Workshops, Travel, and a Farewell or Two
Fooey. I made the mistake I’ve told so many others not to do. I typed my entry directly into the entry box, instead of first typing it in Word and then copy/pasting it into DearDiary. I suspect you have already guessed the result of that ill-begotten attempt to update my diary. The site went down, taking my entry with it. So I’ll sing it again, this time with feeling.
The Gift of Life symposium I attended Saturday was not as well attended as I had expected. Only a little over a hundred people attended, if I include the people running the workshops. It made for nice, cozy workshops of twenty people or less. There were a few donor family people there, but no one who is currently on any of the waiting lists attended. The majority of us were organ recipients, and the majority of these were kidney recipients. I met one other liver recipient, and a heart recipient.
The workshops were good. I attended the skin cancer workshop (my chances of getting skin cancer are greatly increased because I’m immunosuppressed), the medications workshop (which was really tailored towards kidney recipients, but still useful), the nutrition workshop (more on that later) and a seminar on “Rebuilding your Life”, which was excellent.
I really liked the nutritionist who ran the nutrition workshop. We were a small group, probably no more than 15 people, and she opened the format up to direct participation. Unfortunately, this also brought the seminar down to the lowest common denominator, so we didn’t cover much that I didn’t already know. The liver guy was more intent on telling his medical history than discussing nutrition, and the lady behind me was incensed because her “all natural” honey had sugar in it (I’m not entirely sure she ever understood that honey was sugar). I was able to verify that cranberry juice did interact with coumadin though, making coumadin’s anti-coagulative properties more potent. I guess I’m going to have to restrict my cranberry juice intake, which is a bummer because I’d recently become re-enamored with the stuff. Ah well, it isn’t like there’s alcohol in it or anything. Everything in moderation (except alcohol, any pain-reliever that isn’t Tylenol, and salt: these are all verboten).
I hope I never end up like the liver guy in the previous paragraph. Chronic illness was his name, and misery his game. His entire identity was wrapped up in being a transplant patient. Then there were the entrants to the Chronic Illness Olympics. Their entire identities were dependent upon being ill. They’d had more staples, waited longer on the transplant list, were taking more medications, had more complications, saw more doctors. Meeting these people made me take a good long look in the metaphysical mirror. Am I in danger of becoming like them? Have I already crossed the line and been them at some point in time? I grow queasy at the thought.
I am growing reconciled with my new, paved over garden. Next year’s plants will be in pots, but I may still have just enough dirt around the edges to plant more vines along the fencing. I may even grow to like this better, since the lawn furniture will no longer sit at odd angles, and I won’t have to weed the gravel any more. It really hurt to have this summer’s garden upended in the manner it was, though. Much of the harshness of this past summer was mitigated by the presence of that garden. It deserved a better ending than at the hands of a stranger’s backhoe.
My request to go to North Carolina in December has been approved! I’ll be flying down Wednesday, December 10th, attending the meetings Thursday and Friday, doing a wet lab on Saturday, and then coming home Sunday. The schedule (such as it is) is here: National Multi-Hazard Symposium: “One Medicine” Approach to Homeland Security . It will be exciting for me to be working with doctors as well as other veterinarians on this. I’m hoping the wet lab will be a mock-rehearsal for a FAD (foreign animal disease) outbreak in the US, but I’ll be content to wait and see.
I think I found a new home for Voglinde, my turtle. I’m really bummed about it, which surprises me, since I interact a good deal less with her than I do the cats, and she has the personality of a zucchini with a good strong bite. Reptiles do carry quite a few diseases transmittable to humans though, and while they’re perfectly safe for anyone with a sturdy immune system, they are no longer a good idea for me. I can’t clean her tank anymore, or handle her at all, and The Socialist is no turtle fan. It isn’t fair to her, so I’ve found someone at my vet school who is probably interested in taking her in. I’ll have to take a few decent pictures of her before she goes. She isn’t nearly as photogenic as the cats, and therefore has to put up with far fewer paparazzi.
I don’t just hang out here in cyberspace. There are a good number of message boards I visit, under several names. One of these boards is a private board, membership by invitation only. While I really like a handful of people on this board, I have never been comfortable with the way people talk about other people behind their backs. This board represents a sub-population of another, very popular board dedicated to Lord of the Rings. Some of the “elite” on the private board make very mean-spirited fun of some of those who have not been invited to join this board. They’ll embed links to what they consider to be especially poor posts, and then tear the poor person to shreds behind his/her back.
I seldom visit this board, and the only reason I go at all is for a few very special people that I would otherwise have no opportunity to talk to in cyberspace. The Socialist goes to this private board even less frequently, and has a poor view of most of those who run the board because of their exclusionary, literary elitist attitudes.
I don’t know what triggered it, but while I was gone over the weekend, The Socialist finally got good and fed up with the private board, and left a post there that told them he was tired of the lot of them and wouldn’t be visiting again. I can’t be sure what he said because they (probably somewhat justifiably) censored his post a bit. Not in the Socialist’s defense, but by way of explanation, I believe he was somewhat less than sober when he bid them a less-than-fond adieu.
If his good-bye post was inflammatory, then the responses to it were petty and somewhat uncalled for. I was a little angry with the Socialist when I read his post, but the anger dissipated when I read the replies to it. I did note that the people I like stayed away from the action, but the snobs and the holier-than-thou’s glommed onto thread and went through the whole gamut of “good riddance”, “we didn’t like you anyway”, “no loss”, and “he’s jealous of our success anyhow.”
It is impossible to lurk without being seen at this board, and I no longer feel comfortable being seen there. I won’t be going back either, though I’m not going to bother telling anyone. It will make me feel better about myself, since I always felt a bit of a jerk by even going there; it was as though I were giving tacit approval of their tactics by using their board. I do not like the public debates over who should be given access and I do not like humiliating others behind their backs, so the Socialist has actually solved one problem for me. I doubt anyone will notice I’m gone. I further doubt it would make a dram’s worth of difference if they did notice.
For the few people who may read this and know what I’m talking about: I know you won’t pass this on. There’s nothing to be served by it. If someone should be looking for me, tell him or her to leave me a note at the Socialist’s board. I’ll know where to find it.