(Note - this is quite explicit.)
Hemorrhoids.
I had absolutely no idea what they were except as the butt of a joke from Austen Tayshus a very long time ago. It turns out that the slight lump in my bum was indeed the grapes of wrath (so called because the swelling going down looks like a bunch of grapes). Until I got up the courage to have my wife look up my back passage (standing in the front passage), I didn't realise that said lump was pressing on a nerve & was the cause of my sudden back pain.
Time to visit the doctor - preferably one I won't have to face again (& won't be facing this time).
A quick dose of embarrassment at the end of a rubber-gloved finger gave me the news: "You, sir, have piles!" He wasn't quite that chipper or polite, but I had to make allowances under the circumstances. He wrote down a cream named after my arse - easier to remember - & a letter of recommendation to a specialist ("patient has piles; your area of expertise, I believe").
It took two weeks to get into the consulting surgeon's offices, by which time my grapes had shrivelled down to sultanas under the brilliance of where the sun shines out.
It was a busy office. I was the last patient for the day, apparently, & had to wait more than hour for my appointment to be fulfilled, by which time I had noticed the misspelling of the surgeon's qualifications etched into the door, & discovered enough history to realise that I was not going to be dealing with a doctor, but a researcher who had decided to career change to surgery. Being South African, it would appear, a bedside manner was something for which my new rubber-glove-friend was neither qualified or trained.
I had prepared myself for someone tall, fair of hair & skin, & abrupt. I realised that I was still underprepared when I met her & remembered that I was soon to be her glove puppet.
She confirmed that things were "going along nicely" - although thankfully her practiced investigation while I was turned to the wall was even briefer than the GP's. She did however, suggest that "given my age" I should have a colonoscopy "just in case".
I made a booking as far away as I thought polite.
Unfortunately, even two months can skip past when you're ignoring the inevitability of people probing your nether regions while you're unconscious. You'll be asleep when they stick a tube up there, but you can well imagine just how long that thing is & how far up it's going.
I did not read the provided documentation until the last minute - that is, when I should have been putting things in play, like pre-admission for the hospital. The diet changes were minor - not even mildly annoying - but then there's the medicinal end of the procedural preparation.
MoviPrep.
It's as dramatic as hemorrhoids. A sentence in itself - in both the grammatical & sense of injustice.
The directions are almost threatening in their understatement - prepare the solution & chill for two hours. Chilling was the last thing on my mind as I'd already read humorous blogs relating the effects of this "solution". However, forewarned is ... simply another way to build up panic.
My first mouthful - & indeed hurried glassful - reminded me of L&P, that classic Kiwi drink. The second, not so. Successive glasses were increasingly more difficult to swallow between the effects
the product was having. One could say that the gap of thirty minutes between my first two visits to the bathroom was relaxing, but also not indicative of the power of this liquid to "cleanse the intestines".
I made a game of it - checking to see just how cleansed I was becoming, from passing a normally-brown-coloured wet stool, through to pissing out a stream of yellowish-not-quite-clear liquid through my mildly surprised sphincter.
It's not like diarrhea at all. It's very, very different. Diarrhea has your stomach behind it trying to get rid of stuff that could be bad for you. This is an indiscriminate eviction of all intestinal tenants.
In effect, I ingested two litres of "stuff", at least half a litre of water (to ensure non-dehydration?), plus my "meal" of (clear) chicken soup, over a period of less than five hours. My wife suggested it was so much liquid that I shouldn't rush it. My bladder was the least of my concerns.
Like contractions, the pain & exertion came more frequently until my labour was finally & suddenly over & I felt optimistic enough to sleep.
I went to bed in fear. I woke up in annoyance. Mostly, I was annoyed that I would have gotten up in half an hour anyway, so why my intestines decided that I needed one more burst of expulsion at that time was beyond me.
By comparison, the procedure itself was a dream.
25 May 2016
22 May 2016
Bicameral Vision
We lose sight of the origins & intentions of our democratic system to the point where, not only do we forget its advantages, we get distracted by those who intentionally want to subvert good process.
The number of times I have heard whinging about how the upper house (state or federal) "gets in the way" of law-making has even brought me to a point of tuning out & not responding with my old tune of " ... but that's their job!" Indeed, the whole point of having two houses of parliament is for one to set the laws & the other - having no part in the setting - ensuring that those laws make sense within themselves & for the people - a house of review.
We have muddied this for so long, where the "power" in the lower house - those who can control enough votes to set whatever laws they want to the exclusion of any good ideas coming from the other side of the house - will complain bitterly if they don't have the power in the upper house to steamroll whatever they want. They will use words like "mandate" or "trigger for a double dissolution" to imply that they are hard done by because the people did not trust them enough to review their own decisions (strangely).
Admittedly, the parliamentary system is far from perfect - & how people are elected to the two houses is constantly a matter of abuse & review in itself (by another party entirely, made up of public servants) - but to understand how it works best, you need to understand how it was meant to work when it was developed, & the years of changes in the English system from which ours was born.
My inspiration for beginning this blog, however, was not parliamentary decision making, but decisions for all social things. We still have a monarchical view of our democracy - someone comes into power, & they should be allowed to do what they want. This is tyrannical at the least, & we should have come a long way beyond that. It happens in government, in enterprises (Board Chairpersons or CEOs), & the public service (government-backed flunkeys placed in high positions).
What if, however, laws, rules, procedures & practices were developed in a bicameral way - one group to debate & propose changes, & another group to review & approve them (with limited ability to make changes)?
In a previous blog, I mentioned that education is a problem that no government can 'fix' because they just don't have the background or the desire to do anything socially useful to 'fix' the way in which non-voters (primarily) are educated.
What if, instead, educators were elected to a committee to investigate & propose laws, & a group of other interested parties - community representatives, administrators, parents, etc - were empowered to review & accept recommendations?
I know that sounds radical. It would also solve another of education's little problems - how do you get more out of the teachers who are skilled & knowledgeable & want to put back into the system without being administrators? You put them on committees of change, or involve them in reviewing changes - as professional & current teachers.
That way, you don't lose their interest, you gain from their experience, you give them something to aim for (a prestigious position on a committee), & you keep them engaged in the challenges that they themselves face in their day-to-day workplace.
Education is one such example. I don't want to list others, because the reality is that a bicameral vision could be applied to anything from the running of a public company to a charity. Looking at things differently, to see that rule by committee is possible, is one thing. Realising that any activity could benefit from the social experience of the members of any community is the big leap forward that democracy needs.
The number of times I have heard whinging about how the upper house (state or federal) "gets in the way" of law-making has even brought me to a point of tuning out & not responding with my old tune of " ... but that's their job!" Indeed, the whole point of having two houses of parliament is for one to set the laws & the other - having no part in the setting - ensuring that those laws make sense within themselves & for the people - a house of review.
We have muddied this for so long, where the "power" in the lower house - those who can control enough votes to set whatever laws they want to the exclusion of any good ideas coming from the other side of the house - will complain bitterly if they don't have the power in the upper house to steamroll whatever they want. They will use words like "mandate" or "trigger for a double dissolution" to imply that they are hard done by because the people did not trust them enough to review their own decisions (strangely).
Admittedly, the parliamentary system is far from perfect - & how people are elected to the two houses is constantly a matter of abuse & review in itself (by another party entirely, made up of public servants) - but to understand how it works best, you need to understand how it was meant to work when it was developed, & the years of changes in the English system from which ours was born.
My inspiration for beginning this blog, however, was not parliamentary decision making, but decisions for all social things. We still have a monarchical view of our democracy - someone comes into power, & they should be allowed to do what they want. This is tyrannical at the least, & we should have come a long way beyond that. It happens in government, in enterprises (Board Chairpersons or CEOs), & the public service (government-backed flunkeys placed in high positions).
What if, however, laws, rules, procedures & practices were developed in a bicameral way - one group to debate & propose changes, & another group to review & approve them (with limited ability to make changes)?
In a previous blog, I mentioned that education is a problem that no government can 'fix' because they just don't have the background or the desire to do anything socially useful to 'fix' the way in which non-voters (primarily) are educated.
What if, instead, educators were elected to a committee to investigate & propose laws, & a group of other interested parties - community representatives, administrators, parents, etc - were empowered to review & accept recommendations?
I know that sounds radical. It would also solve another of education's little problems - how do you get more out of the teachers who are skilled & knowledgeable & want to put back into the system without being administrators? You put them on committees of change, or involve them in reviewing changes - as professional & current teachers.
That way, you don't lose their interest, you gain from their experience, you give them something to aim for (a prestigious position on a committee), & you keep them engaged in the challenges that they themselves face in their day-to-day workplace.
Education is one such example. I don't want to list others, because the reality is that a bicameral vision could be applied to anything from the running of a public company to a charity. Looking at things differently, to see that rule by committee is possible, is one thing. Realising that any activity could benefit from the social experience of the members of any community is the big leap forward that democracy needs.
01 May 2016
We'll Never 'Fix' the Education System
We don't have the ability or will to 'fix' anything as complex as education.
A bold statement, but if anyone had said it twenty, or fifty years ago, people would have pooh-poohed them; & yet we've gotten nowhere over that time. I don't think I'm going out on a limb in saying what people have been thinking for a long time, & I won't have to wait twenty years to be "proven right".
The reason we won't fix the system is because those empowered to do so - those holding the purse strings - can't. They are the wrong people to see what the problems are, & they have the wrong reasons for applying fixes.
I am, of course, talking about politicians. They are not professional educators, they are not administrators of education systems, they have no skills in business transformation, they are not even employers of the newly educated. They have no vested interest in fixing education. They have no notion of the problems actually within the system. Their only goal is to appear to be doing something in the eyes of their electoral base.
Let's be cynical (of politicians - I'd like you to be quite open to my suggestions) for a moment. One side of politics claims that the best education is acquired in the private system, therefore the closer the public system can get to that, the more likely it will be 'fixed'. This is anathema to their opposition, who would take the first opportunity to reverse any policies put in place along those lines. That second unnamed political party would claim that encouraging the best teachers to stay in the public system (by offering better wages) would improve the general level of education. This, of course, smacks of unionism, which could not be supported by the first side.
What if they're both right? Neither side could possibly support or encourage the others' position. Worse - what if they're both wrong & we just don't have enough parties to offer policies that fly in the face of these dogmatic approaches & be aired & discussed before the general populace - not the voters, but the parents & teachers.
Education is big (number of people involved, number of stakeholders - kids, budget, time - thirteen-plus years of a person's life), & yet policies are squeezed into five-second sound-bites - preferably by a minister & two cronies with good haircuts & an ability to smile & nod without looking like axe murderers.
This is insane. This - & only this - is why the education system cannot be fixed. We - as a society - must treat education with respect & ask more of those placed (by us) in positions of power (government), so that they, in turn, are compelled to add a touch of professionalism to parliament & policy making that achieves real outcomes when the cameras & microphones are switched off.
A bold statement, but if anyone had said it twenty, or fifty years ago, people would have pooh-poohed them; & yet we've gotten nowhere over that time. I don't think I'm going out on a limb in saying what people have been thinking for a long time, & I won't have to wait twenty years to be "proven right".
The reason we won't fix the system is because those empowered to do so - those holding the purse strings - can't. They are the wrong people to see what the problems are, & they have the wrong reasons for applying fixes.
I am, of course, talking about politicians. They are not professional educators, they are not administrators of education systems, they have no skills in business transformation, they are not even employers of the newly educated. They have no vested interest in fixing education. They have no notion of the problems actually within the system. Their only goal is to appear to be doing something in the eyes of their electoral base.
Let's be cynical (of politicians - I'd like you to be quite open to my suggestions) for a moment. One side of politics claims that the best education is acquired in the private system, therefore the closer the public system can get to that, the more likely it will be 'fixed'. This is anathema to their opposition, who would take the first opportunity to reverse any policies put in place along those lines. That second unnamed political party would claim that encouraging the best teachers to stay in the public system (by offering better wages) would improve the general level of education. This, of course, smacks of unionism, which could not be supported by the first side.
What if they're both right? Neither side could possibly support or encourage the others' position. Worse - what if they're both wrong & we just don't have enough parties to offer policies that fly in the face of these dogmatic approaches & be aired & discussed before the general populace - not the voters, but the parents & teachers.
Education is big (number of people involved, number of stakeholders - kids, budget, time - thirteen-plus years of a person's life), & yet policies are squeezed into five-second sound-bites - preferably by a minister & two cronies with good haircuts & an ability to smile & nod without looking like axe murderers.
This is insane. This - & only this - is why the education system cannot be fixed. We - as a society - must treat education with respect & ask more of those placed (by us) in positions of power (government), so that they, in turn, are compelled to add a touch of professionalism to parliament & policy making that achieves real outcomes when the cameras & microphones are switched off.
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