Tag Archives: research

AWOL but now returned


I’ve been away from this blog for several weeks now, after all the entries relating to my new book (Spit & Polish). Partly, I wanted to give you lovely people who subscribe to this blog a bit of a breather. Partly, I was recovering from many week away from home base – I was looking after my kids’ cat and had to relocate for weeks. Coming back, I had all of those appointments and other foolishnesses to catch up on. Sucks the brain away.

And finally partly because, when I returned, I decided I couldn’t live without a cat of my own. I adopted one that (of course) required a five hour driving session to his shelter (Furry Tales Rescue) and back (He is big and orange and polydactyl, so I had to have him), followed by the usual buying frenzy and the somewhat more unusual trying to figure out what was wrong with his leg. But we’re getting along and I’m trying to keep him loving me while also helping him learn the rules of the house. He seems to be settling in well. I’ve named him Archy, after the Archy in Archy and Mehitabel, a book I’ve loved for years. (Archy is a cockroach/ beat poet, but with all those extra toes and my Archy’s singing voice, I think it works)

Look at those toes!

So work has taken a bit of a backseat of late. I am just starting the research for the sequel to Spit & Polish, hoping to get it tied up in draft by the end of the year. In-between I have a few editing projects lined up (by all means contact me if you need a developmental editor as I still have some spaces available), plus my usual onslaught of volunteer activities. This feeling like I have to make a contribution is exhausting sometimes, but to be honest most of my commitments are great fun and grist for the writing mill.

I’m now seeking input for the next book – in it, my nursing student, Ruth Maclean, is sent for her rotation to the Kingston Psychiatric Hospital, once known as the Rockwood Asylum. It’s 1947, and treatments for the mentally ill are still pretty basic. The concept of treating mental illness, as versus just hiding its sufferers away, is still new, but the building here was designed by William Coverdale with all the best of intentions, with lots of light and privacy. (It’s not the building’s fault it now is vacant, falling apart, and perhaps haunted.)

Rockwood Asylum

I mean, just look at all those windows! Very unusual at the time for psychiatric hospitals, even more so for asylums for the criminally insane like Rockwood. It’s going to be fun to research more about this building and its inhabitants.

During the time my fictional Ruth is on placement there, there was an existing nursing education program running on site, for Registered Psychiatric Nurses. I can only imagine the tensions between all of the nursing programs in Kingston at the time – the Kingston General Hospital School, the Hotel Dieu School, Queen’s University, and this one. Competition for the best jobs, various comments about discrepancies in programs – this is all familiar to me from my time at Queen’s, where there was still great tension between regular nurses who trained for their RNs, and those that opted for the university program to get their BNSc. Could lead to some interesting interpersonal interludes.

So I’m looking for any information about psychiatric nursing schools, inter school competition, psychiatric care in 1947, and life in Canada in the post-war period. I’d be most grateful if you have any tidbits to share that I could insert into Ruth’s life.

It’s going to be a bit of a challenging time for Ruth again, I’m afraid. Money remains tight, doctors are flirtatious, supervisors are demanding, patients are difficult. Someone may even have an unfortunate “accident.”

I can’t wait to see how it all turns out.

You can get a Quick Look at the Museum of Health Care here:

Back to MS Blogging


Years ago when I was first diagnosed with MS, I started a blog called “MS Musings”, aka “Musings of a Mad Sow” (based on the equivalency of MS with Mad Cow in my mind at the time).

I’m soon off to the EndMS conference and this seemed like a good time to revisit my blog to share what I find out at the conference. I’ve been living with MS for over 15 years now and my perspective has changed, but there is still some good reading on the blog for newly diagnosed or those dealing with MS and relationships.

Please feel free to read and comment and forward to people you think might benefit from my occasional writings and research reviews.

https://dabble58.blogspot.com

(Image design by John Last-Beresford, my son)

Wallowing in research, or when did that happen, exactly?


I’m in the depths of finishing up my book about a nursing student in Kingston, ON, back at the end of WW2. I’ve got the plot mostly finished, I know where it’s going, I have my characters in place and they are mostly defined, though I’m working on deepening their portrayal.

But I keep getting distracted.

The other day I was writing about charting, as in recording medical records. It’s unlikely they’d be done in pencil, since they could be too easily changed that way. Did they have ball point pens at the time?

1950’s pen ad

It turns out, no they didn’t. The excellent Wikipedia (please donate) brought me to links about the Hungarian inventor, László Bíró, who noticed that newspaper inks dried faster and didn’t smear as much as regular ink, and created the first Biro. There was a previous design but it wasn’t fluid enough to use for writing on paper and so languished.

This was in 1931. The war intervened and Biro fled to Argentina, and subsequent development was vastly slowed. In 1945, Marcel Bich bought the patent and started with his Bic pens. He started manufacturing the steel balls for the pen tips, and apparently they are essentially the same construction now.

Back at the start, the pens were used for airmen, who found fountain pens leaked at altitude. They were seriously expensive, the first models at around $1000 our money, later ones still selling for $188. It wasn’t until 1954, when Parker got into the business, and competition lowered the price, that they started being ubiquitous.

So then I had to wonder about what sort of pens might have been used in hospitals at the time. Would they be pen and ink? Or fountain pens? Could the hospitals at the time afford fountain pens? Or would they just provide inkwells and cheap nibs everywhere?

And how did nursing students keep their aprons pristine while dealing with blotchy pens?

That led to another research hunt. Nursing students at the time sent their uniforms, aprons, bibs, cuffs, and caps to a local laundry. But my character gets bounced out of nursing school to work as a nurses’ aide. Where does she get her uniforms cleaned?

It’s like a link of puzzles, and at some point I am going to have to decide that’s enough, you don’t need that detail…

But it’s all so fascinating. I suspect by the end of writing this book I’ll have enough information for another. And that’s a good thing…I think!

Oh, Mouse!


220px-TheMousesTale-Original.svgI’ve been reading a lot of research results lately and I’m starting to get disturbed. There are millions and millions of little mice going the way of all good research animals to help us figure out MS, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and lots and lots of other disease entities.

I am grateful for their (unwilling) service. I can’t say to stop the research on these poor wee things, because their contribution has been massive. But I am beginning to worry about the net karmic loss of snuffing out all those millions of mice for every year of study. Sooner or later, the balance has to shift and we’ll all start dropping from some mouse virus and it will all be fair, really, given how many tiny souls we’ve sent over that crowded rainbow bridge.

Every time I inject myself with my “disease-modifying medication” I send a wee thank you to the mice who squeaked their way through the multiple trials before we even dared to give it to humans. There’s even a special kind of mouse, bred to develop an MS type illness so then they can try to treat it. Mice bred to develop all sorts of other illnesses, too. So not only do they live their lives in clear plastic cages with little sensory input, but they get illnesses they normally would never have to deal with.

Upon such tiny lives are ours based.

Now, I know, your average wild mouse has an extremely short lifespan. We aren’t White-mouse-in-lab-009necessarily changing the length of the life of these mice. We’re just making them miserable for all their lives.

Of course, I may be wrong. Perhaps there is an inheritability acceptance of their sterile home. Perhaps, like families who refuse to leave Cape Breton or Gimli or the Eastern Townships for generations, these little creatures know nothing else and so think they are in paradise. After all, they get fed. Their nests are clean. I’m not sure if they get to mate with other sterile mousekins (but they must – otherwise where would new sterile mice come from?)

And there is hope. Mice don’t accurately represent human diseases after all, and they are pricey. So many doctors are giving them up as research subjects. Stem cells are making big inroads into the mouse subject market.

I do hope we stop using animals for research eventually. Maybe we could use those stem cells. Or Republicans. Or the Liberal government in Nova Scotia at present. Something with no feelings. Just sayin’.

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My Land! as my mother would say. Suddenly all is explained….


Witzelsucht

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Witzelsucht, from the German witzeln, meaning to joke or wisecrack, and sucht meaning addiction or yearning, is a set of rare neurological symptoms characterized by the patient’s uncontrollable tendency to make puns, tell inappropriate jokes and pointless or irrelevant stories at inconvenient moments. The patient nevertheless finds these utterances intensely amusing. It is associated with small lesions of the orbitofrontal cortex.[1]

It is distinguished from pathologic laughing by virtue of congruent affective experience and expression, and an admixture of irritability and mirth. It is most commonly seen in patients withfrontal lobe disease or injury, particularly right frontal lobe tumors or trauma. Elderly people are very prone to this disorder because of the decreased mass of their gray tissue. For instance, the stereotype of the wise-cracking grandfather may have originated from this as it became a common part of every day life.

^ Mendez, M.D., Ph.D, Mario F (2005). Moria and Witzelsucht from Frontotemporal Dementia. The Journal of Neuropsychiatry and clinical neurosciences.

Wow.  I can relate.  I think this is a familial disorder, having spent entire days trapped in the back seat of my dad’s car, driving somewhere, while he and my brother traded execrable puns until I cried for mercy. I have a friend who is unable to control his punning, and I fear for him, mainly because I have a fireplace in my house and thus a poker.

I’ve been known to “approach others without apprehension” and to share stories inappropriately with complete strangers. I touch strangers. I laugh at things immoderately.

I suppose this may all have something to do with those little lesions in my head thanks to MS – or maybe it’s damage caused by being raised on a steady diet of Monty Python and Fawlty Towers and Benny Hill and Laugh-In. Obviously there are some strange linkages in my head that have been reinforced – much like learning a new language, where practice makes perfect.

The case report is scary.  And here I thought I was just being friendly:

“A 57-year-old right-handed female had a 2-year personality change described as increased gregariousness, excitement, and a tendency to indiscriminately approach strangers without apprehension. She had become the life of the party and would laugh, joke, and sing all the time. The patient had decreased self-care and hygiene and wore the same clothes every day. In addition, she had developed a compulsive tendency, particularly with hoarding of money, and an addiction to ice cream with marked weight gain.”

Of course, I have no evidence of hoarding of money. That just isn’t happening.

But I work at home and have been known to dress similarly day after day. And I love ice cream…

There’s hope for me yet.  I haven’t started to pun. Please, stop me before it is too late……;-)

And how I wish I’d named my puppy this….