Category Archives: Health and wellness

Yes it is a contradiction in terms. Summer is hot. Winter is cold. But a cold in Summer? We know that means mass suckage. Which I rolled into on Canada Day and am only now seeing the word recovery on the distant horizon. Chills, fever, lassitude, tired all the time, endless coughing, being a snot fountain and generally feeling like a 6 foot bag of crap that can only sit up for a half-hour at a time.

This would also explain the lack of posts here. My apologies, but when you have a nasty cold, even staring at a screen to write, hurts. We’re now at the “please cough your testicles off every hour” phase. No, it wasn’t Covid-19, I was tested frequently with the brain swab tests, all negative. It also wasn’t pneumonia, again x-rays. It was/is just a big nasty cold.

Yes I am taking vitamins, cough suppressant, expectorant, acetaminophen as needed, plenty of water and resting. No I have not tried taping a live otter around my throat, a mustard and frog-tongue poultice, breathing in hot creosote fumes with a towel over my head and my feet in a bucket of warmed linseed oil or a hot beverage made of tea, gin, milled cream of wheat, capers and pickle juice.

Nor have I tried any of the other strange remedies that are out there and everyone swears cures the malady in mere hours, just like Great-Aunt Esther did in 1911 during the Influenza when everyone else in the village died and only she survived. Please stop.

I’ll be fine in a couple more days. There will be more writing, pix as appropriate and the usual shenanigans.

It is that time of year here.  Winter is about half done and we have been whacked with another cold snap.  We don’t call it a “Polar Vortex” or other nonsense designed by news departments to hype what is nothing more than the usual stretch of damnably cold weather that hits most of Canada in January.

For our American readers, the last holdouts on the Fahrenheit scale, it is a balmy –0.22 degrees, or –17.9 C.  Of course the sun is out, shining away happily, as we freeze our nubbins, vapour from the bus exhaust leaving contrails in the air.  The car creaks, metal and oil protesting at being used in these temperatures, the shocks and springs grumbling at our abuse.  There is the occasional square tire, where the car has a frozen flat spot that only smoothes out after several kilometers of driving, thumping along, giving the car the gait of a gazelle with one foot mounted in concrete. 

There are the snow banks, piled a dozen feet high from the December blizzards, frozen solid, as unyielding as stone.  Falling on one means deep bruising or a trip to the ER for some plaster to set broken bones, a common occurrence in this season.  The only way to cut the snow banks back is with a rock drill and the careful application of explosives, both things frowned upon by the City, Province and Federal authorities, so we leave the glaciers alone, trying to peer around them, to drive out onto the main streets.

Yet remarkably there are the fanatics, who insist on bicycling to work, even at –25, saying it’s bracing and great exercise in the winter.  The Ottawa Skateway (7 kms long) on what is normally the Rideau Canal waterway, hosts the usual collection who insist on skating the length to work, simultaneously proving their hardiness and madness, their exhalations coating their faces with glistening icicles that thaw miraculously in seconds as soon as they come inside.

Naturally there are the high-school students, jacket open, no hat, no gloves, many in a skirt that would barely cover that which it is supposed to cover, walking from school.  They’re too cool to admit to being frozen half to death and we all did it when we were that age, except now they text to their friends that they’re cold, with stuttering fingers and thumbs tapping out texts that read like a cat trying to use a QWERTY keyboard.

The sensible among us recognize that January here is cold.  We stay inside, near the fire, or wrapped in a blanket on the sofa, sharing bad television with our partners, snuggled together in that curious comfort of watching the Cake Boss in Houston, making sure we don’t think more than is actually necessary.  We hunker down with a book and read in bed, only rising to let the dog out onto the back yard glacier for one last pee before lights out, muttering to ourselves that come spring, that back yard will look like a cesspool of dog excreta with patio furniture and cedar hedges and that lump of ice over there where the barbecue used to be.

The very first vestiges of a new season are upon us however.  It is no longer as black as a well-diggers arse come 4 pm.  You can still see without lights at 5 pm.  You notice the sky lightening up at 0700 as you go into work, it having been dark when you got up, dark when you got to work and dark when you went home at the end of the day, the sun a distant memory of that bright thing up in the sky that seemed to make your eyes hurt when you looked at it.

Nature is hinting, just the merest of whispered hints that this winter will pass, as they have every year and will every year ahead. 

We have to get through it as best we can. 

Sorry about not posting for a while but sometimes work intrudes and we all know that work-life balance isn’t just a way of life, but a concept.

Suffice to say the election up here is provoking outbreaks of spontaneous narcolepsy amongst the citizens.  The various leaders and their fartcatchers seem to think we, the polloi, actually give a flying fornicative act about who will putatively govern us after May the 5th or so. 

The short form is that Harper still comes across like the micromanaging punk bully he is, while Jack Layton looks longingly to being back behind the meat counter at Sobeys’s cutting up roasts and chops.

Iggy?  Ignatief looks like Keith Richards’ evil twin doing a perp walk after a bad night.  The new Liberal slogan is “Vote for the Undead.  At Least You Know What You’re Getting”  Meanwhile the rest of Canada says “Gilles Who?” upon hearing Gilles Duceppe’s name.  Duceppe comes across as a ten-year old boy caught jerking off by his Mom while he was watching Thierry La Fronde.  Elizabeth May, of the Green Party is that microscopic blip on a microscopic blip on the very edge of the Galactic Event Horizon.   

We’ll probably get another Conservative minority government and with any luck will break the 40% barrier, meaning only 40% of the population are motivated enough to make some kind of mark on a ballot.  In our riding, the polling places are a little too public, so we won’t be able to wipe our arses on the ballot, which is what we really, really want to do. 

Apple fanboys are hiding their faces in shame as it has come to light that Steve Jobs’ Church of Apple religion has been secretly tracking your whereabouts on your iPhone.  You can turn the geolocation feature off, if you jailbreak the phone, uninstall the ‘helper’, invalidate your warranty and incur the wrath of the AppStore forever more.  Oh and you get Eternal Damnation as a bonus.  Steve Said So, Selah, It Is So.

In other news, Japan is closing off most of the North East corner of their country as the various reactors that got whacked in the earthquake and tsunami continue to puke their radioactive innards into the sea, onto the land and into the air.  Fukisima will reopen in a few years as “Round Eye Land” a tourist destination for those not from Japan who want to see what radiation burns look like. up close and personal.

Let’s see what else comes up.  Libya.  Anniversary of the BP/Gulf Oil spill.  US economy in the toilet, unless you’re wealthy and a banker.  Most countries, except China, looking to default on their national debts, while the US sells military drones to Pakistan.  Same old, same old.

Of course, one would be remiss without mentioning the upcoming Royal Wedding, as all our media are sending fleets of crews and reporters to breathlessly inform us that Kate is wearing designer so and so and the Queen looks pleased. 

We need bread, but we need circuses too. 

Get squeamish gentlemen, we’re talking prostate.  Yep.  That bit-bigger-than-a-walnut sized gland below your bladder and North-North-West of your asshole. 

It’s a fascinating little object and here’s what it does.  Your prostate secretes a slightly alkaline fluid that is about 25 to 30 percent of your semen.  Not the sperm themselves, that’s a nut job, pun intended, but the seminal vesicles pass up from the nuts to the prostate and mix together to pass down your penis when you pop your cookies from watching “The Golden Girls” reruns.  That Rue McClanahan…what a Minx!  Oh crap, that was out loud wasn’t it?

The reason the prostatic fluid is slightly alkaline is to give your sperm a fighting chance in the Great Swim of Life.  The vagina is acidic, so a bit of alkali lets the lads live longer, eventually leading to fertilization, “was it good for you?” yadda, yadda, yadda, right up to “Yes Dad, it’s a really nice Home and we’ll come to visit you every weekend.  We promise.”

The Creator did great, nay, fabulous work when He did Women, but Jeeze Louise, Male Parts were not His best work:  The design is merely functional, like sex organs designed by Ikea.  It’s part of a system, but you can’t make sense of the instructions and the illustrations are cartoon sketches.  Women however, ahh, now that’s superlative work.  The intake is a bit close to the exhaust, but it’s a great design.

There are enough maladies that can befall the prostate that entire medical careers have been built on them.  It’s a very poor design, almost as bad as the knee, but at least the knee will stop working or swell up if you injure it.  The prostate just sits there like a walnut, asking itself “Am I Coming or am I Going?”

There are two ways to check the prostate and you need both.  The first is what is called a Prostate Specific Antigen test, which is a blood test, taken from blood from your arm.  The lab rats look for an increased level of Prostate antigen, a chemical that indicates a fine, healthy, happy, prostate or an unhappy prostate depending on the change between tests. 

Around the age of 40 to 45, men should have a PSA test yearly.  Some docs say 50, other say 40, but what you want to do is start early enough that you know what your PSA level is over a few years.  Mine’s normal, around 0.01 which indicates no issues with increased antigen production, which would indicate something wrong if the number changes. The PSA test is an early warning, nothing more.

Up until last year, you had to pay separately for a PSA when you had your usual blood work done.  It was $15 most years.  I consider it money well spent.  Now most health care covers it, so ask for it.  If the numbers change, see a doctor right away.  A change in the PSA is an early warning that something is not right.  It hurts as much as having your blood taken hurts.  Instead of four vials, they’ll take five.  No biggie.

There are issues with the PSA test, both false positives and false negatives.  There are also issues with, in the female department, PAP tests, again false positives and false negatives.  In either case, having a baseline is part of early detection.  It isn’t a diagnosis, it just flags something for more investigation. 

The other way to check the prostate is a digital exam.  That’s right digit, as in finger, not zeros and ones digital.  Your doctor will insert a gloved and well-lubricated finger in your asshole and palpate your prostate with a finger to check for inflammation, something swollen or out of whack. 

The sensation of having the prostate digitally examined is no worse than taking a five-pound dump after a night of bad Mexican food.  It’s no fun, but it’s over soon enough and feels much better when finished.  What the doc is looking for is abnormal size, or malformation of the prostate itself.  If you have a swollen prostate, you will scream like a little girl when the doc palpates it.  That doesn’t mean you have cancer, it only means something is wrong.  You can get a swollen prostate from too much self-pleasuring, or, in some men, bike riding.  Prostatic inflammation from things like that goes away after a couple of days of rest.    

A good, caring, doc will have you lie on one side and have you bring one knee up to your chest for a digital exam.  An army-trained doctor will have you bend over the examining table and say “Hang on to your hat!”  I’ve had both and the knee up is much better.

Yes, you might spring a Hollywood half-loaf totally without intention.  Pressure on the prostate can trigger a drop or two of urine, or a mild, momentary erection, no worse than a morning piss-hard and no more useful either.  The prostate is covered with the very same pelvic floor muscles that contract when you have an orgasm and cause you to ejaculate by giving the prostate a good hard squeeze.  It’s perfectly normal as the systems are all interrelated.  Or, absolutely nothing will happen:  It varies from human to human.

Odds are 50-50 you’ll fart too.  I asked and my doc and she said she’s been farted at so many times doing prostate exams that it’s now beyond disgusting and merely funny.  No, it is not appropriate to load up on jalapeno nachos, cabbage soup, beer and beans the night before your prostate exam.

In either case, a digital prostate exam does not make you suddenly want to sing show tunes, or find the beauty in old Judy Garland movies.  Sorry guys, it doesn’t.   

It’s not a comfortable sensation for many men, but it is insanely important to have done.  The prostate doesn’t give many clues that it is unwell and a PSA in combination with a digital exam is the best way to determine your prostate health.

To sum up.  Your prostate helps keep your participation in the fornicative and procreative arts alive.  It doesn’t kick up a fuss when it is unwell, so there are no symptoms to speak of.  A PSA blood test in combination with a digital examination is the best way to find out if things are in good order. 

As we all know, early detection means a much better chance at survival and the prostate is notorious for not kicking up a fuss until it’s almost too late.

If you want to learn more, www.ca.movember.com has links to Prostate Cancer Canada and several dozen other very good resources.