The Portal Speaks: Our Latest Stop Motion/Animated Feature

September is always a cruel month when you provide support to courseware at a University. A ton of new users, a ton more use of the system, people doing cooler and more difficult things, systems that are more interactive than ever…it all means things tend to slow down. This September has not been our worst by any means, but everyone is used to systems working perfectly and being perfectly fast, so Lauren and I created this:

It was a great experiment in mixing stop motion with animation. The whole thing took about two hours from start to finish. We shot it with the lights off in my office. Easy! Our key message was this: everyone, and I mean everyone, is doing their best on this. All your issues are being heard and strategies are in place. Since we created and posted this, new hardware was bought and installed. I fear people imagine that those working deep in the systems don’t know/care/worry about how things work for students and instructors. We know exactly how much they do care, so we really wanted to communicate that.

Plus: making videos is fun.

What was that on my head? Lymph Node Update

My uncle Gerd (my mother’s twin brother, who was visiting the country with his wife, my aunt Susan, and my aunt Ingrid), pointed out that I hadn’t updated about my health status.

Technically I shouldn’t update yet, because my follow-up appointment is this coming Tuesday. However, I discovered last weekend that I had two new bumps on my neck, placed like a vampire bite. I found this quite depressing. Clearly whatever is going on with me is not over, and if it’s a bad something, it’s spreading pretty quickly. I spent Saturday in a funk, losing myself in novels and absently stroking these telltale bumps on my neck.

As annoyed as I’ve been at the idea that just because I’ve had cancer before, any lumps and bumps that I get are so much more likely to be cancer again (not statistically likely in my case), I succumbed to it this time. It was seeping down from my head into the rest of me now; maybe this would be the last year of my life.

So dramatic! But I sort of feel like I have to at least imagine it, prepare myself on some level. If I only have a year left, I want to be able to enjoy that year, not live it in fear and panic. So I thought about it a bit, considered the upsides. Sure, I wouldn’t ever see 40, but at least I (probably) wouldn’t have to experience the death of my parents. I’m at a good point in my life, in my career, I’m close to my family. I have good friends. My nephews are all perfect little angels, I won’t ever have to see them suffer disappointments, heartbreaks, accidents and heavy sadness. I’ve demonstrated a certain amount of potential in various professional areas; isn’t it better to be a tragic loss to your workplace and profession, someone who might have gone on to take on important leadership roles, rather than actually doing it and disappointing everyone? Isn’t there something positive about leaving while you’re on top, all unused potential without any black marks? Surely there is an upside in dying young. I’m determined to find it. It was a rather dour weekend.

In this frame of mind, the world and the general complaints of the people around me look so different. Complaints about getting older? Getting older is what you get to do when you don’t have a terminal illness, when you’re one of the lucky ones. It’s a mark of success, not something to feel sad about. With these bumps on my neck, and a history of cancer, and a feeling that I’ve already dodged an impossible bullet, I spent the weekend just hoping I get to see 40. I wasn’t thinking as hopefully as 60 or 80, just 40. It seemed impossible, too much to ask.

Monday morning I showed my bumps to a couple of colleagues, whose faces looked pretty grim. Yes, spontaneous bumps on your neck? Not a very good sign. Cancer girl has cancer again? Isn’t it inevitable? I felt myself going down that scary path in my head, so to stop it one way or another, I picked up the phone and called my surgeon’s office.

I said something like, “Hi, I had this procedure, and now I have two more bumps, do you think he needs to know about that? I’m seeing him on Tuesday, I’m just kind of…anxious…”

She passed me off and suddenly I heard the dulcet tones of my lovely South African surgeon. “Rochelle?” I felt a bit embarrassed. Surely he is a busy man. My paranoia doesn’t exactly deserve this kind of time and commitment. “The biopsy came back negative, it’s not cancer! It’s just a reactive lymph node. All good! I’ll see you Tuesday!”

I don’t know how to describe the relief of this. It was that good news I didn’t think it was really safe to hope for. It’s nothing! No treatments! No impending death! I jumped up to tell some friends, to tell my boss. Not cancer! Someone said to me: “you must be relieved!” and I thought, well, yes, but instead I felt a stinging behind my eyes that suggested I was about to cry. This knowledge would take a bit of time to assimilate. In my experience, good news is usually accompanied by feeling all the same feelings that you anticipated with its opposite, at least for short spells. So the following hours and days were a bit of an emotional roller coaster.

And now I wonder: will I ever wait for test results again without imagining and mentally preparing for my own death within the year? Cancer has made me a hypochondriac.

The Conscious Patient

The weirdest thing about being awake while having surgery is that you get to hear what your surgeon’s thoughts about the process are while they’re happening.

Here’s how it went: I woke up at about 6:30 but didn’t really want to get out of bed. At 7:30 I leapt out of bed and took a shower, got dressed, took my valium and called a cab. The valium kicked in surprisingly quickly, and by the time I was waiting in the surgical waiting room at 8:45 I was feeling no particular stress. I could tell it was a muscle relaxant, and I repeated tripped over my shoes, but otherwise I felt pretty normal. The only thing missing was my requisite terror and overactive imagination in the waiting room.

Once in my surgeon’s play area (office? mini surgical clinic?), I assumed the position on my stomach. He shaved a bit of my head and washed it with alcohol. Then he said he was “turning [me] into a table!” as he put towels and whatnot over me to expose just the shaved spot on my head.

Then, time for the freezing! There were three or four needles, all at the location. They felt unpleasant and cold, but definitely better than dental freezing. After that was over, he said, “that was the worst part!” which was reassuring, as it wasn’t too bad, but some of my hidden panic attack surfaced after that. I started to cry, lying on my stomach, hiding my face. I don’t really know why I felt it just then. I took a lot of deep breaths and then asked for a kleenex to blow my snotty nose. I don’t think they realized that I was having a bit of a panic, though; the nurse said, “I hear a lot of deep breaths there, are you okay?” and I said I was fine. I mean, what can you say? It was at that point that I realized that the 20mg of valium probably wasn’t quite enough for someone with a panic reaction as strong as mine.

After that, I can’t really say exactly what happened. They waited only a few minutes at most before the first incision happened. I didn’t feel it. It wasn’t clear to me that it happened at all. So that was a relief. There was some tugging and pressing, but it felt more like getting a haircut than anything else.

I realized for sure that the incision had happened when the surgeon started to say, “It’s a lipoma!” I said, “yay!” because I know what a lipoma is and I know that it’s exactly not a big deal. My surgeon had hoped that my bumps were lipomas, but the CT suggested otherwise. So his repeated statements about how it was indeed a lipoma made me happy. At least it’s not cancer! Yay! This is over and it’s not cancer!

“You’re doing really well!” my surgeon said brightly.

“So are you!” I said, in an attempt to be just as perky.

He laughed. “I’m the one with the instruments!”

Then after a bit he said, “That sound is me cooking you!” I hadn’t noticed any sound, but I said, “Mmm what’s for dinner?” This is the kind of conversation you have when you’re under a bunch of towels and cloths with surgical instruments on your back, I guess.

After a bit he said, “Well, maybe there’s a lymph node in there, let’s have a look.” Then I felt him digging around deeper. I still didn’t feel anything. “Oh, there’s the lymph node,” he said, then, to the nurse assisting him, “See there? The grey?”

“Ahhh,” the nurse said.

“Yeah,” he said. “There’s the lymph node.”

I can’t remember if I said anything at that point. I figured this kind of reversed all my good news feelings.

Then he started digging some more, I suppose, and suddenly I felt it. It was like a point of burning and pulling. I think I made a squeaky sound and twisted my leg.

“Oh can you feel that? I’m almost done, it will be over in a moment,” he said, extremely sympathetically. There was another hot burst of burning and pulling. It was quite unpleasant. “That’s it, I’m done,” he said. Deep breaths, deep breaths.

The nurse said something about taking the sample to pathology, and the surgeon said something like, “Yes, mark it down to test for everything.” I said, “I know what that means,” and he said something like, “aww, hmph,” in an oh-come-now-its-surely-not-the-cancer-again sort of tone.

I said, “Well, I did it once, surely I can do it again.”

He told me he was going to stitch me up, and that that work was all surface. I could hear the thread and feel the movement of the process, but I didn’t feel any pain again. The nurse helped him afix a bandaid (that’s what they called it, and, hours later I discovered that’s exactly what it was), they took the cloths off me and told me I should sit up, carefully.

I sat up, and he found me a clean piece of gauze. He told me to put some pressure on it for a while. “It’s going to be a lump at first,” he said. I manoeuvred myself back into my jacket and watched my surgeon tapping away on a keyboard and peering into a screen.

“All done with me?” I asked, pressing the gauze against the still painless lump on my head.

“Yep,” he said. “I’ll see you in a week.”

And that was it. I walked out pressing gauze to my head. I pressed it there for about 30 minutes before I gave up and threw the gauze away.

The first thing I did, out in the waiting area, was call my parents. It was 9:45 when I sat down, meaning the entire experience had happened in about an hour. I hoped I could catch them before they left to come pick me up to tell them I was done and was going to cab home, but the phone just rang and rang. So I settled in to wait. I called my sister, frankly on the brink of tears. That opening of a panic attack was still in me. Talking to my sister calmed me back down. I waited about an hour and then my parents arrived.

I don’t know what it means that he thought at first it was just a lipoma (maybe the largest part of it was?) and that he removed a lymph node afterwards. Good news? Bad news? No idea.

As the freezing came out it started to hurt. It hurts more than my thyroidectomy incision ever did, but I had morphine for that one. But it didn’t wake me up in the night, so I guess it’s not too bad.

Next challenge: taking a shower. I’m supposed to wash the incision and put polysporin on it, so I guess hairwashing is on the table this morning. My mother (who is still here with me) suggests I be brave and do it now. Wish me luck.

iPad reflections

I am writing this post from my new iPad. I’ve been waiting for this moment for some time…I have had high hopes. Here are the pros and the cons.

Pros
It’s remarkably easy to use. Any interface works well only if the symbols in use resonate deeply with the user. Apple has the advantage of many years of symbol generation in it’s favour. I’ve managed to accomplish quite a bit without having to turn to a manual.

Others have commented on how awesome it feels to interact with the web using your fingers instead of a mouse; the immediacy of it, the intimacy…it’s like meeting the web in the flesh for the first time. Intimacy like that with places and content is extremely powerful. I can’t see being satisfied with less having experienced it.

Typing is okay. It autocorrects a lot, but it has to. Most of the time it’s right. It pit all your apostrophes and capitals in, which should clean up a great dal of grammar on the Internet.

Mail is stunning. I don’t even know what makes it so beautiful, but it is. So is the calendar. I get a little shiver imaging that my activities will be documented in such an elegant way. So far I’m only viewing,so I can’t speak to it’s functionality. Apple appears to be appealing to the secret aesthete in us; the style and slickness makes you feel like you’re transcending some kind of hitherto unknown class boundary. I admire and appreciate their attempt to surround me with prettiness.

Cons
It never once occurred to me that the ipad’s web browser (safari) would struggle with google docs. Google docs is my word processor of choice, and since it’s a app, I presumed I would have no trouble at all composing docs on an iPad. But no: I can view but not edit google docs on the iPad. I’d really like to know why. Does docs rely on flash? I was under the impression that it didn’t. Is it’s functionality deliberately disabled, and by which party? My guess is that apple is responsible, not google, but this like like picking one parent over another. I’ve been a Mac user since 1997 and I become more of a google fan by the day. Why apple makes the products I’d rather spend the day with my fingers on, google makes the functionality I need. So I hope safari gets it’s act together. In the meantime I’m making do with a very slick app called Office2 HD, which is beautiful. But I believe that the future is in the mobile web, not locked away in apps. If google comes up with a rival device that ties seamlessly into it’s apps package, I may be lured away from apple products.

iBooks. The reading interface is quite lovely, but I’ve never seem a more poorly organized collection of fiction. Books for young adults are listed in the children’s section. Beyond basic author, title and rough genre, I can’t dig though the collection in any comfortable or interesting way. And the bookshelf display is far too simple for the eventual cluttered collection any book loving reader will accumulate. It looks very much slapped together with no serious thought about categorizing fiction.

Lack of flash? Doesn’t bother me in the slightest. YouTube looks fantastic embedded on a page or otherwise.

Thus I find myself partly pleased and impressed, and partly unexpectedly disappointed.