posts interesting only to me

Same procedure as last year

posts interesting only to me, Sandra
Published on Leave a comment on Same procedure as last year



I don’t like New Year’s Eve; never have. It’s a holiday that always puts you in a melancholy mood as you’re supposed to reflect on the past year and get swallowed up in all the instant nostalgia television and the news media bombard you with. Not to mention all the obligatory partying on the night, which always seems to be going on somewhere else than where I’m at. It all puts me in a maudlin mood and I can’t stand that. then again I’m somebody who can get wistful because the novel I’m reading is almost finished…

2012 has been a strange year anyway, it would’ve been a good year if not for one little thing: the job went well after a bit of a hiccup in 2011 (switching assignments), financially everything’s alright, the cats are in good health, it’s just that this has been the first year without Sandra. And when you’ve been with somebody for eleven years it’s very strange to not have them around anymore. Very strange and painful. Not a day that hasn’t gone by without me being reminded of her not being here. Especially today.

Sandra always liked New Years eve and the crazy fireworks the Dutch get up to tonight (and in the runup to tonight and for several days afterwards (the cats are less impressed)) and always wanted to be in the thick of it, while my first instinct had always been to hide away from it. Despite this mismatch, we had some good New Years’ Eves together, going out to Nieuwmarkt to watch the mobsters, the Chinese kids and the students competing with each other as to who could light the biggest bang, as well as that New Year’s party back in Plymouth, the last year she lived there, that had been just perfect. Without her? Eh, what’s the point.

Health care as a moral issue

posts interesting only to me, Reefer Madness, sciencebollocks
Published on Leave a comment on Health care as a moral issue

Alex talks about medical surveillance technology and the assumptions driving it and how wrong they can be and in the process makes a point that can be applied more generally:

Now, there is obviously some truth to this. Giving up smoking is a really good idea, as is taking your damn pills. But it is also highly problematic. For one thing, it assumes that the problem is non-compliance. In that sense, it transfers your problem from the domain of reality – a physical problem to be solved – into the domain of morality – a statement about good and bad. Rather than being poor, stressed, addicted, etc, the problem is that you are wrong and a bad person. As a rule, this is normatively evil, and of course it only works if the problem is not actually a real problem.

I’ve seen this sort of reasoning play out, or at least this was what it looked like from the outside, in the hospital Sandra stayed in for most of the last two-three years of her life. Sandra was a smoker, had been for decades and while fully aware of the risks, she also was certain that this would not be the thing that killed her and of course she was right… For her, as for many other people, the short term benefits of having a quick fag were more important than the long term health consequences.

Now when she first went into hospital it still have a couple of smoking rooms on the premisses, where both staff (more of whom smoked than you’d expect) and patients could go to. Then one day, in the middle of winter these were closed down because some busybody in higher management decided they don’t belong in a hospital. So now all those patients had to trundle out in the cold to get their fix, which certainly for Sandra didn’t do much for her health.

It’s that sort of attitude where the health health health message has to be driven home, even to people who are in no state to quit smoking, who are dealing with much more immediate problems and need the stress release fags offer. No, people need to be harassed and bullied into doing the right thing, even when it’s inappropriate.

Books read November

books and books review, posts interesting only to me
Published on Leave a comment on Books read November

Slim pickings this month and being busy at work didn’t help. Though be honest, I was reading 3-4 books at teh same time so I expect a glut of books finished in early December, but for now I’ve only read four books:

Faust Eric — Terry Pratchett
A somewhat odd Discworld novel, as it was originally published as an illustrated chapbook. Eric tries to summon a demon and gets Rincewind instead. Hilarity ensues.

Imperial Women in Byzantium 1025 – 1204 — Barbara Hill
The Byzantine Empire had a larger than usual share of female rulers, no more so than in the period Barbara Hill discusses, when for various reasons there was more room for strong minded women to influence imperial politics.

A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush — Eric Newby
Newby was working as a tailor in London when a friend asked him to come to Afghanistan to visit the remote north east corner, Nuristan and climb some mountains there. Despite no experience as a mountaineer, how could he refuse?

Iron Kingdom — Christopher Clark
A largely sympathetic account of the history of Prussia, trying to avoid the teleology that dogs a lot of German history, looking forward to the Third Reich.

Terry Pratchett: Choosing to Die

posts interesting only to me, Sandra
Published on Leave a comment on Terry Pratchett: Choosing to Die



Last year Terry Pratchett made a documentary about his Alzheimer’s Disease and his wish to die when he wanted to, meeting other people in the same situation, actually following some of them to their moment of dying. It was a powerful, emotional and honest documentary about a difficult subject.

Sandra had had much longer than Pratchett to make up her mind on this, having had to live with her disabilities for decades, living on a precarious edge where a small push could sent her towards complete helplessness. She had come to the same conviction as Pratchett had, that it was better to chose the time of her death even if this would out of necessity earlier than it medically needed to be, than keep on living without hope for progress.

When the side effects of our kidney transplant started to become chronic, especially after the first or second time she had slipped into coma this became her worst fear, that she would wait too long to die and it would slip out of her control, that she might end up phsyically alive but mentally destroyed.

She had always been a fighter though and she saw no reason just then to give up, though it was hard on her. There were also her sons to consider, the eldest of which was in trouble we need get into right now what she needed — and did — sort out from her hospital bed and of course there was me. She didn’t want to leave us, but she knew there would be a time she had to.

Watching that Pratchett documentary in June of last year crystalised a lot of these things for her, as it did for me and we had some long, serious talks about what and how we would handle it if she did come to a point of no return. At the time actually she had started doing better, she would be out of hospital not too long after, come home and for a while it looked we finally had all the support we needed, that she was finally stabilising and moving back to a “normal” life, before it all came crashing down again in September.

And this time she had made up her mind. She stopped treatment, said her goodbyes and died, a year and a week ago. She died as she lived, in as full a control of her own destiny as she could get.

She would’ve done the same without Pratchett’s documentary, but it did make it easier for her, for us, to go through with it. It’s one more thing I have to thank him for: thanks to him we met and fell in love and thanks to him she could die with dignity.