I’m back home from my gastroscopy now, which was at 1:00 today. It wasn’t exactly a cake walk, but it was far less worse than I expected. About as bad as a 1 hour dental appointment squeezed into 10 minutes.

No doubt this was partly thanks to the drugs–the bitter, nasty tasting spray to numb my throat and relax my gag reflux, and the fast-acting, short half-life benzodiazapine which caused me to relax, and may have provided a little amnesia as a side effect. I dozed in the recovery room for about half an hour after the procedure, but don’t feel the least bit wobbly now, 4 and 1/2 hours later. Nonetheless, I have promised the good nurses at UBC’s Koerner Pavilion that I will not drive my car until after lunch tomorrow.

The results were inconclusive. I definitely don’t have a hiatal hernia, there’s no indication of tissue damage from acid reflux, and my espophagus is perfectly normal. This is all good news, of course. But a second, similar test is recommended, sometime in September, to test my esophageal motility.

I’m not sure if I’m up for it. Not because I’m avoiding the test, but because whatever is plaguing my insides is working well on the outside–kind of like a mini stomach stapling. New trousers I bought back in March now fall down if I don’t wear a belt, though I’m far from looking frail. So I might put that second test off till after Christmas. New year, new wardrobe?

I’m still mulling over this blog, what it is, why I do it. Meanwhile, some members of the committee in my head keep reminding me how far behind I am with posting. Life got a bit too hectic and stressful back in the middle of last October, what with carpal tunnel, home renovations, real estate deals, getting ready to move, a quick trip to San Francisco, and the news, two days after I got back, that I had to have surgery, and the sooner the better. This blog went down for a while, and at the time I didn’t know if I would go back to it, though since April I’ve posting on a more or less regular basis.

I’d decided, back at the beginning of January 2007, to blog about every film, book, concert, and performance I took in, mainly because I have a dodgy memory, and wanted a way to remember. So far I haven’t written about any of the books I’ve read since fall 2007, or the movies I’ve seen since last November. The books are in piles, and a few cursory notes I’ve made about the movies I’ve seen are on scraps of paper, stapled together on my desk. Now that I’ve outed myself, I have no more reason to lollygag.

Regular readers (all four of you) will be aware that post-surgery, I’ve been having difficulty eating…the technical term for which is dysphagia. Next Thursday a camera will go down my throat and right into my duodenum. I’m not looking forward to this, but will be glad to know what the problem is, and what can be done about it.

Almost all the interest I have had about food has gone into abeyance for the past few months. Though I’ve gone out for dinner a few times, I can’t eat much by the time evening comes around, and I just can’t get excited about the prospects of eating or writing about it.

Likewise coffee and chocolate, once almost daily indulgences. They are on the list my doctor gave me of foods to avoid, and I have managed to give them a pass since the middle of April. But I have some notes about chocolate, six or seven artisanal varieties, waiting to be turned into a blog post.

There’s also the software issue. I’ve been using Wordpress 2.1 almost since the beginning. I’ve avoided updating it because so often after Wordpress announced a new version, the security update patches would be announced. I would decide to wait till the version was stable, but before it seemingly was, Wordpress would announce yet another new version. Now they are up to version 2.6. I’m wondering how long it will be till they announce version 2.7 With all these updates, I’ve been telling myself I have to learn to install Wordpress, so I can do the updates myself. So that’s a project on my to-do list.

Since the spammers found a way to exploit earlier versions of Wordpress (up to 2.3 I think) I’ve turned off my blogroll with the best of intentions of turning it back on, once I’ve updated the software.

So there you have it. Over the next couple months I plan to bring all my book and movie posts up-to-date, learn to install a sexier version of WP, and maybe introduce a few surprises. I hope somebody cares.

So it was off to the the gastroenterologist this morning at 8 a.m. Not my favourite time of day.

He asked me a few questions, the last one being “Do you want me to take a look?”

I thought he was suggesting a bit of prodding and palpating right then and there, so I said okay. He was out of the office like a shot, saying “I’ll get the book.”

Book? Short story is I’m “booked” for a gastroscopy on July 31 at 1 p.m. Nothing to eat or drink after midnight the night before. Food I can do without, but by the time they stick that camera down my throat I will be one thirsty camper.

Sigh. I tried to reason with him, saying things had improved a bit during the six weeks I’d waited for my appointment, but he wasn’t listening.

Of course, with the all the sedation I’ve been promised, I may not even notice the camera. Plus my throat will be frozen. Apparently this reduces the gag reflex.

As he browsed through my file I couldn’t help but notice that the good doctor had a full colour set of images of my business end, taken during a colonoscopy a couple of years ago. By the end of next week, he’ll have pictures of my entire digestive tract.

It crossed my mind, for the briefest second, to mention in jest how touched I was that he’d kept my pictures. But he’s kind of a lugubrious sort, and even if he thought what I said was funny, I knew he wouldn’t have laughed.

The Lido, an unassuming storefront on the south side of Broadway, between Fraser and Main, seems to have taken on a new life.

Back in the 70s, the Lido was a sketchy grocery store with irregular opening hours. Those in the know would arrive at the right time in order to buy slightly moldy packets of cheese, bashed cans of food from exotic or unknown origins, aging bread and pastries, and other semi-attractive comestibles, all at drastically reduced prices, from the Lido’s proprietor, Chris.

Chris was never known to be kind to his wife, at least in public, when she helped him with the store, but she must have been devoted. After he died, the store became a sort of museum to Chris’ memory. Aging packets of dried goods remained on the shelves, slowly draining of colour. For a long time, those packets remained on view to passersby, though the Lido never opened again.

A few years back, the windows were papered over. The Lido museum had become a private matter, unobtrusive and forgettable, lodged up against an auto body shop on an unremarkable stretch of Broadway.

Last week I noticed something had changed. The newspaper lining had been removed from the windows, which themselves had been replaced with smart sand-blasted panes. The exterior, and particularly the Lido sign itself, all looked as if they had been spruced up.

Back in the 70s my mother, a woman in straightened circumstances always looking for a way to stretch a buck, would shop at the Lido. Sometimes she would take me with her. My clearest memory was of the old wooden floors, well worn, dark, ancient.

I loved those floors. Whatever becomes of the Lido, I really hope they keep those floors.

Dys = trouble. Phagia = taking in food. Since I had major surgery in the middle of February, dysphagia has been haunting my gullet. At first it was a minor, easily ignored annoyance, which only occurred briefly after dinner—a sensation that not everything I had eaten had made its way down the ol’espophagus.

My surgery had gone pretty much textbook, and I was managing the pain with out meds, other than a low level anti-inflammatory.

I’d been showing up at my doctor’s office for the previous 18 months with a range of annoying symptoms that painted no meaningful clinical picture. All, I was informed, pointed to far too much stress, a diagnosis with which, having lived through those 18 months, I had to concur. So it was easy to credit these odd swallowing difficulties to stress as well, something that would pass when I finally relaxed.

There were some symptoms that my doctors didn’t write off to stress. Otherwise I wouldn’t have this new 7-inch abdominal scar. Still I didn’t want to bother my doctor, who, though unfailingly kind and an excellent clinician, would most likely just pat my hand, and tell me to go home and work harder on my stress management skills.

Then latish April, things suddenly got a lot worse. Horrendous stomach pain, and the deep desire to rip my bra off and toss it in the nearest wastebin. Going to bed night after night with the uneasy sensation of food stuck in my gullet was suddenly compounded by the same ungodly feelings after breakfast and lunch.

So I did go to see my doctor, who suspected stress-related gastritis, an occasional post-surgery complication. He gave me some pills and told me the food sticking thing was not a good sign; it if wasn’t better in a month then I’d have to go for the camera-down-the throat test, otherwise known as an endoscopy. Oh. My.

Then the worst cold I’d had in years hit me, and I haven’t really felt the same since. I rarely get a cold, and when I do, can usually soldier through. Not this time, though I got in some good reading. For two weeks that cold made my life a misery, and the swallowing bit even more of a challenge.

The pills–proton pump inhibitors–which mainly cut off the switch in our stomachs that makes hydrochloric acid, are working, a little. But I have very little appetite, and no interest in food. Eating has become extremely boring. Everything must be taken in teeny little bits and very well chewed.

I’ve been trying to deal with this as best I can. Eating, the entire chewing and swallowing complex is something we don’t even think about until it stops working, or working well. Soup, yogurt, and oatmeal day after day get a little repetitive. But I’m not complaining, not in a world where so many millions are faced with serious food shortages.

The worst part was my automatic dire fantasies. Having long term anxiety means that I’ve been conjuring up visions of exotic diseases to go with every unusual symptom since I was old enough to parse the Reader’s Digest. Now, of course, we have the Internet, with its handy dandy symptom checkers. I make very good use of them, and they of me; This time I convinced myself that I was to soon leave the planet.

This is not the case, my doctor explained patiently, else I would be getting steadily worse, rather than steadily (albeit slightly) better. Unfortunately, the improvements are so slight that I must go and see my gastroenterologist on July 22, who will most likely recommend the “gold standard” test—the dreaded endoscopy.

I try not to think about it too much; the idea of swallowing a camera, but not being able to swallow the chord it is attached to makes me gag. I’m told they give you good drugs, some to freeze your throat, and some to allay your anxieties. I certainly hope so, because I am totally fed up with the whole damn thing.

The news stories are filed. Although Obama is officially 10 delegates short of the Democratic nomination, based on today’s exit polls, it is his. Here’s the story from the Globe and Mail. And from AP.

Back in November, I took this picture in the Mission District in San Francisco. Although I’d been (and remain) entranced by Obama since seeing him interviewed by Charlie Rose some months previously, I didn’t really think his campaign stood much of a chance against the more experienced Clinton machine.

This image of a small sign atop a nondescript (albeit blue) door reflected the ordinary people who believed in, and energized, Obama’s campaign.

I hope and believe Obama’s nomination and eventual election will signal a watershed in American politics. It is time for the baby boomers (and I am one) to sit down and stop messing things up.

Mr. V. is home this week, mainly so we can work on garden and house stuff. I’m probably not going near the computer much. Continuing to work through both “The Not So Big Life” and “A New Earth“, which are almost like companion volumes, at least for me today.

Here’s a quote from Susanka’s book that really struck me yesterday:

“Every single event in our lives is a type of food that allows us to understand ourselves more completely. If we reject food when it’s offered, w’re like children who don’t want to eat their vegetables. Yes, it’s true that children can survive without their vegetables, but they will grow more readily and with fewer health complications when they eat nutritious food. What our experiences offer us has just the same effect. They’re there to help us grow. Most of us are quite convinced that if we’re living properly, every life event should be yummy and positive. So when things don’t proceed as expected, we perceive that something is wrong, and we assume we must fix it. If we were personally in charge of determining what is best for us, we’d be eating the experiential equivalent of ice cream and chocolate cake all day long.”

Susanka begins this particular chapter with a quote from Ron Mangravite:

“The trick is to realize that the shit that falls on you is fertilizer.”

1. Linear time is not the only time.
A couple of decades ago I read Alan Lakein’s “How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life.” I’m not going to knock his advice, which is practical and helpful for those who need to be more efficient. It’s just not the whole story, and in taking his advice to heart I became something of a pain in the ass: frantic, frustrated, and extremely judgemental about folks who didn’t see things, or spend time, the way I did. Plus it meant my handbags got bigger and bigger–filled not only with books to read in case I was unexpectedly delayed, but also with every bit of flotsam and jetsam I could imagine I might need for any eventuality. These days I get by with a Roots bag that can manage a water bottle and a small camera, but no books. Doing “nothing” when Providence provides the opportunity, like virtue, is its own reward.

2. There is no need to justify our existence.
Back in high school an artsy creature who went by the name of Goat signed my yearbook with a quote I believe can be attributed to Bertrand Russell: “In order to justify your existence, you must create rather than rationalize.” I took this one to heart, bypassing the creating part, going straight to the justifying part, forgetting to remember that I (like each one of us) have a right to be here. It is still hard for me to remember this one, but I am learning that our spark of divinity can be reflected through our creativity.

3. My ego is not who I am.
Currently I’m on my second read through Eckhart Tolle’s “A New Earth,” which, along with his “The Power of Now” I’ve found extremely helpful. Tolle seems to be the real deal, a modern, non-denominational spiritual teacher. Not everything he writes agrees with my personal religious convictions, but as they say in Twelve Step Programs, I can take what I like and leave the rest. One thing I’ve taken from Tolle that I don’t like, but is true, is how I’ve allowed my ego to run roughshod and become a bolus of compulsive thinking that crowds out everyday joy. Recognizing this bolus for what it is has enabled me to begin to get reacquainted with peace and presence and untie the knots of compulsive thinking. And hopefully become less of a pain in the ass. Amen to that.

One of the nicest gifts I received this past Christmas was Sarah Susanka’s “Home by Design.” Susanka is known for her architectural practice and philosophy, first explored in “The Not So Big House: A Blueprint for the Way We Really Live.” Susanka’s “not so big” philosophy guides design of homes that are sanctuaries that simplify lives, rather than starter mansions that tax energies.

“Home by Design” has been helpful in two ways. First, it has enabled me to begin to imagining how to transform our recently bought, modest house into a home that works for us. Second, it led me to Susanka’s website, where I discovered her more recent book “The Not So Big Life: Making Room for What Really Matters.” It is a blueprint for making changes in life, often small and subtle ones, that enable all the space and time needed to do the things that really matter.

Here’s a quote that struck me yesterday:

“One of the most difficult skills to develop is the ability to say no when you know that’s what the situation requires. Because we place such a high value on a can-do attitude, we lose sight of what’s actually possible. We give one another accolades for doing more than is humanly possible in less time than is feasible and assume that the results are good. But they’re not. They’re not good for the people performing the superhuman feats. They’re not good for the people receiving the services performed by the overtaxed workers. And they’re not good for future generations, who will inherit the results of work performed by individuals functioning at the precarious edge of their capabilities”