…that I learned the path of resolution to a health issue that had been causing me problems for six weeks.

In early September of 2008, I’d gotten really sick, in pain to the point of not being able to sleep for more than 45 minutes in a row, and couldn’t keep food down (during the three months that this ordeal lasted, I lost 30 pounds, and that’s with me doing almost no exercise at all). During this period, I’d made five visits to my primary care physician, who’d consistently misdiagnosed the problem and used his misdiagnosis to lead me down the totally incorrect path towards recovery. After the fifth visit, he finally decided it was worth a little deeper investigation, at which point we scheduled a scan of my abdomen.

The scan revealed the problem instantly (it turns out, it would have probably revealed it instantly six weeks earlier as well). I got a call from his office very shortly after the scan (they asked me to stay in the waiting room so he could go over the results with me). They scheduled me that afternoon with a specialist, one who deals with kidney problems.

The problem, and the source of the constant pain, it turns out, was a kidney stone, just outside my left kidney, that had grown large enough to completely block all fluid out of the kidney. The kidney was, for all intents and purposes, completely non-functional. We didn’t know at the time whether or not function would return.

I will interject for one moment here, to note that the specialist is one of the best doctors I have ever seen. He was clear, direct, honest and hopeful without getting my hopes up. He said, in essence, “we’re going to need to do surgery right away just to take pressure off the kidney. It may not come back, but if we don’t do this surgery, you’ll definitely lose the kidney, and will probably die.” We scheduled this surgery for later in the week.

The effect of the surgery was dramatic. I still had trouble sleeping, but it was nothing like before. It was the first time I was able to sleep for more than an hour at a time, and though there was an 8-day recovery period that was fairly unpleasant, it was well worth it.

The next few months went well, though I still wasn’t up for eating much and found it difficult to exercise, and I knew another surgery would be coming. There were freakout moments, because the first surgery was only to do fluid release, and the stone still had to be removed down the line. Because of its location, they couldn’t do the normal approach of breaking it up with sound waves (it was hidden behind a bone) or anything else, so surgery again.

But that wasn’t urgent. It just needed to be done. We scheduled it for mid-December. Like the prior surgery, it had an eight day recovery period, and left me a bit exhausted for the next week or so after that, but all in all, it was just incredibly successful.

It wasn’t long before I discovered that the kidney had started to return to function. The doctor was amused because the radiologist had written this pessimistic note about how horrible it was that the kidney was only at half function, without knowing that I had had no kidney function just a few weeks before.

This June, we had a follow-up. Everything was not just good, but great. He doesn’t want to see me again for a year, and there were no signs of any stones returning or any kidney problems.

I’m writing this for a few reasons. Even though I lost 30 lbs by the time New Year’s Day had come around, I’ve gained a lot of it back — I had gained almost 25 lbs back as of a few weeks ago, which is one of the reasons I’ve been pushing myself so hard lately.

I’m realizing a few things about the health issues I experience. The diabetes is bad enough, but every medicine I take for it includes weight gain as a possible side effect. So I have to work twice as hard to get the same benefit as everyone else, which is why just maintaining my weight is difficult enough.

So I’m working at it, thinking about what I eat and why, and thinking about how much if it I eat, and realizing that one thing that’s going to be true for me is that I will pretty much always be hungry whether I actually need food or not. Eating to the point where I am not hungry, for me, is overeating. My set point has been so screwed up by decades of eating poorly, followed by more than a decade of being on medications which screw with my gastronomy, that I have to just learn to change how I think about food.

So here I am, getting ready to get on the treadmill again, even though there are other things I’d rather be doing, not because I want to look good, not because I want to fit into something, but really because I don’t want to die early just because I didn’t try to become more fit while I had the chance.

At the end of that illness, I actually felt really good. I could move better. I could sleep better. I was just better.

I need to get back to that again.

So off I go.

P.S. this is some of the other, non-exercise stuff, I’ve been doing lately:

First, music:

Then, photos:

Some photos are worth waiting for.  

This Great Blue Heron was hanging out at Allen Brothers Marsh, and looked like it was stalking something, so I gave myself a little time to wait and see what would happen.

I was not disappointed.

A bunch more photos after the fold (all of them are smaller versions; clicking on them gets you to the larger ones).

I wanted to focus this primarily on Vermont, but I just have to say, this is one of the best speeches I’ve ever seen him give:

Obama gave this speech last night:

I have to say, I love this speech.  It actually made me cry.  

And the speech is a good start.  But it’s the same good start we made in November, and the same good start we’ve repeatedly had.

I’m one of the people that’s been urging patience, but I also think that since our President is refusing to issue a timeline, I should issue one of my own.

So here’s the deal: he took office in January of 2009.  

I’m counseling patience with pressure: never stop asking about DOMA, about Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, about ENDA (and, specifically, one that includes protections on the basis of gender identity as well as sexual orientation).  Withhold donations to campaigns of politicians who refuse to answer questions on these issues.  Tell your representatives that these are important to you.  

But let’s give it a little time to work its way through.  And I do mean, a little.  I’m behind this President and I’m behind my party.  But since Obama won’t tell us when he intends to do these things except in vague and general terms, here’s my timeline (he’s got a lot to do, so I’ll be generous):

He’s got a year from the day he took office to make a serious impact on DOMA, Don’t Ask Don’t Tell or ENDA.  This means pressuring congress to do the right thing and get a bill on his desk that he can sign.  If I don’t see this by the end of January 2010, I will no longer be urging patience of any sort.  I will be urging constant and continual pressure without apology, without reservation, without anything.

This isn’t for me.  I live in Vermont, and work in New Hampshire.  My rights are actually pretty solid.  I want them on the federal level, but my day to day life… I’m fine.  This is for every queer kid in Indiana who has to tolerate abuse at school.  This is for the 15-year old in Oklahoma who knows she’s transsexual, but can’t understand what to do about it because the nearest resource center is hundreds of miles away.  This is for every gay couple in Maine who doesn’t know what the hell is going to happen to their marriage rights this year.

This is because I know where I come from, what I had to go through, and who I am and I’m not leaving my people behind just because I’m comfortable.  This is for all of us.

I’m not expecting that all I have to do is to click my heels three times and have everything be okay.

I’m with my president, and I loved this speech.

Now I want to see it made manifest.

Okay, after the fold, open thready stuff.

First, this pair of headlines showed up next to one another in the Herald this week:

Over at Daily Kos, there’s a link to this piece of wingnut art, which is almost funny enough on its own.  If you put the mouse over parts of the artwork, you get commentary about the various people, such as, with the Immigrant, “Why does he have his hand up like that…?  I wanted him to have a look of shock when he realizes where the source of America’s greatness comes from as he sees Christ holding the Constitution.”

There’s also a great spoof of it.  Here’s a screen shot of one of the mouseover bits:

And, finally, a question:

Are the people who made this decision competent at what they do?

…But the number of mudpuppies killed in the Lamoille during the lampricide treatment a week ago raises questions about how well biologists understand the population of the salamander, the effect of the chemical used to control lamprey and the potential that other stresses can put the creatures at risk during such treatments, Andrews said.

“These are complex systems we are tinkering with,” he said.

“It is a large number,” Laroche said of the mudpuppies killed. But, he added, “I am not alarmed.”

The large number of mudpuppies killed might mean that the Lamoille – which has never been treated with lampricide before – has a very high population of the mottled brown salamanders, he said.

“We could have an abundance of mudpuppies and just have a situation where it is difficult to find them and catch them,” Laroche said.

Really?  You kill over 500 members of a species of a rare species of serious concern and you’re “not alarmed?”

According to the Rutland Herald:

In a report due out this week, Vermont officials will conduct the first statewide tally of jobs “created or preserved” by the federal stimulus package. But the figures necessarily will fall well short of the 8,000 jobs projected by federal economists at the outset of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

The final calculations won’t be ready until late this week, but Vermont “recovery czar” Tom Evslin says he’s certain the total won’t come close to what was predicted. That doesn’t necessarily mean that many jobs weren’t created or saved; there’s just no way to document the effect.

Here’s the thing.  The data they’re discussing?  The one where he says “there’s just no way to document the effect?”  Documentation of that effect is part of the requirement of the funding.  And it was due yesterday.

So I’m not sure what’s going on here, but I suspect that this has little to do with job creation, and a lot more to do with petty bickering along the same lines of Douglas not wanting to inform people that ARRA funding helped with certain projects.

I didn’t get this from any local news source, but I did get it from Talking Points Memo:

Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) is on no one’s list of vulnerable Senators in 2010. But an active duty Navy M.D. says he’s ready to mount a serious challenge to the six term liberal. From the left. Daniel Freilich says he plans to formally announce his bid for Leahy’s seat tomorrow in Wilmington, VT.

Who knew?

This isn’t about Vermont, but it’s about a great place that Vermonters can visit, so I figured I’d throw it up, but I wanted to leave the front page with more relevant, Vermont-related stuff.

Parker River Wildlife Refuge, on Plum Island in coastal Massachusetts is probably one of my very favorite places to bird.  It hosts several hundred species of bird throughout the year, and its salt marshes allow for a great deal of variety.  September is one of the best times to visit, and last weekend was no exception.  Not only did we get a series of birds, we got one new life bird and some fairly tricky to find warblers.  

But one of the real highlights was a visit to the refuge banding station.

I’ve never seen bird banding before– it’s more than I thought.  They capture birds in nets, which are patrolled regularly (you’ll see some birds in nets in the photos below), and put them into temporary holding bags.  The birds get annoyed, certainly, but they are released generally unharmed.

Before that happens, however, several things need to take place.  The birds are banded, such as in this photo:

The bands are supposed to last for the life of the bird.  They’re coded with unique identifying numbers which allow us to know if the birds have been captured and released in other areas and improve our understanding of migration paths.  They also are measured for a variety of characteristics (age, overall health, etc).  You’ll see below that one of the birds in someone’s hand has a fairly wet head.  Wetting the head allows researchers to look at the bird’s skull; in may cases, a first year bird doesn’t have the same skull configuration as an older bird (the second layer of their skull hasn’t grown in yet).  

In some cases, such as in bird #20 below, they did some detailed measurements of the differences between lengths of some of the wing feathers to get a definitive ID on it.  

All in all, it was fascinating– I learned so much more about the details of birds and bird physiology than I expected, and since the banding station is fairly far away from traffic, we got some of the more reclusive birds that I don’t normally get to see just hanging out at the banding area.  

So– about the photos below: I’ve decided to make this a Sunday bird quiz.  I will preface by saying that all the photos below were taken at Parker River, and they were all taken last weekend, which can help you narrow down some of the choices.   If, however, you aren’t in the mood for a quiz, you can click on the image to get to a larger version of it, with details about the bird (exact species, etc), assuming I’m correct.  

Bird 01, a bit of nuisance

Bird 02, first I’ve ever photographed of these

Bird 03, fall plumage of a common bird

Bird 04, a common flycatcher

Bird 05, which looks like its name

Bird 06, which is a little tricky from this angle

Bird 07, which I only see in Spring and Fall

Bird 08, which I also only see in Spring and Fall

Bird 09a, a relative of bird 9b

Bird 09b, a relative of Bird 09a

Bird 10, which does what it’s called

Bird 11, which is clearly not amused

Bird 12, which is very difficult to ID for some

Bird 13 (not easy)

Bird 14, which are fun to watch

Bird 15, one of my favorite sparrows

Bird 16, which are adorable

Bird 17, which is feisty and beautiful

Bird 18, which is incredibly small

Bird 19 (this one is not easy either)

Bird 20, which I still have yet to photograph in the wild

Bird 21, which is subtle but solvable

Bird 22, which I rarely photograph in the wild

Bird 23, which I hear more often than I see

Hope you enjoyed the quiz.  I also have a quick personal plug.  I’m selling a 2010 calendar of birding:

As well as one on my night photography:

If you’d like to support my photography, buying a calendar is a fine way to do so.

I don’t have time to get much up about this right now, so this is an invitation to the other front pagers to expand on this piece throughout the day.  The Rutland Herald has the story, which boils down to an agreement having been settled for the current budget year, but the administration insisting on some very serious cuts for future budget years that the union was unwilling to make.  Specifically:

Finding savings in this fiscal year 2010 wasn’t the problem – officials from both parties agreed to achieve the necessary cuts via a combination of furlough days, unpaid holidays and medical-plan savings.

Secretary of Administration Neale Lunderville, however, insisted the union stipulate to an additional $20 million in labor cuts in fiscal years 2011 and 2012, a condition the Vermont State Employees Association ultimately rejected.

[…]

Jes Kraus, executive director of the 6,000-member VSEA, said union officials were unable to agree to the severe cuts Lunderville sought. He said the union, at significant financial expense to its members, helped the administration solve the $7.4 million hole in the current budget. Financial problems in 2011 and 2012, Kraus said, should be solved with the collective bargaining process, already under way, that will set labor agreements for the next two fiscal years.

This is pretty much bad for everybody.

Per The Burlington Free Press:

Lawmakers targeted the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now for this financial sanction because of a series of recent allegations of fraud and deception. The most talked- about has been the allegation of illegal activity that grew from videos showing two people posing as a prostitute and a pimp receiving advice from ACORN staff about how to avoid taxes, falsify documents and hide illegal child workers.

On the surface, this seems kind of reasonable.  Except, with most of these things, the surface doesn’t tell you much.

As both Sanders and Leahy have noted, there is an actual process for determining which organizations get funding of the kind that ACORN gets.  To use the legislative process to specifically target one organization makes this process needlessly political.  It sets the precedent for us to allow right-wing groups to hound us into defunding a group not on the merits of its case but on political fearmongering and the fostering of racial hatred.

It’s not a shock, or even any sort of surprise to me that this vote played out the way it did.  

It is, however, a great disappointment to me that Welch supported it.

As a new source, McClatchy is one of the best I read.  I like them a lot, and their facts are generally solid.  They, however, sometimes they kind of screw it up:

But to Texas separatists like Miller and Republican gubernatorial candidate Larry Kilgore of Mansfield, secession is no laughing matter. Nor is it exclusive to the nation’s second-largest state.

Fanned by angry contempt for Washington, secession movements have sprouted up in perhaps more than a dozen states in recent years. In Vermont, retired economics professor Thomas Naylor leads the Second Vermont Republic, a self-styled citizens network dedicated to extracting the sparsely populated New England state from “the American Empire.”

A few things that McClatchy’s editors should know:

1. the Second Vermont Republic has been widely discredited in Vermont, due to its ties to white supremacists;


2. SVR is basically a waning group.  In its heyday, it had relatively small numbers, and these days, these its numbers are dwindling.

Texas has a fairly active secession movement.  It’s got over half the Republicans in the state supporting it.  It scary, disturbing, and kind of freaky.  But it, unlike the SVR, is kind of a real movement.  

There’s an old joke, which I’ve seen attributed to Larry King: “there’s a group called ‘Blacks and Jews for Pat Buchannan.’  They’re meeting in a phone booth in Wichita.”

At this point, I suspect they have a stronger active membership than the SVR.

(Bumped up, do to some fairly substantive updates below the fold. – promoted by JulieWaters)

Some time ago, I wrote about the fenceline limits at VT Yankee.  Basically, we were looking at two different ways of interpreting the amount of radiation leaked by VT Yankee, one of which tried to look at the amount actually released, the other of which tried to look at how much the human body will absorb.  This allowed Entergy to compare numbers under one formula, and then under another, and say it had only had a small change from one year to the next.  

It’s kind of like saying that someone grew around 61cm in a year, because one year they were measured in inches and the next in cm.  Exact same size, but different measurement standards.  

Now come proposed rules by the Department of Health, which eliminate that conversion factor and goes back to the more strict standards, and Entergy is not amused.  

Per today’s Rutland Herald, once again from Susan Smallheer:

Entergy Nuclear said the new standard would cut radiation limits by 30 percent to 40 percent.

Robert Williams, spokesman for Entergy Nuclear, said the state already had the most stringent radiation standard in the country.

“We have always committed to meet the state’s 20 millirem limit not a 20 milli roentgen,” he wrote in an e-mail, referring to the different measurements for radiation release versus radiation absorption.

See, here’s the thing: the new ruling doesn’t cut radiation limits.  It eliminates a loophole that Entergy used (with the help of the Douglas administration) to bypass radiation limits.  Now that there’s a proposal to remove that loophole, Entergy is whining about it, and talking about their commitment, not to the actual law, but to what they think the law should be.

But the long and short of it is that this is really good news.

UPDATES after the jump.

Two new stories this morning:

First, there’s an environmental lawyer suing over the warm water issue:

David Mears, director of the Environment and Natural Resources Law Clinic at Vermont Law School, said that Judge Merideth Wright didn’t follow the law closely enough to protect the habitat of the American shad, applying warm-water fisheries standards to that section of the Connecticut River, which has been designated a cold water fishery.

Entergy wants to discharge the water into the river warm to make money: Company officials on Tuesday estimated that it uses 20 megawatts of power to operate Vermont Yankee’s cooling towers, power that it could be selling on the power market.

Yes.  You read that right.  Entergy is complaining that it’s unfair for them to have to use power that they could be selling in the process of generating a lot more power.  

Second, the state’s radiological health chief is saying that increased radiation is just fine and dandy, but in doing so, makes some fairly obvious admissions:

Irwin answered “yes” when Sen. Mark MacDonald, chairman of the committee, asked if Vermont Yankee could still be within state-mandated radiation limits even while higher doses of radiation were falling on the school across the road from the plant in Vermont’s southeast corner.

Entergy Nuclear, which owns the plant, has been buying property next to the plant and moving its site boundary farther from the reactor. The state monitors radiation using instruments called dosimeters posted at the plant site boundary.

Under the committee’s questioning, Irwin agreed that moving the dosimeters farther from the reactor would make it easier for the plant to stay under the state’s radiation limits, even though radiation emissions had increased since the plant boosted its power output by 20 percent in 2005.

“Does that not allow sources that emit radiation to emit more radiation than they used to and still be in compliance?” MacDonald asked.

“Yes,” Irwin replied.

I actually love the creativity of just buying nearby property and moving the sensors.  It’s very… inventive.  It’s like adjusting the scale so I can convince myself that I’ve lost weight.

Sometimes when I read this, I think, “do they think we are idiots?”

Then I realize that they probably don’t care if we are idiots.  They just care if there are the “right” people in government who will let them get away with this stuff.

And you know what?

There probably are.