Category Archives: Health and wellness

No, it isn’t a typo, but heaven’s knows there’s enough of those in here.  MOvember is a little something that started in Australia a few years ago.  A "Mo" is a moustache in Australian slang.  I started November clean shaven as usual, and stopped shaving the upper lip. 

Today, the 10th, I have something that looks not unlike a yak with mange residing under my nose.  The reason I’m growing a Mo is not laziness or lack of personal grooming, but for a higher reason, which I am inserting here:

During Movember (the month formerly known as November) I’ll be growing a Mo (slang for Moustache).

That’s right I’m bringing the Mo back because I’m passionate about men’s health and the fight against prostate cancer. Why…

• Every year, around 22,300 Canadian men are diagnosed with prostate cancer and about 4,300 die of the disease, making it the number one cancer threat to Canadian men.
• Men are far less healthy than women. The average life expectancy of males is 5 years less than females.

To sponsor my Mo please go to http://www.movember.com/ca/donate, enter my registration number which is 174981 and your credit card details.

Or you can sponsor me by cheque made payable to the "Prostate Cancer Research Foundation of Canada" clearly marking the donation as being for my Registration Number: 174981. Please mail cheques to: Movember, 145 Front Street East, Suite 306, Toronto, ON M5A 1E3 Canada. All donations over $20 are automatically issued with a tax deductible receipt.

All donations are made directly to the Prostate Cancer Research Foundation of Canada who will use the funds to create awareness and fund research for those men who suffer from prostate cancer.

If I find some courage, I might even post a picture of the Mighty Mo.  Donate if you can, as the Prostrate Cancer Research Foundation of Canada has a legit Revenue Canada Taxable Donation Number, so you know it’s for real.  A couple of legit companies are involved.  Gillette for one, Playboy for another and Wahl Canada (who make hair clippers and facial fur trimmers) are the main sponsors. 

Oh, and I suppose my upper lip also counts as a very, very, distant associate sponsor.

The Drug Enforcement Agency in the US has nailed a very large number of steroid manufacturers and distributors and, perhaps more importantly, the client lists of the various manufacturers and distributors.  ABC reported that the DEA busted 56 labs confiscated 11 million doses and put their hands on $6.5 million in cash.

The client lists don’t have the names of high performance athletes:  The buyers have been high school kids, college students and average folks who have been buying the products to enhance their athletic prowess. 

Naturally, bootleg pharmaceutical labs looks upon things like sanitation and product safety as distant, abstract concepts.  By their nature, steroids and Human Growth Hormone are injectable medications, meaning you have to fill a syringe with them and jamb them into your muscle mass to take the product.  If the product is made in a household garage, as apparently many were, you might as well shoot a mix of rat poison, car wax and lawnmower gas into your butt cheek.

Quoting from the ABC posting,  

The father of a teen who used steroids says it was the allure of a greater athletic prowess caused his son to start taking the drugs after a coach told him he needed to get bigger and stronger to excel at baseball.

Don Hooton says his son Taylor, only 17 years old at the time, began using illegal steroids because of a combination of factors, from the desire to emulate the successes of professional athletes, to "peer pressure, the desire to win, mom and dad pushing the kids, in a good way, but to make a starting line-up, to try to earn that scholarship," Hooton explained.

Don Hooton’s son, Taylor, hung himself in 2004. 

Steroids have a number of side effects, aside from heart damage and liver damage.  There are three that I have seen first-hand.  First, a serious case of industrial acne.  Second, a hair-trigger temper or raging.  Third, either a complete loss of sex drive, or a wild increase in sex drive, to the point of the crack of dawn not being safe in the same room with the user. 

Of course, there is the remarkable increase in muscle mass, stamina and strength.  In the 70’s many high school football players took steroids, for the same reasons they do today:  Athletic success.

That’s the part that puzzles me.  Regardless of the sport, an athlete’s career is essentially over by 30.  The knees, or hips give up.  The eyes or the reflexes go, or the shoulder and elbows break down, depending on the sport.  Then there are always the younger, quicker, stronger ones coming up fast, looking to knock the veterans off the pedestal. 

Stick and ball sports at the highest level pay very well, but for every Wayne Gretzky or Martina Hingis grade superstars, there are hundreds of thousands of never-made-its.  The law of averages are against the Taylor Hootons’ of this world who still have the dreams of making it big.  Dreams so big they’re willing to risk everything to obtain it.

Of the high school superstars I went to school with, not one of the squad of 30 made it to college or university football, let alone the CFL.  The team was City Champions for two years and renown as the toughest team going, but none of them, including those who mysteriously gained 80 pounds of solid muscle over the summer, went any further than high school football. 

With our ages now in the 50’s, plus or minus, how many have serious medical issues from a season or two of steroid use in the 70’s?  Nobody knows for sure, but the likelihood is probably high.

So, why shoot your butt full of crap for the one in a hundred thousand shot that you might, possibly, if the planets line up right, get on a college baseball team?  Are we so sports-smitten that our only acceptable heroes are 18-year olds hitting a baseball over a fence, or throwing a football to someone else? 

Assuming we’re that shallow as a society, what do we do with a 25 year old who has his knees blow out after a couple of seasons of pro ball?  They have no job skills, unless you count hitting other large men as a job skill.  Some have been passed through class after class in high school and college for the ‘good of the team’, to the point that the individual has no actual identity or talents except as a ‘star athlete’. 

Socialization skills consist of being part of a group.  Work skills are watching scouting films, memorizing plays and hanging out with the rest of the team.  Which would leave our mythical 25 year old athlete with the shot knees as a candidate for what job?  Warehouse worker?  Not with ruined knees you don’t.  Truck driver?  With little numerical literacy, how does the ex ball player add up the truck manifest and calculate mileage?  Telephone sales?  Perhaps, if they’re verbally persuasive and have at least some semblance of common courtesy, which is not a requirement to be a good football player.

Our stress on ‘star athlete’ as the answer to ‘what do you want to be when you grow up?’ is creating a strata of society who can’t actually do anything constructive for society.  There is no fallback position, so we discard them, as failed, soiled and just not good enough to make it in the big leagues.

Which brings us back to the steroid busts.  So many people, so determined to become a star athlete that they’re willing to poison themselves for a one in a hundred thousand chance to maybe make it in a job that will discard you like a used tissue, for the adoration of fans who only want winners and who don’t give a damn if you live or die, for a that one chance to have your career end and you’re faced with no job, no skills and no prospects.

We are that shallow.  We are that stupid.  The DEA steroid bust proves it.

There is much discussion on the flu shot, that needs some de-cluttering based on common sense and a bit of Science.  Yes, Science.

1: Freshly born humans have a very basic immune system.  The first two or three days of naturally occurring breast milk contains several zillion bacteria, viruses and miscellaneous gunk to expose the infant to as many bad things as evolution allows.  You can look up the list here, on Wikipedia.

2: The human body, most often, develops immunity to many infections by being exposed to the thing that causes the infection in the first place.  The body develops of library of responses:  Sort of a "Been there, Seen that, Know how to kick its’ Ass" for the immune system.  However, the infection agent is sometimes very particular in how you can kick its’ microscopic ass.  Having Mumps does not mean you are protected against the Flu:  Both are viruses but are different viruses. 

The "Flu" virus is a sneaky little piece of work and can only be killed by very specific definitions in your immune system.  The virus constantly mutates and changes its’ definitions, which means the immune system can’t unlock and kill the little bugger.  Get one genetic marker wrong and the immunity might not work.  

(Science Content: The flu is a group of viruses; the actual name is Influenza, a family of RNA viruses of the family Orthomyxoviridae, made up of the influenzaviruses Isavirus and Thogotovirus, under three species of Influenzavirus A, Influenzavirus B and Influenzavirus C.  There are thousands of definitions.  End of Science Content)

3: You can get exposure to a new library of virus definitions by getting a "Flu Shot".  The viruses are not alive.  They are dead, but your immune system is smart enough to figure out that it now has a new library of definitions to add to the previous ones, built up since the day you were born.   

4:  The "Flu" as well as many other nasties are transmitted by sneezing, coughing and physical contact.  That’s how it moves around from person to person, contact and aerosol modalities.

5:  The most effective way to avoid the flu is to lock yourself in the basement, swathed entirely in sterile plastic, only breathing filtered air, eating sterilized food, swabbing down with disinfectant every few hours and completely avoiding contact with anyone or anything else on the planet until, roughly, May 2008.  That gets you through one flu season. 

6:  For the vast majority of people, in reasonable health, the flu symptoms are: Fever, soreness, shakes, sneezing, cough, general malaise, tiredness and feeling like crap.  Just like a common cold, except more severe.  Treatment is usually fluids, acetaminophen and rest.  Antibiotics don’t do squat, unless you get bacterial pneumonia on top of the flu. 

7:  If you gobble $300 worth of vitamins and holistic naturopathic treatments, you’ll get over the flu in a week, to a week and half.  If you do nothing but rest, take fluids and acetaminophen for the soreness, you’ll recover in seven to ten days.  You choose which one is better.

8:  Children, the elderly and those with a compromised immune system from other things are the most susceptible to the flu.  Diabetics should get a flu shot, as we fit the definition of compromised immune systems.  Children and the elderly, broadly, cannot fight the symptoms as readily as those who have a good state of health.  People don’t necessarily die from the flu, but get other illnesses while having the flu.  Pneumonia is the most common illness that people get while having the flu.  The problem is, the symptoms of pneumonia are almost exactly the same as the flu and pneumonia can take hold while your body is trying to fight the flu.

9:  The library of new flu definitions that you are exposed to (immunized to use the fancy term) are dead viruses that are incubated in a hen egg.  Why a hen egg?  Poultry carry the flu naturally and can be immunized against it the same way humans are, through exposure.  This is much better than exposing varieties of the flu to a group of people, letting them get sick and then extracting the immunity from them.  Hens don’t lay on the sofa all day long, moaning, sniffling, coughing, sleeping and watching very bad daytime TV.  Eggs are a cheap medium for growing dead flu viruses. 

The yearly library of new flu virus definitions are based on the ones from last flu season.  The World Health Organization figures that stuff out.  Although the flu virus changes from year to year, the hope is that the previous years’ library are close enough to work.  Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t.

10:  The shot hurts a little bit for about one second.  I hate needles of every description, even taking my blood sugar with a finger prick makes me feel faint. All I can suggest is to think saucy thoughts and breathe out at the same time.  It works for me and I get the added bonus of a socially acceptable and medically necessary reason to think of some truly inventive pairings, combinations and acts that might get me arrested, slapped, invited up for a drink or given a book deal, if I ever considered writing them down, or acting on them.  All harmless fun while getting a needle.

11:  The best, realistic, protection against the flu is to wash your hands with soap and water, frequently, during the flu season.  Purell, or alcohol prep pads help if you can’t wash your hands.  Momma was right, don’t pick your nose in public, so keep your hands out of your nose, eyes and mouth until you wash your hands.  Dr. Ignatz Semmelweis discovered that basic hand washing with soap and water cut down disease transmission. in 1847.  I didn’t make the name up.  Look here if you don’t believe me. 

12:  If you’ve got the flu, stay home and stop spewing your crud all over the rest of us.  Don’t wipe your nose on strangers who pass by on the street.  If you must sneeze or cough, use a handkerchief and don’t gak all over everyone else.  Have at least a modicum of class and good sense, as well as a bit of basic hygiene.

13:  Are we creating Frankenstein viruses by immunizing everyone against the flu?  The answer is an unqualified "we don’t know".  We know that smallpox was all but eradicated from the planet when immunization was first used broadly.  Diphtheria, Tetanus, Polio and other fun illnesses have been controlled, if not eradicated through immunization.  A generation ago, a diagnosis of polio was almost a death sentence.  Polio didn’t mutate into something that would work around immunization.  

The last influenza pandemic was in 1969, the Hong Kong Flu.  But, Influenzavirus A is based on avian (birds, poultry) strains.  Birds naturally have the flu virus and humans who spends time with birds can pick up the "bird flu".  Sound, hygienic, bird and poultry-keeping practices can dramatically reduce the transmission of avian strains to humans.  In the countries where bird flu has presented itself, sound and hygienic bird and poultry-keeping practices are distant concepts on par with the mathematical implications of n-dimensional calculus. 

Dirt-poor folks who rely on the few chickens they raise to keep from starving to death, don’t have the money or time to disinfect their farms or hen houses.  This also explains why the authorities in those areas don’t bother with trying to fix the hygiene and money problem:  Quarantine, slaughtering, disinfecting, then burying the entire flock is faster and is known to work every time.  It is tough on the subsistence farmer and the family.

H5N1, the "bird flu" does not look like it can pass from human to human, but we’ve been wrong before.  Medical science used to believe that illnesses were caused by ‘ill-humors’ that could only be cured by drilling holes in the skull to let out the bad vapors.  

Tamiflu, the brand name by Roche of Oseltamivir is prescribed as a preventative treatment that can last up to six weeks or as a ”cure" that you have to take within two days of exposure to Influenza A or Influenza B.  Common side effects of Tamiflu are: nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, abdominal pain and headache.  Since the usual dosage for treatment is twice a day for five days, the side effects last almost as long as the flu, plus a day or two to get over it. 

There is a potential, with the influenza virus being such a clever bug, that it could develop an Oseltamivir-resistant strain in the future.  Much like we have antibiotic resistant bacteria now, from the over-prescription of antibiotics for every little bo-bo and sniffle.  We don’t know what can happen if we give everyone on the planet a course of Oseltamivir.  Perhaps we should go back to drilling holes in the head to let out the ‘ ill-humors’?

14:  Should you get the flu shot?  

First, if you deal with the public, like I do, presenting at events and being at other workplaces to do my job, the choice is a qualified yes. 

Secondly, being a diabetic, the recommendation is also yes.

Third, I hate being sick with the flu, also a yes. 

Fourth, a preventative round of an antiviral drug like Tamiflu can have side effects just as ugly as the flu itself.  It might contribute to the influenza virus developing an Oseltamivir-resistant strain in the future.  Not so good. 

A combination of washing hands frequently, avoiding contact with people with the flu and a flu shot makes the most sense, with the least risk and the most practicality, based on the best science we’ve got as of today.  

In an article on the web, reprinted by CTV.ca:   

Office workers may be breathing in dangerous dust emitted from laser printers, finds a disturbing new study from Australian researchers.   The researchers found that certain printers release tiny particles into the air that could pose "a significant health threat" when inhaled into their lungs.  Lidia Morawska, a professor in the School of Physical & Chemical Sciences at the Queensland University of Technology (and) colleagues looked at 62 brands of printers.  They classified 17 of them as "high particle emitters" because they released such elevated quantities of particles. 

Of course, this article has been picked up by all kinds of media outlets, like CNN and various news sources, usually under the sensationalist headline of "Killer Printers on the Job" or some other such foolishness. 

The issue is not that laser printers put microscopic particles in the air.  We know they do, some less than others.  The issue is what happens when we breathe them in?

If you’ve ever refilled a dry toner cartridge on a photocopier, or a laser printer, you know that the material is finer than baby powder, so finely ground that it almost seems like a liquid.  It clings to everything and spilling even the tiniest amount of toner, seems to spread it everywhere in seconds. 

Both devices work roughly the same, creating an image on a photosensitive drum that is positively charged, then dragging the negatively charged toner across the image drum and finally depositing the melted toner on the paper as a copy of the original.  There are variations of course, but those are the broad strokes of the technology.  To melt the toner, heat is used to set the pigment so it doesn’t smudge.  By happy coincidence, the image drum is hot enough to melt the toner.

Standing next to a photocopier or a laser printer while running a long job, you get that peculiar smell of hot electronics and ozone from the image drum fusing the toner on the paper.  Some kind of gas, odor or volatile vapor is being given off from the process.  What is it?  Nobody who knows will tell us. 

Very fine dust exists in nature.  Poke around a flower at pollen time.  Pollen feels like toner, in that pollen is amazingly fine particles of something not quite solid feeling.  Sand, obviously, feels like sand.  City dust on your windows feels finer than sand but not as fine as pollen.

Where our knowledge is lacking is what are the long term effects of exposure.  Lamp Black or Coal Dust were thought to be perfectly normal things, then the science caught up with them.  Black lung, silicosis or Miner’s Lung were the results.  Our forebears knew that the dust from filling a grain silo, or milling flour could burst into flames given the right concentrations and exposure to open flame, so they wore a kerchief around their nose and mouth to keep from breathing in the dust.

As a kid, the City of Ottawa used to use DDT fogging trucks to kill the mosquitoes in the late spring.  We’d follow along behind the fogger, driving our bicycles in and out of the DDT pretending we were airplanes hiding in clouds, then zooming out.

For those of us who are old enough to remember Roneo copies in school, we’d sniff the freshly Roneo’ed paper with that alcohol smell.  The really cool supply teachers would use two colored Roneo (or AB Dick) stencils, one with red for the headline and the purplish-blue for the body text.  We loved the permanent markers that were powered by ether.

In my high school, we had a huge asbestos fire curtain back of the proscenium that we had to test twice a year for the Fire Department.  The aircraft shop routinely used a fiberglass chopper gun to layup laminated parts, while we merrily rolled out the resin and hardener.  Getting high off the fumes was considered an excellent side benefit to aircraft shop while using dope on fabric wing structures. 

If we were welding or cutting we rarely used a hood, unless the shop teacher was around.  We did know enough not to look at the arc, most of the time.  In the paint shop we at least knew enough to wear coveralls.  Woodworking?  You’d come out covered in the finest dusts of walnut, pine, beech, basswood and mahogany with a fine glaze of shellac, urethane or French Polish depending on what you were doing.

Using a lead, tin and flux-coated soldering iron to hot-knife hashish was normal in Electronics class, especially when Mr. O’Brien was out of the room.  He told us he’d lost his sense of smell in an industrial accident years ago, so, we’d get messed up while working on our projects.

Eventually science and medicine caught up with our stupidity, ignorance or naivete, which is a good thing.  We trusted the manufacturers and our own common sense.  Both were found to be sorely lacking.

So will your laser printer kill you?  Quite probably.  We’ll find out in a few more months that exposure to photocopier and laser printer toner will cause tumors the size of turnips to break out on your lungs, while owning an inject printer means the tumors will only be the size of tangerines.

If we de-invented printers and photocopiers and went back to stone tablets and chisels, there will be a report somewhere that the Scribe who took down the Ten Commandments died from exposure to granite dust, not the Roman Centurions, as originally believed.  There will also be reports that scribes are being unnecessarily blinded by flying rock fragments and chisel chips.   

Look folks, everything, including time, will kill you eventually.  Nothing is 100% safe if humans are involved in it.

The Live Earth concerts are underway around the planet.  They’re a way to raise the profile of the ecologically sustainable movement by mixing music and eco-friendly information to bring about a change in how we use the Earth’s resources.  I’ll make it easy and capitalize Green to mean all the environmentally friendly things that you should consider.  This is a string of posts, as the subject is fairly deep.

I’m not going to claim I’m all Green.  The mere fact that I’m using the Internet means electricity has to be generated, computers had to be made, metals had to be mined, oil was drilled and petrochemicals were used to get to the point of me typing and posting.  Nothing in modern life is ‘carbon-neutral’, no matter how hard we try. 

It could even be argued that the mere act of dying and being buried is an affront to Mother Earth, as most of us have dental fillings that contain amalgam and mercury.  Therefore our putrefaction is leaching heavy metals into the soil, contaminating groundwater and we won’t mention the problems with the casket, the phenolic glues that hold it together, steel nails that could have been recycled, varnishes made from petrochemicals.  You get the idea. 

Any concept, including Green, can be, to use the Latin, reductio ad absurdum: Reduced to absurdity.  Which is exactly what I have done, with tongue only slightly in cheek, for purposes of illustration that any idea, even good ones, can be taken a little too far.

Green is a number of things.  Small things, generally, but some big ones too.  Most of them are not inconvenient, or even that terribly complex. Going Green consist of knowing three things.

1) Oil is a finite resource.  We don’t know how much is left.

2) Food is important.  If you don’t eat, you don’t shit.  If you don’t shit, you die.

3) Stupidity and Hydrogen are two constants in the Universe and I’m not convinced about Hydrogen.

Working with those three core facts, you can look around at things that use up oil, or make our food less than good, or are stupid.  Avoid those things and you will do good things for our continued existence on the planet.

As a personal experiment a few months ago, I counted up the number of plastic grocery bags I had in a cupboard.  There were more than 150, made from Low Density Polyethylene, or LDPE.  Designed to be single use, I was struck that it was a waste of oil, energy, time, money and effort  For $1.98 I bought two of those ‘bring your own’ Recycling Federation of Ontario permanent grocery bags. 

I keep one in the apartment and one in the car as I most often get groceries on the way home from work, so having a bag in the car makes sense.  When I bring the groceries up, I hang the empty bag on the front door handle to remind me to take it back to the car the next day when I go to work.  Automagically, the next time I need groceries, there is a bag in the car.  It is so simple, even I can understand it. 

How much oil have I saved?  Oh, maybe a quart.  How much energy have I saved?  I have no idea.  I do know that reducing the number of grocery bags that I have used would roughly measure the same as a skein of bags at your local supermarket.  Or, a block of LDPE about two inches thick, 12 by 18 inches and weighs five pounds.  Someone else can do the math.

Mississauga makes it easy to recycle household waste.  You don’t even have to sort it.  As long as there are no wet organics, the city will take all the paper, plastic and metal you can give.  The city has provided each high rise tennant with a Blue Bag, again made from recycled stuff, to catch all the recyclables that we can take to the recycling room, instead of tossing them down the chute and off to the landfill.  A couple of times a week, the city comes by and takes the accumulated recyclables of two hundred or so apartments and feeds it into the recycling stream.

Again, as a personal experiment, I’ve consciously not thrown paper, plastic or metals down the garbage chute next to Chez David.  I throw out, in any two week period, perhaps one bag of legitimate wet organic garbage:  Kitchen scraps, leftover spaghetti sauce, stale pretzels, tea bags and the stalks of romaine lettuce.  The rest of it goes into the blue bag for recycling.  I have to take that blue bag to the recycling room two or three times in any given two week period, as it is full of paper, plastic and other potentially recyclable stuff.  By the way, all those accursed AOL CD’s are polycarbonate and are recyclable.

If there was a Green Box (meaning organic waste, compostable garbage) program for apartment buildings, then potentially I wouldn’t be sending more than a cup and half of material to a landfill in any two week period.  I can understand why apartment buildings don’t do Green Box, as the accumulated wet organic garbage from 200 apartments would start to stink after a couple of days.  Households, however, are a different story and Mississauga has a good Green Box system that produces compost for use in parks, by homeowners and sold retail.   

Less garbage means less trucks hauling it to the landfill to bury it forever after a single use.  The tradeoff is the energy and infrastructure it takes to pick up my recycling and turn it back into things, so it probably will net out the same.  At least I’m getting multiple uses out of things I recycle, so it is an overall Green thing.  Effort or thinking required?  None to Less than None to separate recyclables from organics and reuse both as many times as you can.

We’ll keep going in the next post.

It has been seven days since my surgery.  My left eye itches a fair amount, as there are slow-dissolving sutures in the outside muscle that have pulled my eye straight for the first time in fifty years.

I take eyedrops four times a day, which are a combination of antibiotics and steroids for the inflammation.  I can see light, dark and beginning of images through my left eye.  Right now, with my right eye closed and covered, I can see the brightness of my computer monitor and the darkness of my keyboard.  I think I can see the blue taskbar of this particular program, which would be Windows Live Writer.  Yep.  It has a blue taskbar.

The strangest effect of all this, is between my ears.  I look in the mirror and I’m not entirely sure who is looking back.  I know, logically, it is me, as nobody else lives here:  That haircut is a dead giveaway.

Which speaks to how we see ourselves, our perceptions of what we look like and how others recognize us.  Most people feel a little uneasy when they see a picture of themselves.  A picture is an accurate representation of how we look, but it doesn’t quite mesh with how we perceive ourselves.  Our self-identification contains not only the physicality but the emotional and behavioral aspect of who we are.

I’ve always avoided looking directly at my face, as the wonky eye bothers me.  Correction, it bothered me.  It doesn’t bother anyone else, I know, but it bothered me, being tied into all kinds of other memories, fears and darker things in the human soul.  We see our flaws, to the exclusion of everything else.

A common example:  Think back to your teenage years.  Odds are you had a pimple or two.  Looking in the mirror, to you, it probably seemed like it was the size of Montana, was big enough to plant a flag on the top and park cars in the shadow of it.  For that period of time, it became the only thing you could see on your face. 

My situation is somewhat the same, except it has gone on for a long time.  This morning, as the swelling goes down some more, I am marveling at the image in the mirror looking back at me.  It seems like the David I know, but something is different.  I am unlearning my visual self-image and replacing it with the New David. 

If you color your hair, you have felt that same psychic wobble, going from brown to red, or blonde as an example.  It is The New You in the mirror.  Brighter, younger, more vivacious, sexier, whatever attributes you might care to use.  Then it becomes the new Normal, things settle down and you ‘recognize’ yourself again. 

Yet, logically you know that the only change from yesterday to today is having your hair colored.  Your eyes are the same color, you’ve got the same beauty mark and your nose is still the same shape.  You still like Barolo or Kraft Dinner.  The only change is the color of your hair, but it feels different and even nice.

It doesn’t quite feel nice to me yet.  That might take a while to get to the point of nice, as self-image is a component of ego and a component of self-worth, which ties to self-confidence, values, happiness, sadness, fear, memories and four thousand other attributes of personality.

As for visual acuity out the left side, I can’t see depth, but I am seeing the beginnings of shapes, colors and light.  Maybe that’s all I’ll get.  I’m not hoping for anything beyond the eye healing up close to straight.  Anything after that is pure bonus.

The rest, I’ll adapt to as I go.  It might be good, it might be bad, or it might be somewhere in between. 

It is bittersweet however, as the image of the little boy, the teenager, the young man, the adult and the middle-aged man, all named David, with that one eye looking off someplace else, is gone. 

Replaced with what, we shall find out.

So, Goodbye my friends.  And Hello!

Cheers!

David

If you hit wikipedia.org you can get a capsule definition of Strabismus that is close enough for Rock and Roll.  And a squeamish alert as there are photos of my eye pre and post surgery in the posting.

Today, infants with strabismus and amblyopia are treated very young, often before their first birthday.  In 1957 it wasn’t done, as the general prognosis was "He’ll grow out of it".  Oh well.

The human eyeball has four muscles that hold it in place and move it around.  Think of a globe of the Earth.  The muscles that move it around are on the North and South poles and along the Greenwich and International Date Line meridians at the equator.  It is an elegant machine for moving an orb around in specific patterns.

Mechanically, if you want to look to the right, the muscles relax and tighten in a specific order to move the eyeballs.  You lean this set of actions in your first few days of life and it becomes automatic, as the infant eye and brain likes bright, moving things. 

You can see this test being done with newborns, using a small light to see if the eyes track together.  Infants can’t quite make sense of what they’re seeing, as the brain hasn’t quite figured out all this real world stuff yet.  Sometimes newborns don’t track properly, but it goes away after a few days and is probably an artifact of the the various human systems getting used to being out in the world and trying to figure out the basics.  The newborn brain learns stuff at a ferocious rate.

To square up my particular situation, lenses or prisms to force a correction would not work, as it had gone on forty-nine years too long.  Surgery was the sole option.  Unfortunately the surgery is declared a ‘cosmetic’ procedure and is almost not covered by health insurance.  I could have gone to the US and dropped several thousand dollars for a cosmetic procedure, but didn’t. 

Adult strabismus corrective surgery for cosmetic reasons is severely underfunded by health insurance in Ontario.  I got on the waiting list almost four years ago.  I’ve got no complaint there, as it is ‘cosmetic’ ophthalmic surgery.  It’s not as frivolous as a bigger set for a pole dancer and not as important as fixing an infant with strabismus or a senior with glaucoma.  I can appreciate that the funding well isn’t as deep as one might like.  Priorities have to go to the serious stuff first.  Last May I got the word that I would be up for surgery in March 2007.

Meeting the surgeon was important.  I knew approximately, how the surgery would go.  By judging the angle off square, the surgeon loosens one muscle and throws a few stitches in the other.  In my case, loosen the left eye muscle next to the nose (East) and tighten up the muscle to the West by putting four or five stitches in it, shortening the length of the muscle and pulling the eyeball more forward.  I was 45 degrees off square, pointing East, or inwards towards the nose.

Knowing the mechanism and procedure is important, but even so, I’ll confess to a deep fear here.  You can call it a morbid fear if you like, as everyone has at least one, be it spiders, snakes, pubic speaking, circus clowns or Cream of Wheat. 

Mine is my eyes.  Having only one working eye, I have guarded it all my life, as losing it means White-Cane Time. 

I’m sitting in a office with a guy who is going to be taking a scalpel to my eye?  Holy Hannah and Maynard!  I made sure I told him that the whole concept scared the hell out of me.  Had I had a fully open choice, I would have opted for full general anesthesia.  Knock me out cold, work me over with a ball-peen hammer and let me feel like crap in the recovery room for a few hours.  I could get a general, but it would postpone the surgery until December 2007.

With a local, I was scheduled for March 22nd.  Four days before my 50th birthday.  That seemed to be some kind of omen to me, starting off the next half-century with straight eyes, so I put on my big boy underwear and said do it.  Local anaesthetic, but be prepared to shoot me full of drugs if I start to panic in the OR.  Agreed.  Nitrous, Atavan, Valium, Jack Daniels’, Afghan Hash, or a mallet to the head, whatever it took.

The night before, I took this picture.  The Before. I am looking at the camera lens, at least with the eye to your right.       

This is what I’ve seen for 49 years, 360 days and what everyone else saw when they looked at me. 

Well, not with the camera under my chin.  That would be silly. 

No coffee, no tea, no smokes as of midnight.  I arrived at the hospital at 0700.  The Riverside Hospital is all day-surgery, so I waited around a bit, and then was called into the back room.  Strip off, wear the angel wings, blood pressure, checklists, pulse, sit here.  I read for a bit, knowing that like all hospitals, unless you have a javelin stuck in your head, things take the time they take.  After a chapter or two, it was my turn.  On the bed, warm blanket, head back and get comfortable.  They take my eyeglasses and book.  I lay back and close my eyes to meditate a bit. 

A gowned gnome comes over and takes my blood pressure and pulse again.  He doesn’t bother introducing himself so I ask, "Who the hell are you and what are you doing?"  It turns out he’s the anesthesiologist, Doctor Unpronounceable Muttered. 

We have a little talk.  First up, buddy, what is my name?  He consults the chart.  David Smith.  What is my middle name?  Eugene.  What is the procedure I’m going to have?  Strabismus.  Which eye?  Left.  Are you sure?  Yes I am.  Who is the surgeon?  Doctor Delpero.  What’s the offset?  45 degrees.  Good. 

I want to make sure they’ve got the right guy and the right procedure, as David Smith is a fairly common name.  The hospital is doing 38 ophthalmic procedures in six hours, I want to make sure they know who they’re doing and what they’re doing to this patient. Then we have the discussion regarding fear.  The gnome stops in his tracks.  He didn’t know I was fearful.  So I explain it to him using small words and easy to understand concepts.  He inserts a little venous shunt into the back of my hand and tapes it down.  Then pops a syringe into the shunt and gives me a squirt of something.

Then he peels my left eye open and pops some ‘drops to numb your eye’ into the left eye.  They sting like hell and I tell him so.  Don’t worry, it’s just the first freezing.  Then he swabs my eye area and cheek with an antiseptic, probably Betadine, as it has that iodine chemical smell.  Then he takes a Sharpie marker out of his pocket and puts a dash over my left eye.  That’s encouraging.  I could truly run amok with a Sharpie and box of Hi-Liters. 

I lean back.  In a few minutes he returns.  How are you?  Scared Shitless, Thanks for Asking.  I get another shot in the back of the hand.  The drugs kick in.  Wheeeeee!

An orderly comes by, looks up the chart and asks my name.  David Smith, I manage to reply.  He unlocks the wheels and gets me rolling down the hall.  I park in the hallway, looking at the ceiling tiles for a while.  Clunk and we’re rolling again, this time into a room with a stainless steel ceiling and too many lights. 

Doctor Delpero greets me, wearing his OR blues and a mask.  How are you?  Right now, I’m starting to shake in fear and I feel some tears coming out of my eyes.  Nnn-not so good, is about all I manage to stutter.  I feel a pressure on my right hand as another shot of FeelGood goes in.  Someone takes a length of tape and tapes my head to the table, forehead and chin, so I can’t move. 

A pulse clip goes on my finger, while someone sticks cardiac monitors to my chest.  They’re cold and I can feel the leads being hooked up.  Then I hear the cardiac monitor beep and feel the blood pressure cuff inflate on my right arm.  I didn’t even know it was there, such is the power of FeelGood into the back of the hand.  For that matter I never noticed someone turning down my gown to put the cardiac pads on me.  Only when I head the beeps did it register that I was hearing me. 

Then, in a moment of exceptional weirdness, someone puts a Styrofoam box on my chest and tapes it down.  I open my eye and look down.  No word of a lie, it looked like the kind of Styrofoam clamshell box you get takeout lunch in, big enough for salad, a sandwich and dessert. 

I laughed out loud and asked if they were taking lunch while working on me.  It was explained that they can’t put an oxygen mask on me, as the doctors need the room to work, so the box has an oxygen feed line to blow on my face. 

You ready?  As ready as I’ll ever be.  Doctor Delpero puts a length of opaque adhesive plastic over my face, more or less a square of shower curtain with Post-It Note glue on one side.  I start to hum to myself and close my eyes.  I hear a few things, like this will feel weird.  At that moment he’s clipped my left eye open with a tool that looks like it came from the Inquisition, to give him room to work.  I breathe into the weirdness. 

There are whispered instructions between Delpero and his student who is doing some of the work.  I feel pressure and a pinch as the freezing is pumped into my eye area with a needle.  I breathe some more, but I can hear the heart rate beeps increasing.  Since I’m reasonably certain nobody else is hooked up in the OR, that could only be me.  You OK?  Yessssss. I reply.

I can feel the side of my head going numb from the nose back to my ear.  I’ve had extensive dental surgery before and I know that the freezing only takes a minute to numb it all out.  I’ll feel pressure, but no actual pain.  Here we go.

I hear someone ask for a hook and start to hum to myself again.  I don’t want to know and try to conjure up some happy drug-induced images, but I only partially succeed.  I feel pressure as my eye is pulled a bit, a hand on the side of my face.  I hear a clipping sound, then a request for cautery and can see a hand pass over my now wide open right eye, with the shower curtain over it.  I hear a little beep as the cautery iron works.  Again please.  Another beep.  Damn.  Not the word that you want to hear in the OR.

I ask, what’s up?  Oh the cautery isn’t working right, so we’re going to get another one.  Fair enough, I say.  You still with us David?  Yep.  Right here.  There is a momentary pause and a few beeps while the new cautery is fired up.  I get hit again and hear a That’s better.  A few more tugs and a few more beeps.

The plastic drape is starting to close in on my nose and mouth a bit, as the doctors work.  I ask for a moment, explaining what is going on.  The drape is adjusted and the Styrofoam lunch box is repositioned. I feel a swab over my left eye. 

Ready for the other side now.  I hear the request for the hook again and feel some tugging.  Then a request for suture material.  More tugging, just gentle pulling, as I breathe into it again. 

I can hear the heart rate start to race a bit.  Could I have another shot please?  We can’t David, you might start to come up out of the drugs if we give you more, as there is a border between relaxed and then suddenly awake.  OK.  Then give me a second.  I feel their hands move away from my face.  I bring my knees up a bit, straightening out my back as best I can while taped to the table.  A couple of deep breaths.  A couple more.  OK.  Keep going.

A few more whispered requests then an quiet, Yep.  That looks about right.  OK David, I’m going to uncover your right eye and I want to see how they track together.  Off comes the drape and I blink into the bright lights.  Look left.  Look right.  Look up.  Look down.  My left eye feels like it is full of aquarium gravel and I notice tears in my right eye.  I blink a couple of times.  So?  Looks good so far. 

The drape goes back down and someone swabs the trail of tears heading towards my right ear.  It would seem I am crying at least on one side of my head.  There are a couple of more tugs, then a ratcheting click and a release of the pressure on my left eye.  All done, I’ve taken the instrument out and now I’ll put a patch over it.

I feel my right eye well up again with tears as the shower curtain drape comes off.  Someone swabs the tears away and I let out a little sob.  You OK?  Yes.  I think so.  Hands undo the Styrofoam lunch box on my chest.  Others take the tape off my forehead and chin.  I close my eyes as the gurney is rolled out.  I choke out a Thank You.  I’ve been waiting nearly 50 years for this.  Thank you.

Trundled down the hallway to the recovery room, I get hooked up to the blood pressure cuff again.  I close my eyes and and sleep for a bit. 

When I wake up, I can barely feel half my head.  My nose is still half frozen and my left eye itches like a son of gun, so I touch the gauze patch over my eye and press on it very lightly.  It helps.  An aide asks me if I want anything.  Coffee and something to eat would be good.  I get hospital strength coffee-related product and some kind of carrot muffin.  I eat and nod out again. 

Later, after snoozing for a bit and reading for a bit, Doctor Delpero comes in for my adjustment.  What happens is he leaves two slip knots hanging out of my eye.  With the freezing in, he can’t be certain that the lineup is bang on, but now that the freezing is almost out, he can adjust the slip knots to give me a precision alignment.  

In the initial consultation I said I’d be happy with something close enough, as nothing is guaranteed.  My example was Ellen Barkin, the actor, who is just ever so exquisitely off eye alignment.  Not that I want to look like Ellen Barkin, so stop thinking that way, you dirty minded swine. 

The patch comes off and I blink a few times.  I can feel the suture slip knots on my cheek, which is a very disturbing feeling to be sure.  Look up, look down, look left, look right.  Follow the finger.  He opens a sterile pouch of instruments and has me look around again.  I feel one of the sutures tugged a bit as he tightens things up.  I start to panic a bit, as this is a very weird feeling, but I breathe and relax, knowing it won’t take long. 

A few more tugs, then a couple of snips.  Look up, look down, look left, look right.  Bingo.  Bang on.  A few lengths of adhesive tape and some gauze pads come out.  Close your eyes David.  A patch goes on and gets taped to my head.  I’ll see you tomorrow at my office and we’ll see how it all worked out.  He leaves me the instructions and a prescription for various things.  I shake his hand and say thank you. 

After another half hour, I’m released.  Back in the hotel I take this picture.  Call it The After  

Yes, I know the patch should be black and I should have a parrot on my shoulder, but considering hospitals have no sense of humor, I did OK.

With the application of much medication, I sleep.  Part the way through the evening, I notice something.  I stare at the bedside light and cover my right eye with my hand.  I can see light through my patch.  I check again.  Yep.  Light and Dark.  Holy Shit.  I try not to cry, as tears have salt and salt in fresh stitches hurts.  But I cry anyway.  I can see bright light and darkness through an eye that I have never seen through. 

The next morning I drive to Doctor Delpero’s office.  I want to know if I’m just dreaming this, or hallucinating, or just full of wishful thinking.  The patch comes off and Delpero shines a light in my left eye.  I can see it.  I ask if this is possible?  It can happen, he explains.  Perhaps the nerves are there and hooked up but since the brain couldn’t make sense of the image, it ignored it all these years.  Now, with the image being closer to lined up, the brain is trying to make sense of it.  Only time will tell if it develops into anything.  By the way David, the lineup is right on.  

I look in his mirror.  I look like I’ve gone rounds with Mike Tyson, but that is expected and it will go away in time.  The sutures will dissolve in four weeks and the eye will look a bit red for another few weeks after that. 

So here’s the After II on Friday and After III on Sunday.

I’ll finish it up in the next installment.

I’ll give you the squeamish alert now.  Some photos and descriptions might be disturbing to some readers.  Or, it will get your rocks off.  I don’t know, or particularly care to know.

Since March of 1957, I’ve had an eyeball that is off kilter, the left eyeball.   As the left eye couldn’t see things, it never tracked with the right eye.

Last week, I had surgery to fix it.  This is the story of one eye being off target for all of my life, then squared up.

Back in the Day it was called Lazy Eye and the solution was to put a patch over the good eye and exercise the lazy eye to make it track with the good eye.  Look up, look down, look left, look right, repeat nine thousand times.  Unfortunately, I couldn’t see out of the left eye, so all the ‘exercise’ was an exercise in futility. 

I was sent out to play wearing a patch on my good eye, which meant I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face.  Or doors, fences, trees, buildings or cars.  There was much bruising.  Again, back then, it was considered appropriate by the medical folks to "force’ the kid to use the eye, then it would magically work and line up.  The attitude was that children are wilful, evil little creatures who must be forced to do things, with a rubber hose to the soles of the feet if need be.  Fortunately things have changed since then.

After a few months of banging into things, the medical folks eventually figured out, despite me telling them repeatedly, that I couldn’t see out the left eye.  Blind as a bat.  No light, no shapes, no dark, or shadows.  Nothing.  The right eye?  Fine, but nearsighted.

Some science content here:  Stereoscopic vision, the ability to see in three dimensions is as much a brain function as an eye function.  The back of the eyeballs output data via the optic nerves to the optic chiasm, where a lot of the data crosses paths.  Essentially your right eye feeds the left side of the brain and the left eye feeds the right side of the brain.  Your brain puts the two slightly different pictures together and calls that reality in three dimensions.  The interocular distance, the distance between your two eyes, gives you the two slightly different images.

When you move your eyes to look at something, let’s say a car passing in front of you, the two eyes move at slightly different rates.  Every zillionth of a second the brain sends signals to the muscles to keep the two images approximately in sync and refreshes the combined image into a coherent picture. 

If you’ve ever had dental surgery, like a root canal, and had half your head frozen, you notice that your vision is impaired or blurry for a while.  One set of eye muscles is affected by the dental freezing and is out of sync with the unfrozen ones.  The brain can’t make a coherent image out of the input, because the two aren’t lining up within the range the brain can resolve. 

As a young’un, the two pictures that were being delivered to my brain were too far out of alignment for the brain to make sense of them.  So, the brain, being confused, said, "The left side data is pooched.  Screw it."  The brain, being a complex machine, stopped accepting input from the left side optic nerve.  

I never noticed it, being about 6 months old.  The left eye, over time, stopped tracking with the right eye as the brain didn’t need or want the input.  Parenthetically, my left eye is a real one, completely alive, as the pupil reacts to light, but there is no input from it that I can see, at least until last Friday.

What this means, is that I have never seen in three dimensions.  I have no idea what it looks like.  Since I have never seen it, I don’t miss it, much like someone born color-blind or deaf has no appreciation for what they have never known. 

Having said that, I must also explain that there are drawbacks to having monocular vision.  For example, catching a ball.  Billiards.  Pouring liquids.  Walking down stairs.  The list of things that are easier with binocular vision is long, but humans are remarkably adaptive animals.  Most of my adaptions are very subtle and you wouldn’t notice them, if you didn’t know.

For example, if I pour you a glass of wine, you might notice that I put the spout of the bottle on the edge of the glass, then pour.  If I didn’t, then there would be wine everywhere, except in the glass.  Walking down a flight of stairs, I always hold the handrail.  To me optically, the stair and my feet are in the same geometric plane so I don’t get the visual cueing that my foot is about to hit the stair tread.  I’ve fallen down too many sets of stairs for it to be entertaining anymore. 

As for catching anything?  Forget it, as I can’t see how far it is away from me to put out my hand to capture it.  You need two slightly different views of the flying object to allow your brain to calculate where, in space, the object is, to trigger your arm to put your hand predictively where the arc will end.  Without the second visual input, the brain can’t calculate the interception point accurately. 

Watching me play badminton is hilarious, golf is agriculturally funny as I dig divots, baseball is a nine-inning joke, volleyball an exercise in face-planting, along with gymnastics, lacrosse, football, hockey and rugby.  Skiing, be it downhill or cross-country is an endless loop of me falling over, while darts is dangerous for bystanders.  Snooker and 9-ball, two billiards games I love, are as visually puzzling as modern art to me.  Martial arts would be dangerous to all concerned, as I can’t see properly to pull the strike before hitting someone.

I tried playing Squash with a good friend many years ago.  I tried hard too, as I like it.  More than once I almost decapitated him with a mighty swing of the racquet to hit a ball that I thought was far enough away from his head to clear it.  I was wrong.  He’s since forgiven me for it, but at the time, I was mortified. 

Sports is one thing, but behavior and personality are another whole set of things that I have a different take on.  There is some scientific thought that the left hemisphere of the brain is the creative side, the literate, wordy, visual side of our personality.  The right hemisphere is the more mathematical, hardwired logical side. 

I am so mathematically challenged that I should have a blue parking pass from the Province of Ontario.  Grade 2 consisted of me being drilled in math for hours after school by my Father, usually ending in tears, yelling and screaming.  I still don’t know my times tables.  It took me three tries to get through Grade 9 Algebra.  Long division might as well be in Sanskrit. 

Cursive writing is right hemisphere and my handwriting is indecipherable at best, aside from being partially dyslexic.  Fortunately I have learned how to spot my common errors and rely on spell-checking programs.  I’ve used a typewriter then a computer for just about all my correspondence, as others can’t read my writing.  

I don’t actually know, instinctively, my left hand from my right hand.  Watch me give directions to someone and I’ll take forever, as I have to consciously do the turns, then figure out which direction it is by translating motion into Left or Right.

Math and handedness are right brain functions.  The biggest stimuli is visual in the human and the right hemisphere of the brain is fed by the left eye.  Perhaps this explains why I seem to be able to fling words with a modicum of mediocrity, but can’t add three numbers together without a calculator.

It isn’t all unpleasant.  I see what a camera sees, which explains why I spent about ten years in television as a director and photographer.  The illusion you see as depth on television or film is created with lighting.  I can’t be fooled by binocular vision into thinking things are correctly lit, so I was a pretty good shooter in my day on film and tape.  I can still get off the occasional good shot with the camera. 

Even stranger is my previous history in flying and racing, two activities one would think would absolutely need depth perception.  Technically, they do, but I’ve got eight hours in fixed wing, single engine aircraft and sixteen hours in gliders.  Laps racing?  More than several thousand and I wasn’t that bad a racer either.  

You learn different cues to make up for the cues that others use naturally.  When driving, I always do the three-count thing.  Watch the car in front of you on the highway pass a fixed object, count to three and you should be passing the same object.  Less than three and you’re too close. 

When driving I have my head turned slightly left, to center up my right eye and cover all three mirrors.  I don’t know how I learned it, but that’s what I use.  I can extrapolate position from shadows, perhaps better than you can.  Again I don’t know how I learned it, but that’s what I use.

To bring it all together regarding binocular vision, just for giggles, cover your right eye and try to walk across your living room, only using your left eye.  You will bang a shin, or fall over or wind up behind the sofa on your head.  It’s hard for you because you’re used to having the two visual inputs that you see as depth.  

As a child it was hellish.  Male children in the 60’s were all about sports as the determining social hierarchy marker.  So was physical appearance.  With one eye pointing inwards and a basic stick and ball ineptitude, I was a castaway.  There aren’t many photos of me, as I instinctively avoided cameras.  For some reason I was always away when school photos were being taken.  Cyclops was a common playground taunt, along with Spaz, Freak and Dumbo. 

Growing older I adjusted, sort of.  There are a few pictures of me out there.  When I could, I would make sure that I was far enough from the camera that it was hard to see the left eyeball being off.  What few formal portraits of me that exist, give me the heebie jeebies when I see myself.  The bathroom mirror looks somewhat back at me, kind of, but not quite.

As a trainer I used to make mock of it.  If I pointed to someone at the back of the class and the guy four seats to the right answered, I’d point to my right eye and say "Not quite, try this one, as it’s the one I use all the time." then laugh.  After all, you can laugh or you can cry and laughter is easier, at least in public. 

Inwardly, I cried and got reminded of it, every morning, in the bathroom mirror.  I have overheard others describe me as the "guy with the eye".  Oh well. 

Is a wonky eye a definer of me?  Perhaps.  I know I have learned more about visual acuity, spatial relationships, perception and some rudimentary biology because I have tried to understand the why of how I see what I see and how others see what they see.

In the next posting I’ll get down to brass tacks regarding the operation.  There will be a before and after picture or two.  No shot of during, although I was tempted to ask for one. 

There’s been more than a few outbreaks of the Norwalk Virus this winter.  Sometimes called the Cruise Ship Shits, the Norwalk Virus is a nasty little bug(ger) that was first detected in 1968 in an elementary school in Norwalk, Ohio.  Known now as Norovirus, this little beastie is transmitted by the fecal-oral route. 

Cruise ships, hospitals and schools are the places where Norovirus shows up most often, usually with headlines along the lines of "Cruise Ship Passengers Sick", "Hospital Floor Closed" and "Students Sick".  Most Norovirus outbreaks are hard to link back to one causative act, but the general propagation routes, bad hygiene and bad housekeeping, look like the best suspect. 

Along the same lines as E.Coli contaminated fruits and vegetables, Nororvirus has the same economic factors.  Here’s why:  Cleaning staff at a hospital, hotel or cruise ship are the low persons on the financial totem pole. 

As invisible persons, those who clean the rooms, floors and walls, are hired from the pool of unskilled and underpaid.  Look around the next time you’re at a hotel.  You’re looking at new immigrants, or illegals, who are willing to work for the smallest wage possible.  Why?  Maintenance is a ‘cost’ to an organization or business, so the route to profitability is to cut costs:  Get someone cheaper.

For instance, of all the hospital cuts that went on in Ontario’s Health Care system, how many administrators and senior manager positions were cut?  If your answer is Zero, then you win a case of C. Difficile the next time you wind up in hospital. 

Who was cut then?  Cleaning staff, nursing staff, custodians and support staff.  Without regular, thorough disinfection and continuous housekeeping, the guck accumulates.  One reason is hospitals are full of sick people, of course.  This is not to say that Operating Rooms or Treatment areas are not very clean, but the overall level of cleanliness has declined because the number of staff who actually do the cleaning, has been decreased. 

Hotels are notorious for working their housekeeping staff like Roman orchard slaves, as the time it takes to clean a room for a new guest, directly impacts the number of housekeeping people they have to hire.  If you can save 90 seconds, then, over 20 rooms, you’ve saved 30 minutes, which means your staff can do another one or two rooms and you don’t have to hire that extra person or two. 

If the staff doesn’t like it, well, fire them all and hire a new bunch of ignorant peasants.  Naturally, woe betide any support staff who mentions such words as "union" or "unsafe work conditions" or "I’d like a raise because they raised the minimum wage."  Bloody troublemakers.  I am being ironic here.

Which leads to a fascinating study as to what parts of a hotel room are the filthiest.  One would think the toilet, shower and sink would be.  Nope.  Those get cleaned every day; they’re probably cleaner than your own bathroom at home, that you clean once or twice a week. 

The big culprits are the TV remote and the telephone handset.  Let’s put it this way, when was the last time you cleaned your TV remote or telephone handset at home?  Never?  Fair enough, I don’t clean it either, but in a hotel room, you have people of various levels of hygiene in and out every couple of nights. 

Ask to have the remote and the phone cleaned in your hotel room and you get looked at like you’ve just sprouted a spare head out of your right shoulder.  Don’t ask about what lives on the comforter on your hotel bed.  Those things might be washed once a week.  At least the sheets get changed daily. ABC News’ 20/20 once shined a blue bio light on a hotel comforter and found things you don’t want to know about.

Schools?  Same deal.  Put a bunch of kids in a room for seven hours a day for a week and children, being children, will have been exposed to all kinds of bacteria, viruses and illness-causing yuk.  Parents, being parents, as soon as precious Melinda or William come down with a sniffle, rush them to the doctor for antibiotics.  Which helps create a whole legion of antibiotic-resistant strains of Norovirus, Heliobacter, or C. Difficile.  By the way, Rhinovirus, the cold virus, will run its’ course in five to eight days.  With all kinds of anti-viral medication, it should take about a week, give or take a couple of days. 

Cruise Ships, essentially 4,000 room hotels that float, have the same problem.  Housekeeping costs money and the turnaround time between passenger loads is so short that there is no time to thoroughly clean the ship from top to bottom.  Fast turnaround means more profit.

Commercial Aircraft are the same deal, as an aircraft on the ground, being cleaned, is not generating revenue.  I’ve flown on too many commercial flights that smell like a Legion urinal in the past few years.  Aircraft groomers (that’s what you call a cleaner on the ground crew) get a tiny window of time to make the cabin vaguely orderly.  Actual cleaning?  As likely as getting a hot meal on a five-hour domestic flight. 

I’m not a germophobe or suffer from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, but I do meet a lot of people in my job.  A dozen years ago I started frequently washing my hands with soap and water after meeting a group of folks and being a little more circumspect about environmental cleanliness.  It has cut down on the number of colds and flu I get.  It is is purely a feeling, not a concrete numerical improvement.  Where I can, I swab down the phone and TV remote with either an alcohol prep wipe or some Purell on a tissue.  I also remove the bedspread in any hotel room I stay in.  Has it helped?  Well, it doesn’t hurt. 

I’ve had a C. Difficile infection and suffered with post-operative Pneumonia.  I don’t want to ever have them again.  Both leave you feeling like you’ve been pulled face-first through a one-inch knot-hole by a tow truck.  It takes about two months to feel normal again.

What is answer then?  The answer is economic.  All it will take is one broad epidemic outbreak for the smart folks to put two and two together.  Realize that a lack of cleanliness in a public environment is directly proportional to the number of cleaning staff.  More cleaning staff doing the day to day housekeeping means the environment is less likely to support an epidemic of a common virus. 

This costs money, either in hiring back the folks you let go, or in lost time from work, closed hospitals, bad publicity for the hotel or cruise line and folks like you and me stuck in bed for a week.  Choose which way you want to pay.

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