File: gutfull.txt
Cont: the new me, and why I want to be rid of him
Date: 21, 22, 23 Nov 2003

I owe a lot to the likes of Planck, Fourier, Radon, deMarignac, Roentgen,
Maxwell and a bunch of other people. Their legacy is the truly astounding
ability to see through one's bones and their fleshy wrapping, and peruse
internal workings which you could otherwise not without a big long slash
through the external plating beforehand. Lensless RF imaging technology
cannot answer on your behalf the question of wether or not you're prepared
to see what it can show you, but you can't have everything.

What on earth would the entrail-reading Romans have made of CT-scans and
NMR?

Haematology, while it can tell you a lot, can't give you an image. So, two
nights ago, I swilled down an unpalatable beverage of heavy metal sulfate
and yesterday I took all my clothes off, donned a distinctly Roman
disposable gown and was fed head-first into an computerised axial
tomography rig. Which is a huge x-ray machine which takes lots of
exposures from multiple angles, which represent slices of your body;
grunty computers take all those slices and, mainly using linear algebra
with a few layers of other maths on top, build them into human-readable
images of your internals in cross-section, provided these internals admit
enough x-rays to be detectable on the other side of the rotating beam
path (which is why I had to guzzle the astringent white radiopaque slushy 
I mentioned earlier).

The aforementioned slushy stays in your GI tract and makes your intestines
show up on the x-ray exposures, but it doesn't make it to your
circulation, since the compound is deliberately chosen because it doesn't
dissolve in your gut acids, which is good 'cos soluble barium compounds
are hellishly toxic. This insolubility is why they also cannulate you and
punch a load of clear orange liquid into your veins - so these too can be
made visible to the short-wavelength eye of the machine. I did ultimately
find out what the contrast medium was - iopamidol - and looked it up in
the Merck. I'd have to shoot up about four kilos of it before I could be
expected to die of poisoning, and the molecule is specifically constructed
to be rapidly excreted by your kidneys.

There's trefoiled IONISING RADIATION HAZARD stickers on the door to the
room, and the radiologist gazes in on you through a VERY THICK window. You
lie on a tray, and the tray is fed, under precise machine control, into
the central tunnel of the CT rig, which is a floor-mounted,
room-dominating contraption with all its interesting pieces hidden by
beige plastic cowlings; The first run is to calibrate the machine to your
particular radiological parameters, the actual scans happen on subsequent
runs. The machine makes low, quiet humming sounds, inches you back and
forth at a slow, precise rate, and you can see through the beam aperture
that something large and heavy is rotating, very accurately, around you,
but you'd never know it was throwing hard EM at the atoms of your body.

The machine powered down, and like a compact disc in a very large player,
I was gently ejected.  The radiologist came out and asked me to move my
penis - prone on my belly, it was evidently obstructing their scans. I had
no idea it'd be opaque to that part of the spectrum. It's simultaneously
reassuring and disconcerting to know that they can see so much stuff under
the flimsy blue gown - but who am I to refuse if someone suggests I shift
my dick out of the way of a beam of ionising radiation. So I shoved it
down my leg, then he crammed a few cc's of triiodinated isophthalic acid
up my arm.

Most people report odd effects when shot up with this stuff. I did. My
arsehole felt very hot for a few seconds, then the back of my throat felt
hot, then I swore I could smell some sort of burnt, bleachy stink. With my
guts rendered sufficiently visible to this anchored, domesticated version
of Superman's eyeballs, the radiologist left the room and the machine
inhaled me again.
 
Then the scan started. The machine tells you to breathe in and hold your
breath (bzzz, scans are happening), then breathe out, but it stops
there... maybe programmers could remember to change this to something
which instructs the scanee to breathe normally. This repeats itself a few
times while the machine gets lots of juicy images and you turn anoxic in
the belief that you have to have empty lungs for no apparent reason, and
eventually give up and breathe like you normally would anyway.

The bloke comes in and says, "We're gonna scan you again, and pay
particular attention to your left kidney." Which it immediately occurs to
me they wouldn't do if everything was normal and boring. Uh-oh. So they
scan that a couple of times. Then he comes in and sends me off down the
corridor to an hilarious old lady in a darkened room, who asks me to lie
down and take my gown off, squirts a load of imaging gel on my gut and
then manually moves an ultrasound probe around on my left flank. 

It felt a bit ticklish, but is way more interrogatory than your average
massage. She did this for a LONG time, and got lots of snaps, but didn't
say anything (and I can't see anything on the screen from where I am).
Then she passed me a towel to wipe the goop off, and told me to go and put
my clothes back on.

So, clad again in my usual stuff, I returned to the outside world. I got
the report later that day, shortly before they told me to get myself down
to the nuclear magnetic resonance imaging crew in Kogarah. Which I did. I
read the CT scanner's report in their waiting room. Yatta yatta neoplasm,
renal in origin, yatta yatta kidneys still working, blah blah needs more
investigation. I know enough anatomy and med-lingo to understand what
they're talking about. I have cancer. 

I've met the enemy, and it is me. Well, it is _of_ me, anyway. It isn't me
in the sense that it isn't a chunk of cells doing stuff I would like them
to do, and it isn't me in the sense that none of it should be there
according to one's embryological body plan. It is me in that it's
genetically full o' my code, it is me in the sense that my immune system
hasn't identified it as a targetable impostor, hence the normal lymphocyte
count. Hey, maybe I can make money off it, license it and flog it as a
cell line to mol bio companies, once they chop it out? I'm gonna need to,
getting this fucker out is gonna cost me a pile of bux I don't have.
Tumors are immortal, and a sample of this stuff will potentially outlast
me. Enduring fame, in an Eppendorff tube. 

Collectively, the DNA in our cells take millions of nucleotidyl insults
every day, but most of them either occur where they don't matter, or are
repaired, or produce cells which commit programmed suicide (apoptosis) or
die an uncontrolled death from regulatory failure (necrosis), or die after
they reach their Hayflick limit (and hence are telomerase-negative and not
immortal). Of the remnant, we get hundreds of potential tumors a day.
Almost all of them get smashed by NK's, macrophages, and other sections of
your immunology, which spot and kill these things which in the process of
becoming tumors lost the molecular passwords which allow them to be
considered part of the whole. Depending on your genes, what diseases you
get, what chems you are exposed to, eventually, a few of these make it to
the immortal league of extraordinary cells.

So, it's a numbers game. Once a few of these things get their act
together, they can grow, but they remain _diffusion limited_ and get no
bigger until one or more of them decide to turn on their angiogenesis
signalling. Then the adjacent arteries and veins start to supply it with
access to the community nutrient lode pumped around your body. This it has
evidently done. It's a big fucker, longest dimensions are 10 x 14 x 18cm,
it's threaded through with vascular supply, some of which probably used to
feed the nephrons in my renal cortex.

Because it's big, and well supplied with blood (it appears, thusly, that
I've been dining for at least two in recent months) it will enlarge,
exponentially, and push other things out of the way (which is why my
spleen felt enlarged - it was forced upwards from below). Because this
growth process entails more and more cells, each with its own chance to
forget to make adherin proteins and thence bud off and become another
tumor, the bigger it is, the more dangerous it becomes, for reasons
unrelated to mere metabolic load. Renal neoplasms have a noted tendancy to
metastatise.

I guess if you're gonna have cancer, this is one of the better places to
have it. No limbs off. They don't have to chop any bones up to get at it,
it isn't anywhere near your personality executes, and one is luckily
bestowed with redundant kidneys so if you have to piss one off, you can do
so without staring down a life of dialysis. At this stage, though, I don't
know if it's a lone primary or a descendant of some creepy oncological
mothership lurking somewhere else.

NMR imaging works on a different principle to X-rays. If you think of
X-rays in the same way as you might think of a very strong, penetrating
searchlight, you're well on the way to understanding them. But NMR is
totally, utterly different and exploits tricky quantum mechanical aspects
of one's own molecular stuffing, to provide images of astounding
resolution - down to microns in the really recent machines.

NMR and CT-machines look pretty much the same to the people fed into them.
They sound very different. CT is almost silent. NMR, which uses huge,
liquid-helium supercooled, superconducting magnets and which bashes them
with powerful changing magnetic fields applied by large coils (producing
magnetostriction - same phenomenon which makes power transformers in the
street produce their characteristic hum), is very fucking loud, so one is
fitted with nonmetallic earmuffs to protect one's hearing. These double as
headphones to enable the NMR operator to tell you when to stop breathing
and breathe again. The headphones have no wires, since the fields
generated by the machine would induce huge currents in such wires and melt
'em; sound comes in through tubing, with characteristic pipe distortion. 
One has to have no metal implants, jewellery, anything, when one goes
in, wearing another of those hospital gowns which if not done up correctly
tends to expose one's arse to all and sundry. Funny how I care about that
when my internal organs, which have never seen the light of day, are
about to be displayed by proxy to the world at large.

How it works is roughly like so. You lie down, and a pair of coils
(presumably graphite or some other non-metal, but I really don't know) is
placed, one below and one above the area one wants to look at. These are
the aerials which detect the changes in alignment of your protons (and
carbon-13 nuclei, too, but only barely) when the imposed magnetic field
changes. They feed you into the machine and energise the electromagnet
(which is an idiotically strong, supercooled rare-earth jobbie, something
on the order of 20 Tesla, which would rip any ferromagnetic materials out
of you and embed them in the machine as soon as they energised the
magnet). Your protons become aligned with the (static) magnetic field - in
effect turning you into a weak magnet. Then another coil is energised
which rotates the magnetically aligned protons towards it, and when this
second coil is de-energised, the protons want to re-acquire their
orientation towards the big magnetic field which was turned on the first
time, and when they do they emit RF... you can figure out where they are,
if there is a gradient in the static field, which is of course carefully
arranged. The machine records what the coils detect - which is an RF
signal from your hydrogen atoms, saying what their chemical environment
is, which relates to what kind of molecules they're in, and what sort of
tissues contain them. Heavy math crunching (of the Fourier transform of
the free induction decay spectrum of the alignment of your protons after
they turn the second coil off, for each slice) gets your image.

As the machine electromagnetically sectioned my carcass, stridently
wrestling the raw forces of the universe, I could feel strips of faint
warmth moving up my body ... my protons were dissipating as heat the
energy stashed in them by the imposed magnetic fields (this must be how a
tape head feels when it is demagnetised). It made a lot of loud humming
tones, some very discordant. The equipment produces astoundingly high
resolution images - I'd always wanted to be imaged (is gratuitous MRI the
ultimate in self-obsession?) - and I have had that wish granted, though I
hoped it might be under better circumstances. Ah, well, in 2012 we run out
of helium; no supercoolant, no more MRI scans. Better to do it now.

I did lots of breathing in and breathing out while the machine
interrogated my proton distribution. A while later someone named Lynette
told me she was gonna shoot me up with a contrast dye. This isn't an
iodine-based material, I knew, so I asked her what it was. She said,
gadolinium-somethingorother, and I reckon, probably gadopentenic acid
(geez, the Merck's a handy tome) which is a paramagnetic relaxation
agent... makes things containing it really stand out on MRI. They can't
use a glass needle (they break) or a metal one, so they cannulated me with
a plastic item, they shot me up with Gado', did more scans, and let me get
up and get my clothes back on.

I snuck a look in the room with the pictures in it, with my guts in
cross-section on the screens, and fuck me, it looks detailed and messy.
There's a lot more plumbing than is meant to be there, connected to a big
... thing ... where most of the kidney was. Amazingly the remnants of the
left kidney still works. They said they'd need a while to come to
a conclusion on this one and they'd send the pics and assessment off
tomorrow.

I came home and departed with some gadolinic, slightly iodinated, dense
barytic turds, and thought about the situation a bit. I don't know enough
to really take a position yet. The dog is a reassuring island of blithe
normality, tail wagging as tumor boy dismounts from his 'cycle and takes
off his helmet.

I told mum what the report said. "You know what a neoplasm is, don't you?"
I asked. "It's a tumor. A big one." She got all teary. Later she mentioned
she wondered if this was a secondary to something else, like a lung tumor
she might have, over the years, supplied to me via my proximity to her
tobacco habit. I told her we don't know yet, and speculation is pointless.
I had to admit I kind of enjoyed watching her squirm for a teensy bit,
amazed that she thought, maybe there were real consequences from her
unapologetic, callous, fuck-you stubborn inconsideration of what people
around her like to breathe. I ran a quick thought process, along the lines
of, diag with lung tumor secondary to tobacco smoke exposure, strangle mum
on the spot, go to court, and claim self-defense against proven poisoner.
But that'd be silly. Aside from needlessly enriching bastard lawyers,
there would be more satisfaction in letting her live out the rest of her
life in awareness that she'd carcinogenated me.  I wonder, if in running
these sorts of thoughts, I am subtly telling myself to get my head scanned
too. 

Dad's sort of odd. He reckons I should cut my goatee off 'cos it'll
interfere with the administration of anaesthesia. He _very much_ gives a
shit how I am going to present myself as a patient in the hospital where
he works. Sends me up the road to purchase some acceptably boring clothes.
And fucked if I'm gonna. The cash goes on Eigen: Rules of the Game;
Lehninger: Bioenergetics; Tainter: Collapse of complex civilisations,
second hand. They should get here in a couple of weeks.

Today (Friday) I get a call, to go and have yet another CT-scan. This time
they want to look at my chest. I go there, and there's a crowd of people
in the waiting room, but they ask me to come in right away, which is 
abnormal - the immutable laws of queueing are only broken for the insane,
the very important, or those suspected of dying, and I don't think I'm
either of the first two. The CT-machine at this place, which is made by
weapons manufacturer General Electric, probably sells commercially for
several million bucks, is newer and faster than the one in Hurstville
(and has obviously been got at by the school of design which says
everything needs to look streamlined and aerodynamic), has higher
resolution, is more capable of ionising my dick, and all that. 

The injected contrast agent feels just as weird as it did yesterday. Why
does someone want to look in my chest if they've found something in my
abdomen? Obviously 'cos lungs is where these things usually start. If it
has, then the neoplastic freakshow in my belly is a secondary, and I'd say
it's a good bet asbestos, or passive smoking, or something of that nature
has finally come to collect its dues somewhere in the lobes of my
respiratory system. 

I walked out of the nuclear medicine / CT-imaging place and walked down
the footpath to the place where yesterday my protons learned to dance, in
the expectation they'd have my scans and they could pass them over to me
so I could 1) deliver 'em to dad, who referred me there and 2) I could get
the straight dope from the enclosed report and look at the scans myself.
If there's anything that shits me it is the _not_knowing_. But there's
some dude at the desk, I think he's a radiologist, and he says I'm meant
to be getting my chest scanned. Uh, yeah mate, I just did that, are the
NMR scans available so I can take 'em over to Hurstville? He says the NMR
scans are here, and he and another one of the diagnostic radiologists and
some kidney-choppin' surgical dude (who dad has watched operating and
approves), are gonna look at all of them together, including the chest one
I just had, on Monday and come to a conclusion about what to do, so they'd
like to keep it all together in one place.

Um, right.

I wander off to the carpark and ride back to Blakehurst.

The pact of silence shits me. I've had more scans than your average
barcode, and _know_ they know what I want to know, and aren't showing me.
I think, am I condemned to cark it sometime in the next few months or
what? Hmmmm.

I decided I'd go round to Turella, bitch about the idiots two levels
upstream of cat.org.au chopping off our web and email feeds, get pissed.
Ooooh, Chatelle Napoleon brandy alternating with Peters Wicked Honey and
Cashew Icecream is very fucking good. I crash in the cot of one of the
locals, and we chat for a while. I let the oncological cat out of the bag.
After a while, she's in the loop to the same extent I am. She invites me 
for a shag. Maybe it wasn't the best time for a shag. It's sad to be being
shagged by someone and have them suddenly burst out crying all over you. I
ask why she's upset and she says it's not so much that I have cancer, it's
that I said I wouldn't bother to fight it if it's already an entrenched
aggressive, metastatic one. I guess it would seem like I was rejecting
everyone, by not making an effort to hang around, by choosing to let 
myself be removed from their life.

It is in the absence of knowledge that superstition and fear fester. In
the absence of awareness about what is going on inside, the decisional
logic becomes simple. If it's localised, chop it out, cool. If it is
metastatic and distributed everywhere, well, I think - it might be time to
prep an azide milkshake, ride down to a part of the National Park that I
like, dig a hole, climb in, and irreversibly lock my metabolism. Fucked if
I want to be stuck in a cot somewhere, emotional football for a load of
people crying around me as I die, all of whom think they have something
very important to say to me, and who think we're gonna meet up again
later. I want calm, indifferent nature around me.

The timescale of my life looks like it might be dramatically
compressed. Now, most people have reasons to stay. Spouses, rugrats,
careers, infrastructure they expect to use for their lifespans, or God
says they have to stay, or something.

But I look on my life so far, and wonder, is there anything which really
recommends me? Am I worth, in the purely economic rationalist view of the
world, the effort of saving?

Dad seems to think so, I suspect he's been pulling various strings to 
get all these scans arranged with such suspicious efficiency. Why does he
want to save me? We get on pretty well but I am secretly convinced I have
been, on the whole, a nuisance to him.

What do I do that makes me worthwhile? To whom do I matter? Why should
anyone miss me on a planet stuffed with millions almost alike? Thousands
of people exist, just like me, with this same sort of predicament, and
quite possibly I will be saved by blind luck alone, they will die and I
will never hear about it.

If I am full o' metastatic malignancy, I'd only go through with the
nauseating bullshit associated with chemotherapeutically fighting such an
illness, not 'cos I feel I really have to do anything special before I
cark it or need to live for some additional thing I have to complete, but
since I feel there's something altogether wrong about my dear old man
having to put me in the ground rather than the other way around. I can't
think of any real justification to prolong my existance. I've lived long
enough to get grey hair, be fucked senseless, blow shit up, play god with
the genomes of living things, learn most of the things I wanted to know,
free myself of religion, despair of the future of my species, travel much
of the world. Some people I want to say bye to are out of the country. I
skipped a few drugs, though, and it's too late to whip up a batch of mesc,
or score a few tabs of LSD. Oh well, tough shit. I should check out the
Powerhouse Museum, the Bletchley Park exhibit, a few other little things.
Go skydiving. Get my naked arse flashed by a speed camera at 100kmh above
the limit. The four remaining books I want to read are already in the
post. Ar, bugger, I haven't finished renovating the kitchen either. Oh
well, tough shit, too. I've done all the good stuff, I reckon.


It is great a) having a molecular biological clue what I am up against and
b) being an atheist. Having no god to beseech or delude myself that I can
plead with, I can get straight to the point. Most people go through the
disbelief, bargaining, anger, depression, acceptance cycle, but I seem to
go to acceptance first, depression second, then back to acceptance.
Knowledge is power. Self knowledge brings power over oneself. 

Wills are odd, I never thought I should write one. What stuff do I have
that other people would possibly want? Like I'd give a rat's what happens
to it if I am dead. What kind of person lives a life that leaves not
only nothing to squabble over, but no descendants to squabble over it?
Hmmm. I'll just be a job creation scheme for the Public Trustee, I 'spose.
Funny, when I think I'm gonna die, odd things pop out, like that I
have to discretely dispose of my stash of hardcore porn, so as not to
offend the sensibilities of the people who find it when they go through
the stuff I used to own. Various clandestine possessions also need
stashing in the ground or to be moved on to someone else.


I like black humour. TISM have a lot of songs mentioning cancer, and I
still think they're funny now I have some of my own.

"There's cancer in the south of France
 Cancer lurks in Rome.
 Cancer circles the while globe, 
 until it finds you home."

and

"Cancer? I dream of cancer! Cancer can eat my BONES!
Oh, lucky I would consider myself to be racked by cancerous moans -
a fate more evil, a life more lost, the devil for me foresaw!
Imagine the day I awoke to find the Milats had moved next door."





It's saturday morning. Rain's pissing down on the steel roof. I like the
sound. White noise, stochastic arrival of discrete, glistening carriers,
loud enough to drown out the straining engines of the local revheads who
emerge to do burnouts on the wet roads. I am climbed upon by the form
previously feigning sleep next to me, and have one of those strangely
distracted fucks, where everything is sort of done on autopilot and I'm
thinking about something else. I wonder, ferinstance, what _it_ does while
I'm having this shag, how does it move, what does it know about the
blissful fire spreadding through my pelvis when I come. I dunno. I had
this odd idea that there's something defiant about the reproductive act
when performed by a condemned individual, but then, that's crap, I thought
to myself. We're all condemned. Some of us just have the luxury (or curse,
you pick) of knowing when and how. There's nothing remotely defiant about
fulfilling the main purpose for which your organism exists any more than
one is defiant of death while breathing. At least there were no tears this
time.

I haven't told many people what I know: three cat people (so they know why
I'm off-net for a while). They all think it's a bit grim. One said she'd
miss me if I died. Some people don't believe it. I was massaged by a young
lass a few weeks ago and she too noticed the malevolent lump. I SMS'd her
the info and I recieved in reply from her dual-case SMS phone: "DONT FUCK
WITH ME PRED". I sent back "IM NOT" but only because I don't have
lowercase on my wankerfone. 

I eat breakky, and am glad my hangover is only a little one. I am tempted
to fanatically read up about renal tumors, but I think it'd only depress
me.

Eventually I ride to Newtown, eat a ham and cheese melt and swill some of
the faintly burnt coffee they flog at the Old Fish Shop on King st. They
usually give me something other than what I ask for, but that's OK since I
get the mistaken order for free. The rain has turned the usual footpath
parade into a serried trickle of umbrellas and bipedal bedragglement.
There's people dressed up the way they are because, to my neverending
amazement, they apparently give a shit who wins the footy. I pop around to
Ned the Anarchist's place but he's out, driving to Wollongong, probably
testing the suspension with his new squeeze. So I pop back to Turella.

I fuck around there for a while, pulling files out of the server via the
age old method of floppy disk 'cos someone's changed the IP numbers again,
grrrr. I'd send mail but our provider's provider has, incredibly, turned
the mail system off, the idiotic bastards. I get a pile of parts to take
back to the shed, there's a GX150 motherboard which I consider well worth
the effort of salvaging and retrofitting into the ATX tall-form chassis I
found on the roadside last week.

I'm about to leave for Blakehurst, taking advantage of a break in the
rain. Ah, ya know you're appreciated when the person who shagged you in
the morning blew a large part of an ounce of good bud on manufacturing
some punchy cannabis cookies. Serious weapons in the fight against pain
and depression. And, a nibble tells me, rather tasty too. Newly appointed
a trafficker of commercial quantities of natural analgesics, I start up
and ride through the drizzle. Hmmm. I hope I can keep mum away from them.

I get back to the Old's place a while later. They're watching the footy on
TV, the volume is up REALLY loud, earthworms in the back garden are
doubtless clued right up about the fucking wallabies. For fuck's sake,
even my wankerfone has stopped telling me where I am and now, instead of a
suburb, displays

GO WALLAB
IES

by default. Puke. I wonder if brain process saturation by televised sport
is a treatable pathology. The game hasn't started, they're half an hour
into the hour of pre-match advertising bait which is now customarily
played before the actual footy. I turn the volume down (normally this
creates uproar if I do it) and have a chat to dad. He does most of the
talking.

"We've looked at the MRI, the CT scans, and we're gonna have a chat to
Peter Aslan on monday. On wednesday, you'll be on his list."

Which is dad-speak for, you'll be in hospital and they're gonna chop it
out. I wonder which anonymous renal patient was bumped off Peter's list to
accommodate me. 

"Ok, so they're gonna fling the kidney, right. What I want to know is,
how far has it spread?"

"Looks like it hasn't. One lymph node in the hilus is enlarged, there's no
other involvement, the spleen's normal, the liver's normal, your lungs
are normal."

This should be reassuring, and is, but not completely. Maybe it's
metastatising and just hasn't cooked up anything detectable yet. But I
couldn't have hoped for a better prognostic. Tobacco, meso, and Sydney air
haven't got me yet. Tho, some total strangers are gonna chop me open and
steal my internal organ (they'll pass it on to the histology lab, then
it'll probably be incinerated, incorporated in dog food, or sold to a
biotechnology company as a renal tumor cell line), and I can't say I'd
recommend it as a way to lose weight. Not that at 65kg I need to. If I was
a blob, I'd probably never have felt this thing until it was too well
established to treat. 

This evening, I finally got my hands on the actual MRI and CT assessments.
What I like about these people is they don't fuck about when they write
their reports - if you're getting both barrrels, they'll give 'em to you
straight.  When three people write stuff like:

"There is a large heterogeneous soft tissue mass in the left hypochondrium
extending to the left loin which appears to involve the middle and lower
thirds of the left kidney."

"There is a mass lesion measuring approx. 14cm in size involving the
lateral portion of the left kidney extending from the undersurface of the
spleen to just above the illiac crest."

"The huge left renal lesion with multiple draining cortical veins can be
seen."

"There are several enlarged feeding arteries from the aorta, either
engorged lumbar arteries or accessory renal arteries supplying the tumor."


it means I'm in for a slashing... it's too big to remove piecemeal
endoscopically (and too risky, they might leave some in). I 'spose you'd
expect that, seeing as it is plumbed into the biggest artery in my body.
I've spoken to dad enough about accidental removal of perfectly good 
organs, etc, that I am going to bring along a texta and write on my right
flank before I go in, in large letters:

PLEASE OPEN OTHER SIDE ---->


I slowly notice, everywhere in the patho reports, they studiously avoid
the use of the term cancer. Lesion, tumor, neoplasm. Has political
correctness reached med terminology too?

The rest of the evening is sort of mundane, how I like it. Mutant freak
kidney and I eat some cold fish. We go out to the shed and do some tricky
metalwork on the computer chassis. I love doing this, since we use these
as servers, and get server-level performance out of these sorts of
motherboard, despite their bring deliberately layed out to prevent their
implementation as servers since it would cut into sales of equivalently
performing overpriced servers with logically identical guts. I dunno what
mutant freak kidney thinks of it. That done, mutant freak kidney and I
come in and sit down to type some more of this rant. Hey, you in there,
you're the star in your own suicide drama! Enjoy it while it lasts, you
get the chop as soon as we can arrange it.



Sunday. 23rd Nov.


I have to sort out what the hell's going wrong with this pirate satellite
dish decoder. I reckon they've changed the crypto keys, as I said would
eventually happen. Can I be fucked right now? No. I wash a bunch o'
clothes to wear in the hospital. Walk the dog. Why I suddenly get so much 
schadenfreude upon reading in the sunday rag that the Wallabies lost to
England eludes me. Nah. Turns out they retasked the sat; different data
transfer rate, different slice of spectrum, yatta yatta. Our dodgy dealer
knows the score, it's good, and I reprogram the thing, then wait for the
new codes to come down from the orbiting broadcaster.

Mum's spending a lot of time on the fone today, which (of course) impedes
net access here under the parental roof. She's in martyr mode. An old form
master of mine used to refer to such people as `the ones who have to be
the first with the worst'. Finally, she's Got Something Important To Talk
About. But worse than that, these phone calls propagate the news, and
prolly most people don't need to know (why is this rant on the net? Oh,
rank egotism, probably). 

She rang up her sister, who, completely unnecessarily, skitzed out
immediately. Rellos I rarely hear about in places I have never heard of
will have detailed information about my urinary tract, what colour my piss
is, and from what planet originated the thing they'll chop out three days
from now. I got on the fone to uncle Des, and mentioned it in terminology
he could understand - one of my beer processing organs is about to blow
up. 

The back lawn is carpetted in lush green grass, topped with brilliant
lilac jacaranda flowers, all wet from the unseasonal rain. I savour
walking through it in bare feet as I move things to and from the shed, and
the freaky colour scheme. 

I move a bookshelf and a cupboard. Good - mundanity is returning. I fill
in the hospital admission form. I have to go get more ichor sucked outta
my arm tomorrow. And see if I can't score a pair of those electronic
noise-cancelling headphones... hospitals harbour machines going PING all
night, screams, moans, raugous, lunk-busting coughs, pukes, phones
ringing, door slamming, nurses chatting, tele-fucking-inescapable-vision,
and other noises I'd prefer not to hear. I want my own tinnitus and the
thump of my carotid arteries as the blood pounds through 'em.



I might write tomorrow, but I might not. You've suffered enough. 




<predator>

(next in this series is conway.cat.org.au/~predator/gutting.txt)