January 2008 Archives
My older son has three stick insects (order Phasmatodea) living in a vivarium. He calls them "stick bugs." They were given to him by his science teacher last fall. We figured they were going to part of some school science project, but so far there's been no curricular connection. Meanwhile, the phasmids have grown. When we got them in September, they were each about an inch long. Now the longest of them is nearly four inches in length, though at first glance it often looks longer because of its penchant for sticking its two forelegs straight out in front of it. (In the picture below the insect in the foreground is standing next to an actual stick.)
My son's teacher said that he was giving us three insects in the hope that there would be two different sexes among the trio, enabling them to have babies. We haven't figured out precisely what species of phasmid these are. I'd assumed that they were the most common type, the Indian or Laboratory stick insect (Carausius morosus). But the Indian stick insect reproduces parthenogenically, and ours haven't reproduced at all. (One of my son's friends was luckier: his insects laid eggs, which hatched. Of course, the adults then ate the young ...)
The phasmids eat lettuce, and they molt periodically. The picture below shows a complete molted exoskeleton. Apparently the insects find their old shells tasty, so often these ghostly skeletons will disappear from the vivarium after a few days. The newly molted insect is a plant-like green, but it soon returns to its bark-like brown coloring.
The phasmids seem to be more active at night. During the day they prowl around the vivarium a little bit, but mostly they're still and rather stick-like. I keep asking my son if he'll let me take them out of the cage for a little exercise in the hallway, but so far he's refused all requests. My wife isn't so crazy about the idea of walking the stick bugs either.
But here's what's really cool about stick bugs: they can regenerate limbs. Two of the insects were damaged when we received them: the biggest was missing its right foreleg, and another was missing its left hindleg. Then, one morning I noticed that the smaller one had all of its legs. It had grown a new hindleg, which was in fact bigger than its surviving hindleg. A few weeks later, the big one regenerated its foreleg. The new legs seemed to have regrown under the exoskeleton and then uncurled after molting.
How marvelous to be able to regrow a lost limb! No need for the bluetooth bionics that are being tested these days on veterans of the Iraq war who have had their legs amputated (click here for a CNN report.) Of course, in my current state, I'd be happy with the ability to regenerate damaged knee cartilage spontaneously.
On the other hand, stick bugs don't live very long: life expectancy for most species is less than a year. I guess you can't have everything.
A representative from Empire Blue Cross Blue Shield called today. Apparently, they need to be convinced that the use of the EBIce Cold Therapy Unit is not an "experimental" treatment.
Finally, a glitch, though mercifully it's bureaucratic and not medical.
When we first scheduled the surgery, I'd been worried about bureaucratic problems, because the surgery was scheduled for early January, and we had switched our coverage from Oxford Health Plans to Empire Blue Cross Blue Shield, effective January 1. I was certain that the necessary pre-approvals wouldn't be processed in time. But lo and behold! My Empire ID card arrived before my final appointment with Dr. Feldman, and all the paperwork went through smoothly. The hospital visit, as I wrote before, was a breeze.
But then today I checked the claims section of my Empire account online.
This morning's New York Times noted the oddness of conducting a political vote in a casino, which occurred during yesterday's Nevada caucuses. A lawsuit filed by the state's teachers union had challenged the legality of holding caucuses in casinos. One caucus participant told the Times: "I don’t want to say it’s embarrassing, because I’m here, but I do see why people would think it’s strange that we are voting in a casino. It’s not normal from what our country is doing, but this is Las Vegas." But, I ask, how much worse could it be to hold an election in a casino than in, say, a 2004 polling site in Ohio, Florida, or Pennsylvania that used an electronic voting machine? The Time itself editorialized in 2004 about the relative security of electronic voting machines and electronic slot machines: "Election officials say their electronic voting systems are the very best. But the truth is, gamblers are getting the best technology, and voters are being given systems that are cheap and untrustworthy by comparison. There are many questions yet to be resolved about electronic voting, but one thing is clear: a vote for president should be at least as secure as a 25-cent bet in Las Vegas." Steven F. Freeman, visting professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Organizational Dynamics, presented a paper to the American Statistical Association in 2005 in which he argued that it is "easier to rig an electronic voting machine than a Las Vegas slot machine." (The Washington Post offers a quick comparison of the respectivd machines here. Freeman was a crucial source for Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s famous Rolling Stone piece about the stealing of the 2004 election and the co-author with Joel Bleifuss of Was the 2004 Pressidential Election Stolen? Exit Polls, Election Fraud, and the Official Count.) But location turned out to be the least of the problems during the Nevada caucuses, which produced a split that should remind us of recent national elections. One candidate (Hilllary Clinton) won the popular vote, but due to quirks in the way that delegates are allocated, with more weight given to certain areas of the state than others, another candidate received more delegates (Obama, 13-12). Nevada turns out to be "normal" after all. What a long and interesting election year this is going to be!
Sarah Silverman is right: the first half-hour of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) doesn't suck. After reading the article in Wired magazine that I discuss below, I decided to watch the beginning of the film again. The first half-hour is a frothy, kinetic homage to Busby Berkeley, 1930s comedy, and Republic Pictures serials. It features features Kate Capshaw singing "Anything Goes" in Mandarin in a Berkeley-style production number set at the Club Obi-Wan, followed by a wildly choreographed brawl, a car chase through the streets of 1935 Shanghai, and a sequence in which an escape raft is launched from a crashing plane just in the nick of time, careening down Himalayan slopes and finally hurtling down rapids.
That's actually the first twenty minutes; the next ten take us to the brink of Pankot Palace, where the story really begins. I had meant to stop watching there, but I just couldn't.
I have a new knee brace. The old one (shown below at left) was put on in the operating room. It had stiff pieces of metal running along the sides and bottom, and it wasn't very comfortable.
The new one is much more comfortable -- and much bigger. Manufactured by Donjoy, the brace runs from the top of my thigh to my ankle, with foam padding around the thigh and calf secured by Velcro straps and adjustable hinges which are currently set to 0 degrees: no flex at all. We decided to keep using the EBIce cold therapy unit. Some quick research suggests that the EBIce has been around for about 12 years, and I think it's made a big difference for me. The knee, when it came out of its bandages, looked far less swollen than I remember it looking in similar circumstances in 1987.
Yesterday was my first post-op appointment with my orthopedic surgeon, Dr. Andrew J. Feldman. He walked into the room holding my charts and said, "You really made me work hard."
The latest issue of Wired magazine arrived today, and guess what caught my eye as I scanned the cover (click on the picture to get a better view):
Here's an X-ray that shows what my knees looked like before last week's operation, but after the 1987 ACL reconstruction and 20 years' worth of use. Note the fun hardware holding the previous graft in place!
My wife says that jinxing works in only one direction because bad fortune is simply more frequent and more powerful than good fortune.
The writer Shalom Auslander has a different explanation. In his recently published memoir Foreskin's Lament (2007), Auslander attributes bad fortune not to chance but rather to the machinations of "an abusive, belligerent god, a god who awoke millennia ago on the wrong side of the firmament and still hasn't cheered up" (7).
I decided to read Foreskin's Lament because I thought it would cheer me up during my convalescence. After all, it had my wife actually snorting with glee when she was reading it the week before my surgery. And I'd read the excerpt from the memoir that Auslander had published in The New Yorker last year (Personal History, "Playoffs," The New Yorker, January 15, 2007, p. 38), a hilarious recounting of Auslander's attempts to keep the Sabbath during the New York Rangers' 1994 Stanley Cup run. My friend Dick Horwich had urged me to read the piece, knowing the story of my own supposed dealings with God during the 1986 World Series (recounted here in my post "The Crypto-History of the Historic Collapse of the New York Mets.") An additional incentive: this year I found myself writing letters of recommendation for three -- count 'em, three -- former students who were deciding to pursue doctorates in literature or cultural studies after renouncing the conservative religious traditions in which they had been educated before college (two orthodox Jewish, one Jesuit). I thought that perhaps Auslander's memoir would give me further insights into their intellectual predicaments. And it did, though I don't think any of my former students are quite as angry as Auslander proves nimself to be across the pages of his book. I found myself snorting with glee, too, as I read passages like this one: For the People of the Book, words, being the stuff of books, have weight. Words have consequences. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was the name of the Lord, and so the second word they came up with, immediately after the Word, was the word Holy, which described the first Word, which you were now prohibitied from uttering, even though there were only two words in total, effectively cutting the entire language in half. Soon came the words "shan't" and "mustn't" and "stoning" and "kill," and then a whole lot of other words that you were required to say in case the first Word was uttered, words of penance, apology, and promise that you would never utter that Word in vain again, so help you Word. (27) Late in the book, the anger overwhelms the comedy momentarily, when Auslander describes an episode of self-flagellation that results in testicular torsion and a trip to the emergency room (256). Lenny Bruce had suddenly become Sam Kinison, and I had a moment of thinking I wouldn't finish the book. But the next chapter contained the wonderful Rangers' story, and Auslander had me back. I wonder how much controversy I would provoke if I included an excerpt from the book on next fall's Con West syllabus! Shalom Auslander will be appearing on January 24 at the 92nd Street Y. Unfortunately, the event is already sold out. The front page of his website features pictures a padded cell.
It's now about four days since my knee surgery was completed, and things have gone incredibly smoothly so far. I came home on Tuesday night, about 24 hours after the surgery. The hospital offered to let me stay another night, but I was eager to get home to be with my family, and the use of crutches came back to me very quickly. I've been mostly horizontal since then, hooked up to a cold therapy machine that circulates ice water through a sleeve that was placed around the knee at the end of the surgery. Wish we'd had that twenty years ago! Much easier and more consistent than the ice packs, and one gets used to the cycling of the pump -- one minute on, one minute off -- quickly enough. I'll probably try to use it less starting this weekend.
I'm hoping that the pain has been peaking the last day or so. We'll call it "manageable" thus far. None of this, of course, would be manageable without my wife, who has been a trouper thus far and will have to be even more of one once her school term begins in a couple of weeks.
All things considered, I feel like an extraordinarily lucky fellow.
I have an abiding interest in technology and technological change. For quite a few years, I've been working on a project that I called "Technophobia," which has subsequently metamorphosed into a number of other things. The closest thing I have to a hobby these days is building and upgrading computers: I've built several computers over the past few years, including the desktop and home server that I currently use.
But today I'm interested in a form of technology that I don't think about as often: medical technology. That's because I'm having a rather complicated bit of knee surgery in a few hours.
In 1986, I tore my the anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) in my right knee, when I failed to execute a flying snap kick correctly during a Tae Kwon Do class. I landed awkwardly, and my knee twisted. It was the single most painful moment of my life: I can still remember the feeling of pain shooting up my body from my leg through the top of my head, cleaving my tongue to the roof of my mouth for an instant. I left the class and rode my bike home. Over the next few days, the swelling subsided, and the knee felt better, though every now and then there'd be a funny clicking sound. I continued to play squash. I consulted an orthopedist at Harvard's University Health Services (UHS), but his speciality was backs rather than knees, so he referred me to someone else. I got an appointment for January. I asked the first doctor if it would be okay to ski on the knee, because I had plans to go to Lake Tahoe with a college buddy. The doctor suggested that I be very careful.
Apparently, I wasn't careful enough. A mogul took me and my knee out on the first run, and I went down the mountain on a body board. Eventually, I saw the knee specialist, and he told me that I had torn my ACL and probably my meniscus. In the end, he did a menisectomy and an ACL reconstruction, stretching a patellar tendon across the back of the knee to serve as a ligament. I was in the hospital for a couple of nights and then transferred to the infirmary at UHS for a few days.
Last year, after my knee had begun to ache more and more, I consulted an orthopedist here in New York. He happened to be Dr. Andrew J. Feldman, head of Sports Medicine at St. Vincent's Hospital and team physician for the New York Rangers, the hockey team I've been rooting for since 1973. He said that I had a varus knee and the beginnings of osteoarthritis. He advised a high tibial osteotomy, in which the knee would be staightened out by removing a portion of the tibia, followed by an ACL revision. The alternative, he said, was a total knee replacement much sooner than was advisable given my age and level of physical activity. He described my symptoms so perfectly that I was convinced right away and began to take steps to apply for leave from teaching.
When I saw him again this fall, after having a scanogram and a full length x-ray done of the leg, he described my knee as "a massive train wreck waiting to happen." And, he said, "I can see the light."
So today we're going to do it. Click below and read on, if you like gory details. What astonishes me is that the ACL reconstruction that I had done twenty years ago, which kept me in the hospital for nearly a week, is now out-patient surgery. I suppose that's a sign of both advances in medical technology and the changes in our health care system that have occurred during the past twenty years. This procedure is more complicated, so I'll stay in the hospital overnight.
