About halfway between my apartment and my office is a community garden. In a corner of that community garden is a milkweed plant. I first noticed it in early September, because of the brightly-colored animals crawling all over it. These, I learned from the internet (thanks, internet), are milkweed bugs. They eat milkweed seeds by […]
Miscellaneous
More imaging, more problems: Colin Norman’s medical troubles began with his heart. But in this week’s post, an MRI of Colin’s heart shows that his pancreas is wearing a cyst ominously called an intraductal papillary mucinous neoplasm. These cysts may be an early sign of pancreatic cancer, but using them to screen for the disease . . . well, that’s tricky. […]
A friend of mine, a fund manager, described his experience of the financial crisis of 2008. His fund was based in one of these mid-town Manhattan office towers they call a Hedge Fund Hotel. In those early days when the crisis set in, my friend could arrive at work relaxed, but then he’d be in an […]
A little over a month ago, Liberian Thomas Eric Duncan became the first person in the US to develop ebola. In the days before he died, Duncan infected two nurses. Last month, a New York doctor who had been working with Doctors without Borders in Guinea was diagnosed with the disease, becoming the fourth person to develop […]
It doesn’t seem right that something as basic as time should be so annoying. No, it’s not time itself that’s annoying. I’ve more or less made peace with the fact that it’s marching on. The thing that’s annoying is when the stupid time keeps changing. In college, I appreciated that extra hour of sleep in […]
A few years ago, I decided to take up hunting. This was kind of a big deal, because I’d spent the first decade-plus of my adult life as vegetarian. I became a big game hunter for the same reason I raise chickens — to know where my food comes from and ensure that it’s raised […]
Seeing a mammoth is not the same as looking over a zoo wall at a modern elephant, or even standing next to a live, gray, wrinkled wall of flesh with scant, coarse hairs. Watching the flexible, prehensile reach of an elephant’s trunk and the slow cross-wise chewing of hay, I’ve found it hard to see […]
October 20-24, 2014 In his third post, Colin Norman faces a daunting prospect: heart surgery. “The operation isn’t as simple as snipping out the piece of aorta that includes the aneurysm and sewing in the Dacron tube. Because my aneurysm is right at the root of the aorta, the surgery would involve the left ventricle […]
