest time that I spell “Kaitlin” with a “K” and not a “C”!) So in some ways, it is easier for me to believe that bureaucracies would destroy me than that cancer would destroy me.
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01.12.08
Posted in Canadian life, Random thoughts, University life at 11:30 pm by ducky
Last night, my beloved husband and I went to see Zarqa Nawaz (the creator of Little Mosque on the Prairie) speak at our local gorgeous performing arts hall.
Her talk was wonderful and funny and thought-provoking — I’m really glad I went.
One of the points that she made was that when a Muslim does something bad, there are cries about how this is just one more example of how Islam as a religion is repressive/bad/evil/ugly/whatever, but nobody tars Christianity or white culture if someone white does something bad. One thing that she mentioned was that the leading cause of death of pregnant women in the US was homicide, but that nobody talks about how US culture is brutal to women
I was shocked by the statistic. But thinking about that this morning, I started to wonder about how meaningful that statistic was. What else are pregnant women going to die of?
- If a woman is pregnant, she’s not going to be old, so she is much less likely to die from diseases of old age. Pregnant women probably don’t die of heart disease very often.
- If a young woman has some nasty illness, she’s probably not going to be pregnant. Either her body won’t have the resources to get pregnant, or she’ll have the baby and take steps to not get pregnant again, or the illness (or medications) will cause her to lose the baby.
- Pregnant women usually don’t put themselves in dangerous situations. Women generally don’t hang out in war zones, mine coal, drive trucks, or enter motorcycle races once they find out they are pregnant. (And before they find out they are pregnant, they might also get missed by the statistics.)
While yes, it is bad that homicide is the leading cause of pregnant women in the US, I’d like to see how it compares to US women of childbearing age who are not pregnant, to US men of the same age, and the same numbers for different countries.
I did a little digging, and found some stats at the Violence Policy Center (VPC) and some stats at the US Bureau of Justice (BOJ):
- Black women were more than three times as likely to be murdered than white women.
- Women were more than 11 times as likely to be murdered by a man they knew than by a stranger (VPC).
- When the woman knew her murderer, 60% of the time, it was an intimate or ex-intimate according to VPC. However, according to the Bureau of Justice, about a third of women were killed by their intimates. (Maybe the difference is due to different classification of “intimates”. VPC includes ex-intimates.)
- Only about three percent of male victims are killed by their intimates (BOJ).
- In 90% of the cases where the race of both victim and murderer were know, the woman was killed by men of a different race!!! (BOJ)
- The number of women killed by their intimates in the US was pretty stable for 20 years, and then started falling in 1993. It’s at its lowest point ever right now. (BOJ)
- The number of men killed by their intimates in the US has been falling steadily and dramatically for the past 30 years. (BOJ)
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12.24.07
Posted in Canadian life at 7:36 pm by ducky
As I mentioned before, I scalded my hand and ended up feeling very foolish about a resulting trip to the emergency room. Well, I now feel very good about that trip. On Saturday, I got a bill for $130 for that trip because I wasn’t covered. With a bit of exploring, we discovered that the British Columbia Medical Services Plan didn’t think that Jim and I existed. This was disconcerting.
Apparently, when you get a study permit extension, or extend your work visa in Canada, you also have to tell the provincial health care plan that you got an extension. It’s not enough to just keep paying your bills.
In BC, you have to fax your new study permit or work permit to the head MSP office at 250-405-3595. Be sure to include your Care Card number somewhere on the fax so that they know whose file this regards.
You have 90 days to reinstate your same number; if you take more than 90 days, they have to issue you a new number. We faxed in our permits today, 24 December, one entire week before the 90 days would have been up.
If I hadn’t gone to the emergency room for what turned out to be a trivial matter, I would not have found out that my Care Card had expired before the 90 days was up. I would have had to go through even more paperwork… so now I’m glad that I went!
Keywords: British Columbia Medical Services Plan, Canadian study permit extension, Canadian work permit extension, health care, health insurance.
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11.26.07
Posted in Canadian life, Too Much Information, University life at 7:09 pm by ducky
On the day before US Thanksgiving, I was at my lab late, waiting for my beloved husband to get done with an opera chorus rehearsal. For reasons that don’t matter, I didn’t go home for dinner. Instead, I prepared some yummy cup-of-soup for dinner, adding boiling water from the electric kettle in our lab. I immediately grabbed the cup in my right hand to take back to my desk… and slopped boiling-hot soup on my hand. It landed in the little triangle of skin between the thumb and index finger, where there is a little depression — and saw no good reason to leave. This hurt, so my body acted quickly to throw the water off of the web of skin.
Unfortunately, that meant that soup jumped out of the cup onto the floor, onto my shirt, onto the desk, onto the back of my hand, and even one little splatter onto my forehead. YOWCH!
I quickly grabbed my waterbottle and poured it over the back of my hand (watering one of the office plants in the process). It hurt, but not so much that I thought I couldn’t clean up some of the mess before going 50m to the closest washroom to run more cold water over my hand. So it was a minute or two before I ran more cold water over the burn.
It hurt, but it didn’t hurt that badly. I had never scalded myself before, but I certainly had burned myself before, and it wasn’t painful in that same league. So I ate what was left of the cup of soup and went back to debugging.
After a while, the scald started to hurt. It hurt more and more as time went on. This was really, really strange. I wondered if scalds were somehow different from “regular” burns. It was hurting enough that I was having trouble focusing on my work. “How long would it keep getting worse?” I wondered.
What really made me nervous was that I was supposed to jump in a car and go down to the US in a few hours. I have travellers’ insurance so that I can get medical treatment in the US if needed, but it would probably be a big logistical hassle. Finally, I decided to go to the emergency room a few blocks away. I felt kind of foolish for doing so, but I had never had the experience of a burn’s pain getting worse and worse as time goes on.
As soon as I got outside, my hand started feeling better. This made sense, given the cold and moist air on my bare skin. At the emergency room, they saw me quickly, told me I was fine, and sent me home. I felt relieved but somewhat foolish, but it had been really strange for the pain to increase.
I went back to the lab and commenced working again. I started typing and mousing and typing and mousing again. With my hands. Especially my right hand. And what do you think happened? The pain started increasing again in my right hand!
I felt really, really stupid at that point. It was hurting more and more because I was stretching the scalded area. Duh.
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09.24.07
Posted in Canadian life at 10:01 am by ducky
Here’s another difference between US and Canadian culture that totally surprised me: Canadians normally do not allow write-in candidates for their elections. In the US, it is normal and customary to allow write-ins.
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07.11.07
Posted in Canadian life at 10:03 am by ducky
When we were first living in Canada, we noticed that every time we crossed into the US, the border guards would ask us how we liked our car. The first time, we didn’t think much of it. It was a nice shiny relatively new car.
The second time, we thought it was a bit of a coincidence, but we do have a pretty neato car.
The third time, it was clear something was up, but we couldn’t figure out what (and we didn’t want to ask).
When we got British Columbia plates, they stopped asking us.
People suggested that maybe they thought our car might be stolen. This made no sense to us: why would we steal a California car, drive it through Oregon and Washington into Canada, and then take it back into the US?
Then someone pointed out that maybe we stole license plates in California, stole a car in Canada, and were driving the stolen car into the US. This makes slightly more sense, but wouldn’t it be easier to steal plates from BC or Washington? If I were going to steal a car from BC, I’d steal the car, go find a car at an airport rental lot that looked just like mine, swap the plates, and run south. I figure that by the time the owners noticed that their plates were different, I’d be long gone.
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06.24.07
Posted in Canadian life, Politics at 8:58 pm by ducky
I don’t have a TV, so am not current with a lot of popular North American culture.
I knew that “24” was a very popular series, but was shocked to hear that torture is shown in almost every episode and that it is portrayed as being effective. If I were more of a conspiracy-theorist, I would suspect the U.S. military-industrial complex of being behind “24”. Maybe this would explain why Americans seem distressingly comfortable with torture. The Republican candidates (absent the one who was actually tortured) endorse “enhanced interrogation techniques”.
Some say that in the “ticking time bomb” scenario, torture is a good idea. I can maybe agree with my government torturing in the following circumstances:
- Nobody will ever ever find out that my government tortured the victim. If it becomes known that my government tortures people, then my life and the lives of people I care about get riskier. Not only will my enemies be more willing to torture in retaliation, but the torture will turn more people into my enemies.
- The victims are all guilty (i.e. is hiding secrets that will save many many civilian lives). If my government tortures innocent people, that will really piss off them their loved ones, their friends, their neighbors, their hairdresser, etc. It can also make allied countries less willing to cooperate with my government. Furthermore, I am (and I presume you are) innocent. If my government is willing to torture innocent people, what’s to stop them from torturing you and me?
- The victims will never give false or misleading information. If they fabricate information, that could lead to resources being spent unwisely. And if you can’t be sure of what the victim tells you, why bother?
Point 1: The only way that you might be able to hide the torture is if you kill them after you are done torturing them. You then have to figure out where to dispose of the body so that nobody finds it. And, if you kill too many, people will figure it out anyway (witness the disappeared).
Point 1 is not possible. You cannot have a systemic policy that encourages torture — or even one that only weakly punishes subordinates who torture — and expect people to not find out about it.
Point 2: Oh come on. You can’t tell me that my government bureaucracy would never make a mistake?
Besides, they have demonstrated pretty convincingly that they can make mistakes — see the Maher Arer case. So Point 2 is not possible.
Point 3: I am weak, I admit it. It wouldn’t take that much beating to get me to talk. However, I also believe that sadists gravitate to the job of torturer. (If you don’t enjoy it, you won’t do a very good job.) I figure that it wouldn’t really matter what I said — that if they are going to hurt me they will either hurt me or stop with little regard for what I say. And if I believe that I will give bogus information, why should I believe that people with stronger convictions than I wouldn’t do an even better job of it?
So Point 3 is not possible.
Let’s review: I’m only willing for my government to use torture only if all three points hold, and I believe that none of the points can ever hold.
No torture. Ever. It’s a supremely bad idea.
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06.23.07
Posted in Canadian life at 5:42 pm by ducky
As Jim, I, and nine of our Green College neighbors tumbled out of the restaurant, Andrea groaned about a big blister on her foot. She was also carrying a violin case and a big bag, so I considered letting her take my place in our car and taking the bus home myself.
I hesitated for a moment, however, because it was after dark. It would be a bit slower, more lonely, and there was the chance of getting harassed traveling by myself. Still, being middle-aged but unblistered and unburdened, I would have an easier time on the bus than young, beautiful, burdened, and blistered Andrea. And this is Canada — the buses are pretty safe.
So Jim took Andrea and three other Greenies home. As we parted company, I gulped and squared my shoulders for the journey home alone. I took about two steps and realized that all six of the other Greenies were headed towards that same bus home!
I had assumed that I would be taking the bus myself because in California, everybody drove. In a similar circumstance in California, everyone else would have driven home. Not true here!
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06.05.07
Posted in Canadian life at 10:47 am by ducky
I mentioned before that low-level government functionaries seem to have more discretion in Canada then in the US. Since then, I’ve seen a few more examples of this.
- We heard a story about a company hiring a huge (HUGE) truck to pick something up in Canada and bring it to the US. Aspen trucks are built in Canada, and used for hauling oil derricks around. They are so big that they have two steering wheels so that two sections can be steered independently. The company hired two US drivers, rented a truck (which happened to be in the US at the time), got all the paperwork cleared by the BC government in Victoria, and drove up to the border. The agent at the border said, “You can’t bring that thing in here! It’s too big!” The drivers said, “But we have the paperwork!” The agent said, “You can’t drive that thing in here!” The drivers said, “But we have the paperwork!” The agent said, “I’m cancelling the permit. You’ll have to talk to Victoria. Now park that thing over there.” The drivers parked it over there slick as a whistle (because it had two steering controls), and the agent said, “Oh. I didn’t realize you could do that. If I had realized, I wouldn’t have cancelled the permit.” (He let the truck through, although delayed one day because it was too late in the day to un-cancel the permit.) Now, both sides had some culpability in the communications breakdown, but the US drivers thought that because they had followed the rules, they were in the clear. You might say that the agent was at fault, but if the truck in fact did not have two steering columns, you would have wanted him to cancel the permit.
- Jim has had to deal with Transport Canada a few times about issues pertaining to his medical clearance to fly. He’s been in in-person once, but usually talks to them on the phone. They remember his name, ask him how his flying is going, and once asked him about a newspaper article that he appeared in.
- I did a favor for someone who was off-campus and needed to submit a form. It was past the deadline, but that didn’t seem to matter.
I told some US friends about how functionaries had much more discretion in Canada, and they were appalled. “You can’t do that! You’ll get unfair treatment!”
I thought about Southwest Airlines, which we had flown on recently. One of Southwest’s advertised strengths is that its employees have quite a lot of discretion. Why was it okay for Southwest employees to have discretion but not US governmental employees?
I realized that my US friends have the very strong belief that government officials are incompetent and/or hostile. Government functionaries only make your life worse, not better. However, in Canada, the petty bureaucrats who I have interacted with have been competent, polite, and worked to make my life better. In general, they have made my life better.
While I realize that there are good agents in the US and bad agents in Canada, I think that in general the bureaucrats are better in Canada.
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