So I headed down to St. Joseph Hospital yesterday morning for my abdominal CT scan. When I scheduled the appointment, I was told I'd have to show up two hours early to drink a nice barium milkshake. It turned out when I reached the radiology floor, though, that my urologist had merely ordered a scan with and without contrast. No barium required. This meant I was there two hours early.

That was okay, though. They squeezed me right in. Lying on the table being slid like a magician's assistant through the donut hole of the scanner, I was amused by the light-up pictographs that instructed me when to hold my breath and when to exhale. The fellow in the breath-holding pictograph looked like he had a huge wad of chewing tobacco stuffed into his cheek. Among the other icons on the scanner display were a heart, a pair of lungs, and something that at first looked to me like a bondage hood. It was actually supposed to be a radiation warning symbol with a camera aperture affixed to its underside.

I went through the scanner twice before a nurse stuck me with an IV line to flood my veins with a radiocontrast dye to help my urinary tract show up better in the images. She warned me that I would probably feel warm or flushed for a minute or so when the dye went in. The sensation was actually a whole lot weirder than that. It actually made me feel like I was being cooked from the inside out, like my bones were glowing red. It was like having the worst fever I'd ever experienced. And the sensation faded, as promised, after a minute or so.

(Does anyone know why it feels that way? I'm wondering if it's some kind of immunoresponse.)

Anyway, my urologist will have the results by the time I go in to get scoped next week. I'm holding out hope that it's just a mild case of stones. We shall see.

By the way, for those legions of you who've been on tenterhooks about my bladder, tomorrow I at last go in for my abdominal CT scan. (I had to reschedule it from last month because of a guest.) I have to be there two hours early to drink barium or something of the sort so my inner bits will be nice and glowy. I'll be sure to report.

Then next week I have my lovely cystoscopy at the urologist's office, when he have a look-see directly inside the ol' bladder. Can't wait for that. I've had one once before, and believe me, it's so much fun.

Now that Christmas is over, let's talk about miracles.

Miracles have been on my mind since last week when I heard the story of Kateri Tekakwitha, a 17th century Mohawk-Algonquin woman whom the Vatican plans to canonize. The miracle that sealed her canonization was 5-year-old Jake Finkbonner's 2006 recovery from the flesh-eating bacterium Strep A. His chest, neck, face, and scalp were infected, but a Blessed Kateri relic and prayers to the long-dead woman supposedly halted the progress of the infection before it reached his eyes, brain, or heart.

Jake's recovery is wonderful, perhaps even remarkable, but is it a miracle? We tend to use the word miracle in two different senses without always making much of a distinction between them. Sometimes we mean an occurrence has come to pass that was simply quite unlikely. In this case, miracle is nothing more than a hyperbolic turn of phrase. But often we mean an occurrence that could only have come to pass through some kind of supernatural or divine intervention.

The miraculous waters are only muddied by the frequency with which the word gets tossed around in the news. A game-winning three-point shot from half-court at the buzzer and other impressive athletic feats get the same tag as the 10-year-old Dutch boy who survives a plane crash that kills all 103 other people on board.

But are any of these occurrences more than rhetorical miracles? We know that, under the right circumstances, some people can survive plane crashes. We know that, with the right combination of skill, training, and luck, improbable last-minute field goals can happen. We know that internal diseases can be halted or cured, even if we don't always understand the precise mechanisms that bring this about. These and other seeimingly remarkable occurrences are things that we learn through our experience in, observation of, and interaction with the world are, in fact, possible.

When we sit at the bedside of a cancer-afflicted loved one and pray for God to send a cure, we know that a cure really is possible. But imagine sitting at the bedside of a loved one whose leg has been severed in an accident. Would any of us pray to God for the leg to regrow or be restored without surgical intervention and seriously expect that prayer to be answered? No, because we know through our experience of the world that limbs do not spontaneously regenerate. We don't even think about the possibility that God would provide such a miracle.

Which is odd. Our expectation of what God can miraculously accomplish is confined entirely to the realm of the possible. What we know is flatly impossible doesn't even enter into our thinking.

A miracle would be 104 out of 104 passengers surviving a horrific plane crash without a scratch. A miracle would be a priest sticking someone's severed leg back to the stump and having it reattach itself. Surely these feats would not be beyond an omnipotent God who traffics in the otherwise impossible. But no, what we consider to be miracles really aren't, and what would be true miracles don't lie within the realms of our expectations or even our imaginations.

Even young Jake Finkbonner, cured by a miraculous relic, seems to have that innate understanding of what is actually possible and what isn't. He says he wants to help other kids when he grows up. Does that mean he wants to be a priest? A saint?

No. He says he wants to be a doctor.

[Spoiler warning: Mildly squicky medical details within. The squeamish may not wish their appetites spoiled.]

I know you've all been waiting breathlessly to hear what's come of my possible kidney stone situation. I just saw my very booked-up urologist, and what he has to say boils down to: "We need to do more tests before we know what's going on."

He cautions me that there could be a myriad of reasons for hematuria (blood in the urine) and stinging urination. The blood (which, incidentally, I've only seen twice) could be coming from the kidneys, the bladder, the urethra, what have you. I need to start out by having an abdominal CT scan and a cystoscopy.

I've never had a CT scan, but I've had a cystoscopy one time before. It Is Not Fun. It involves having a camera shoved up your urethra and into your bladder. Yes, it's done with local anaesthesia, but you still feel it. The only good thing about it is, it couldn't be scheduled until January 18th.

The good news is, my urine is clear of any infection. As long as I was there, they drew blood for PSA testing. (My father died almost four years ago of prostate cancer.) Or rather, they attempted to draw blood. For some reason my veins weren't cooperating. Even when the phlebotomist managed to hit my vein, she was getting a bare spatter of blood in the tube. After two attempts in my right arm and one in my left, she finally struck gold by tapping a vein in the back of my left hand. It's something you feel silly saying to a woman, but I've never had that problem before. Seriously. It must have been her fault.

Okay then. I'll check in again after the (gulp!) cystoscopy.

[Spoiler warning: Mildly squicky medical details within. The squeamish may not wish their appetites spoiled.]

It had been quite some time since Laura or I had visited a doctor, probably too long. Now we're all too familiar with the decor at our physician's new office.

Do I need to tell you how it started? Okay, it burned a little when I peed. (Don't worry—Laura's story and mine are not related.) This went on for a couple of days and I didn't pay much attention to it, but then on Saturday morning it didn't just burn. It felt like a red-hot poker was being jabbed up there when I peed.

Our doctor doesn't have office hours on weekends, so I took myself to a clinic. The doctor there didn't take much of a medical history from me, but he put me on an antibiotic in case it was a urinary tract infection, told me to drink lots of water, and sent me home.

I kept meaning to make an appointment with our regular doctor, especially since the burning, while its intensity fluctuated, never really got any better. On Wednesday, however, something new happened. My urine looked normal at first, but was followed by a bright red stream. When the panic subsided, I called my doctor to see if I could get in that day. I realized that, far from having a UTI (which I already pretty much knew I didn't, since the antibiotic wasn't helping), I probably had stones. I passed a stone once before, in 2006, and the things apparently run in my family. I should have realized what it was sooner, but I guess I didn't want to think about that possibility.

My doctor confirmed that was likely the case when I saw her that afternoon. She put me on a different antibiotic, Cipro, just as a precaution, told me to drink lots and lots of water, told me to make an appointment with my urologist, and told me to go to an emergency room immediately if I started having pain in my sides or developed a fever.

That was thirteen days ago, November 9th. I still haven't seen my urologist because the earliest appointment I could get was November 30th. The blood in my urine has only recurred once since then, but the pain during urination fluctuates between pretty intense and nonexistent. I think I've passed at least one small stone, which felt very strange but not at all painful, but I can't be sure that was the case. All I can say for sure is that urinating felt completely normal for the rest of that day, but that it was back to burning to next day.

Still eight days to go before I can see my urologist, at which point I imagine he will stick a camera up my urethra and take a peek around inside my bladder. Fun times. It's happened to me before.

Meanwhile, my left eye had been bothering me a little, but I didn't really pay much attention to it since all my energy was focused on my quarter-hourly trips to the bathroom. But on Tuesday last week Laura told me that my eye looked really terrible, all red and a bit puffy. Like I said, I hadn't been paying much attention. My glasses have thick rims and narrow lenses, which has the effect of casting a shadow onto my eye when I look in the mirror, so I hadn't noticed how red the eye had become.

By now our doctor was on vacation, but I dragged myself over to the office the next morning during walk-in hours and saw one of the other doctors. Probably conjuctivitis, she said, though if, as I told her, it had really been bothering me for almost a week, I should have been waking up with a lot of crust around my eye, which I wasn't. "Maybe the Cipro tablets you've been taking have kept the conjunctivitis from worsening, like it normally would," she said. "I'm going to give you Cipro eyedrops. Hopefully you'll start to see improvement within a day or two."

I did, and I'm happy to report that my eye is pretty back to normal. If only my damn knee would stop hurting now when I'm going up and down stairs.

Since everything seems to happen at once, Laura has been in and out of doctor's offices at the same time. It was a little over a month ago that we made a trip to New York City. Because of a work commitment that came up, she ended up leaving Chicago a day later than I did. As she tells the story, that first night that I was in New York, she was riding the subway home from work when the train banked hard around a curve. A woman standing near her, texting, was not holding onto anything and fell onto Laura, smashing her hand. When the woman straightened up again, Laura's left pinky finger was sticking out at a funny angle at the second knuckle.

Laura looked at the finger, as did the shocked woman. Then Laura took her right hand (which, you may or may not know, consists of only two opposing digits, thanks to a birth defect, and is nicknamed The Claw) and popped the left pinky back into place. The woman turned ashen—though Laura says she doesn't know whether it was because of the finger-popping or because of the unexpected appearance of The Claw itself—and fled through the crowd to the far end of the train car.

(I told Laura she should have held her hands up accusingly and shouted, "I'm a hand model!!!" She does guard her fingers jealously since, as she says, she doesn't have any phalanges to spare.)

Anyway, the finger ached for a while, and it felt stiff, but Laura thought it was actually getting better. Finally, though, the knuckle swelled up and she went in to see the doctor. An X-ray confirmed that there was a hairline fracture in there. She visited an orthopedic surgeon in case surgery was going to be necessary, but he said he didn't think it would be, that it looked like it was going to heal right on its own. He did, however, pull out a gigantic needle and administer two injections of an anti-inflammatory directly into her finger joint. Laura says the surgeon asked her first how well she dealt with pain. Pretty well, Laura said. No, said the surgeon, as in do you pass out?

She didn't, but that's how much the injections hurt.

Laura's finger does seem to be improving, but that's not all that's been going on. Ella recently visited the doctor because of a limp in her left hind leg. She was diagnosed with a probable partial rupture of her cranial cruciate ligament, or CCL, which is the canine equivalent of the ACL. This knee injury meant we had to prevent Ella from running for an entire week, though walking was prescribed as "very good for her." Question: Have you ever tried to walk a dog and prevent it from running at all? It was a long week. Also, Bart (our Honda Accord) has been to the doctor to have a brake light fixed and a new set of tires installed.

So there you go. We've now been to doctor's offices more often in the past two weeks than in the past two years. The lesson here, kids, is to go visit your doctor at the first sign of any problem. Don't put it off! Also, stop that damn texting, unless you can do it one-handed.

I can't help myself. I have to share a couple more tidbits on the topic of health care. First is Johann Hari of The Independent, who takes the American right wing to damning task in yesterday's "Republicans, Religion and the Triumph of Unreason." Here are two of the almost amusing bits from a not-really-very-amusing article:

These increasingly frenzied claims have become so detached from reality that they often seem like black comedy. The right-wing magazine US Investors' Daily claimed that if Stephen Hawking had been British, he would have been allowed to die at birth by its "socialist" healthcare system. Hawking responded with a polite cough that he is British, and "I wouldn't be here without the NHS"...

For many of the people at the top of the party, this is merely cynical manipulation. One of Bush's former advisers, David Kuo, has said the President and Karl Rove would mock evangelicals as "nuts" as soon as they left the Oval Office. But the ordinary Republican base believe this stuff. They are being tricked into opposing their own interests through false fears and invented demons. Last week, one of the Republicans sent to disrupt a healthcare town hall started a fight and was injured—and then complained he had no health insurance. I didn't laugh; I wanted to weep.  [full article]

As the health care establishment appears to be once again able to block any reasonable changes to America's sick health care system, it's important to note that, ironically, the "father" of Canada's universal, single-payer health care system was late President Lyndon B. Johnson. In 1964, his plan caused Canadian Prime Minister Lester Pearson to rush the same health care scheme into existence so that Ottawa was not beaten by the Americans, as was the case in 1934 with Social Security. As things turned out, LBJ compromised with the Republicans and scaled back his plan to a co-payer insurance for senior citizens, or Medicare. So it's hardly surprising that, again, a popular President cannot win out against the nasty tactics and enormous wealth of the medical vested interests.

And yet, today Canada's system is not only as good as America's, but better medically speaking, according to the World Health Organization. Even more dramatic, it is between 30 and 60% cheaper for procedures, medications and hospital stays. Despite compelling evidence, the status quo remains south of the border and American voters/media appear to be unaware of the need for change. There are billions in profits being made at the expense of Americans and the country's economy.  [full article]

Every time I hear someone on the radio going on about how there's nothing wrong with the American health care system, I get so mad I can't see straight. I always wonder out loud what that person would say if he lost his job and his health insurance, or if she suddenly couldn't get coverage for a life-threatening disease because of some innocuous "pre-existing condition."

I have pretty good health coverage, but that's only because my wife has a good job. I don't want to think about what would happen if she lost her job. COBRA coverage would be available for 18 months, of course, but it's as expensive as half a month's rent. And even with our coverage, it's a tremendous pain in the ass to negotiate the thicket of requirements you have to go through in order to consult a specialist, which both Laura and I are currently doing.

In fact, yesterday I had to cancel a long-standing appointment I was supposed to have this afternoon with the urologist I've been seeing (in a professional sense, not the sense of having an affair with, although he's cute in a reassuring-older-guy kinda way) this year. Why? Because Laura's insurance just changed to a new company, and my procedure would not be covered unless I could get a referral form from my primary-care physician, but that office wouldn't cough up the form because we haven't received our new insurance cards yet....

Fortunately it's not an urgent procedure, but if it had been I would be, to put it crudely, fucked. I can reschedule for a couple of months from now, but how much easier and more sensible would this all have been under a single-payer system? I don't know how anyone with serious health problems manages.

With all the hysteria out there about socialism from people who would prefer shooting themselves in the foot and bleeding to death over guaranteeing their own unbroken access to good medical care, it's a good time to compare our American health-care system with that of our big, scary, freedom-hating neighbor to the north. Those dangerously deluded Canadians, who just don't realize that the road to hell or at least totalitarianism is paved with ideas like the desirability of keeping everyone in the country healthy. Aaaagh!

Back in early 2008, Sara Robinson of the Campaign for America's Future, an American living in Canada, very handily debunked some of the top myths about the Canadian health-care system (starting with the myth that their medicine is "socialized"), but without skipping over some of the drawbacks of that system. Her two blog entries on the topic are well worth your time to read:

• Mythbusting Canadian Health Care—Part I
  
• Mythbusting Canadian Health Care—Part II: Debunking the Free Marketeers

Straight up. But I would trade ours for theirs in a heartbeat.

I'm not one to announce my daily word count, but I will say that progress is beginning to be made. Today it was made at a Starbucks on Greenview after I got my B₁₂ shot at the doctor's office. Yes, it turns out I have quite a B₁₂ deficiency, which might explain the tingling I sometimes feel in my back and legs, not to mention my frequent fatigue and general lack of energy. I think it's too early to chalk today's productivity up to the vitamin boost, though.

I'd like to propose a law. My idea is inspired by a technique I proposed for preventing executives from prioritizing the most egregiously idiotic of projects, but admittedly those stakes are small beer compared to the problem my law would address.

The proposal is simple. Before declaring preemptive (i.e., unprovoked) war, the president would be required to sacrifice a finger.

I'm not talking about a clean amputation, either, with anaesthesia and all those modern niceties. I mean the president's finger would be hacked off with a dull saw, preferably rusty, while he watches. In the most appealing scenario, the amputation would be performed by a surgeon with experience in Civil War reenactments. The surgeon could have whisky, but the president could not.

Also, the stump would be cauterized with a red-hot branding iron.

As you can imagine, the president would have to feel pretty strongly about the necessity of a preemptive war in order to start one. And we could be sure that he was feeling at least a portion of the misery, pain, and suffering he was about to unleash.

Oh, yes, and the amputation would be televised, so we could see how long it took the president to pass out. I'd write my senator and suggest this, but my senator is Hillary Clinton.