So
Woke up to the smell of burning pines in the morning and an unnatural light glowing over Athens as the sunlight filtered through layers of different sized ashes held in suspension in the air.
Snowfall-like the ash was being wafted on the same breeze which further to the west was fanning the flames and sending the ash coming our way.
We cannot see the damage, the smoke is too thick to see the mountain.
Friday, June 29, 2007
Thursday, June 28, 2007
Forest fire season is open
Mount Parnitha, the Parnes of aniquity, burns, spewing smoke over Athens. Hope the red deer get out alive.
Monday, June 25, 2007
In Anatolia
Been a little lost in Anatolia - promise to get arse into gear to write some stuff and maybe show some pics. Have this shish until then.
Tuesday, June 12, 2007
16,000 hours
I have a little add-on for Firefox which tells me how I am doing on the smober front. Well, it seems that I have not smoked for 16,000 hours. This is a saving of 1,800 euro and represents 13,333 cigarettes not smoked since that morning in August 2005.
Ah, those fond memories...
Ah, those fond memories...
Thursday, June 07, 2007
Resistance to change is all about control
So when I went for my quarterly trip down to the nice people at Schering who give me my injectables, it was all change. None of the old staff were there and for some reason everything was now branded Bayer - yep the aspirin people have bought out the interferon people. Big deal - as long as the stuff is still produced and dished out as before.
And here start the problems.
There is too much different about the whole system - different needle widths, syringe widths, different amount of powder and juice, different use of the mechanical autoject thing.
The injection itself seems to take a much longer time, meaning motionless hands for longer, there are more windows to watch from, which is just horrible if you think about it. I hate watching the plunger through the window.
And size - everything is so much bigger and unwieldier for traveling with. Yukky yuk yuk is basically what I have to say about the new set-up - albeit before using it for the first time. Maybe I will change my mind afterwards.
Just feeling a little down in the dumps because it seems to have added a little more complexity to that side of my life and I don't like it because I had no say in it.
--mopes--
And here start the problems.
There is too much different about the whole system - different needle widths, syringe widths, different amount of powder and juice, different use of the mechanical autoject thing.
The injection itself seems to take a much longer time, meaning motionless hands for longer, there are more windows to watch from, which is just horrible if you think about it. I hate watching the plunger through the window.
And size - everything is so much bigger and unwieldier for traveling with. Yukky yuk yuk is basically what I have to say about the new set-up - albeit before using it for the first time. Maybe I will change my mind afterwards.
Just feeling a little down in the dumps because it seems to have added a little more complexity to that side of my life and I don't like it because I had no say in it.
--mopes--
Funky video explains all
Well, I can't find a copy of it and I did search for a good 90 seconds or more on you tube, so sorry - you will not be seeing the video that made me 'click' in two different ways.
Background - hmm. Well on Sunday we went down to the SEF - the peace and friendship stadium, which was housing a medical exhibition for the lay person. Bunch of bollocks, no really it was crap firms selling para-medical trivialities like battery powered vibrating massage toys and orthopaedic chairs and the like. At the same time, there are various talks open to the public about a variety of issues.
So, there we were, with our brave faces on, going to a talk all about the monoclonal antibody whatsit - to learn about the newly approved dog's-bollocks of MS medication. It was with some trepidation that I went - yes, I wanted to learn more about this thing and of course I did not realise from the advertising leaflets that its the drug that had its clinical trials suspended in the states because of people dying, but which was rebranded and re released because one in a thousand rare encephalopathy cases and some deaths are not to be put in the way of a multibillion (billions and billions) dollar industry. There was also a talk about fatigue which is more what drew me, and more about that later.
Brave faces - yes, so there we were. I was wearing mine because I was wary of being confronted by a hall full of wheelchair bound, walking stick wielding people and having the little voice in the back of my head telling me, "you see that, that's you that is, in a few years". So it was my first time in front of a bunch of people having the same dx. All I will say about that is that I rather hope that those with the canes and the wheels are more likely to come to these meetings thus skewing the statistics slightly.
Anyway - the lady doctor gets up and does a very rushed rendition of a bunch of powerpoint slides she did not prepare herself. One of these slides had a video which helped me understand for the first time one of the mechanisms of how the MS works.
The video shows this big spikey white guy zooming around in the blood and then squeezing itself out of the blood vessel (crossing the blood brain barrier) and grappling onto the myelin of a brain cell which it then goes on to destroy. So now I understand the whole blood brain barrier white blood cell whatsit alittle more visually than before.
And the lady doctor then went on to talk about the new wonder drug and what it does - and then came the second realisation of the day - the drugs are fighting the "how" of the problem. Tysabri (and as far as I know all the interferons) stop the spikey white guys from crossing the blood brain barrier. That's what they do (and a little bit more, but essentially this is it). First off, I am appalled that we are dealing with the "how" and not the "why" dammit. I am a "why" sort of guy and I'm fucked if I'm going to sit back and expend energy on building dykes rather than stopping the flood waters from rising in the first place.
The talk by the lady doctor was heavily into selling Tysabri, and spent a lot of time talking about the encaphalopathies which were caused during the clinical testing, but she somehow neglected to say that death resulted during the clinical tests in the states. A heck of a lot of slides all about the encephalopathies
Did I mention that the whole thing is sponsored by Genesis? Ah, no.
If I had remembered this myself, I would have been expecting the shameless plug for the sponsor's anti fatigue drug which took up most of the talk on the fatigue subject. I was not a happy camper. I don't want to hear about drugs, to treat syptoms I want to hear about what you are doing to combat the cause.
Anyway - that was a semi-wasted morning which could not be redeemed not even by the amusement afforded by watching the people turning up after our talks had overrun for TV sex-doc Askitis' talk on erectile dysfunction. Oh and by learning that the local office of the MS Society has been overrun by representatives of pharmaceutical companies and big industry and they are using it to their own aims while the patients go unheeded. That wasn't good news. The good news was in fact that a new society has been launched only for those with a diagnosis, to ensure that that does not happen again. It looks like some disgruntled patients have run off with the mailing lists and are regrouping elsewhere.
The day was properly rescued by my first real visit to the NAM since before the quake, and that needs its own post later.
Background - hmm. Well on Sunday we went down to the SEF - the peace and friendship stadium, which was housing a medical exhibition for the lay person. Bunch of bollocks, no really it was crap firms selling para-medical trivialities like battery powered vibrating massage toys and orthopaedic chairs and the like. At the same time, there are various talks open to the public about a variety of issues.
So, there we were, with our brave faces on, going to a talk all about the monoclonal antibody whatsit - to learn about the newly approved dog's-bollocks of MS medication. It was with some trepidation that I went - yes, I wanted to learn more about this thing and of course I did not realise from the advertising leaflets that its the drug that had its clinical trials suspended in the states because of people dying, but which was rebranded and re released because one in a thousand rare encephalopathy cases and some deaths are not to be put in the way of a multibillion (billions and billions) dollar industry. There was also a talk about fatigue which is more what drew me, and more about that later.
Brave faces - yes, so there we were. I was wearing mine because I was wary of being confronted by a hall full of wheelchair bound, walking stick wielding people and having the little voice in the back of my head telling me, "you see that, that's you that is, in a few years". So it was my first time in front of a bunch of people having the same dx. All I will say about that is that I rather hope that those with the canes and the wheels are more likely to come to these meetings thus skewing the statistics slightly.
Anyway - the lady doctor gets up and does a very rushed rendition of a bunch of powerpoint slides she did not prepare herself. One of these slides had a video which helped me understand for the first time one of the mechanisms of how the MS works.
The video shows this big spikey white guy zooming around in the blood and then squeezing itself out of the blood vessel (crossing the blood brain barrier) and grappling onto the myelin of a brain cell which it then goes on to destroy. So now I understand the whole blood brain barrier white blood cell whatsit alittle more visually than before.
And the lady doctor then went on to talk about the new wonder drug and what it does - and then came the second realisation of the day - the drugs are fighting the "how" of the problem. Tysabri (and as far as I know all the interferons) stop the spikey white guys from crossing the blood brain barrier. That's what they do (and a little bit more, but essentially this is it). First off, I am appalled that we are dealing with the "how" and not the "why" dammit. I am a "why" sort of guy and I'm fucked if I'm going to sit back and expend energy on building dykes rather than stopping the flood waters from rising in the first place.
The talk by the lady doctor was heavily into selling Tysabri, and spent a lot of time talking about the encaphalopathies which were caused during the clinical testing, but she somehow neglected to say that death resulted during the clinical tests in the states. A heck of a lot of slides all about the encephalopathies
Did I mention that the whole thing is sponsored by Genesis? Ah, no.
If I had remembered this myself, I would have been expecting the shameless plug for the sponsor's anti fatigue drug which took up most of the talk on the fatigue subject. I was not a happy camper. I don't want to hear about drugs, to treat syptoms I want to hear about what you are doing to combat the cause.
Anyway - that was a semi-wasted morning which could not be redeemed not even by the amusement afforded by watching the people turning up after our talks had overrun for TV sex-doc Askitis' talk on erectile dysfunction. Oh and by learning that the local office of the MS Society has been overrun by representatives of pharmaceutical companies and big industry and they are using it to their own aims while the patients go unheeded. That wasn't good news. The good news was in fact that a new society has been launched only for those with a diagnosis, to ensure that that does not happen again. It looks like some disgruntled patients have run off with the mailing lists and are regrouping elsewhere.
The day was properly rescued by my first real visit to the NAM since before the quake, and that needs its own post later.
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