health | M Thomas Apple Author Page

How I learned how NOT to carry a shoulder bag to work

July 2, 2023
MThomas

Have you ever had surgery? What for?

Yeah, minor surgery. On March 3, 2020, I had a benign tumor the size of a gum ball removed from my left shoulder.

It had been created by repeated rubbing of my shoulder bag strap on sweaty skin. Or rather on sweaty shirt over sweaty skin. I walk half an hour back and forth the train station to my workplace each morning and evening, and the summers in Kyoto are hot hot hot.

So there I was lying on a surgeon’s bed, getting my shoulder skin snipped into three pieces and pried open. My blood pressure shot up to 190 at one point. The surgeons told me to relax.

Uh. Yeah. They didn’t tell me how close the tumor was to a major artery, but I could make an educated guess.

There was a cloth screen between my face and my shoulder so that I couldn’t see what they were doing. And of course they had numbed the entire area and I couldn’t move my left arm at all.

But it was an unpleasant experience. No pain, but I could of course still hear the clip clip clipping of scissors on skin. And I have an imagination.

(Fwiw I have written a short story based on getting my wisdom teeth taken out—also with local rather than general anesthesia—though I didn’t include the factoid that my root tips shot across the room like tiny cannonballs and were never found again).

Fortunately, the surgery was successful— they even showed me the tumor (it looked like a tiny blancmange, and now you’ll have that image in your mind next time you eat one). They even asked me if if wanted to keep it (um, no thanks).

And afterwards the scar was barely visible, so good a job they did with the stitches.

Two days after the surgery, we went into lockdown and had to wear masks everywhere.

Talk about good timing.

Elementary school students show NASA that EpiPens are toxic in space

March 8, 2023
MThomas

For the program, the 9- to 12-year-old students designed an experiment in which epinephrine samples were placed into tiny cubes and sent to the edge of space via either a high-altitude balloon or a rocket. Once back on Earth, researchers from the John L. Holmes Mass Spectrometry Facility at the University of Ottawa tested the samples and found that only 87% contained pure epinephrine, while the other 13% had been “transformed into extremely poisonous benzoic acid derivatives,” according to a University of Ottawa statement(opens in new tab).
https://www.livescience.com/elementary-schoolers-prove-epipens-become-fatally-toxic-in-space-something-nasa-never-knew

EpiPens are already dangerous enough as it is, and lots of people who have one don’t know how to use it properly.

So…uh…why would an astronaut have this thing in space to begin with? NASA should know the full medical history of all its astronauts before even considering sending them into space.

Artificial intelligence-created medicine to be used on humans for first time

January 31, 2020
MThomas

“This year was the first to have an AI-designed drug, but by the end of the decade all new drugs could potentially be designed by AI.”

Philip K Dick would have had a field day with this. Imagine what will happen once we start ingesting nanobots…

I, for one, welcome our AI drug overlords.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-51315462

Happy (Belated!) New Year’s 2020!

January 4, 2020
MThomas

Hi, everyone. I guess I should have planned a little better — should have written a “new year’s post” and then saved it before the holiday season began, scheduled the post, and then enjoyed overeating, overdrinking, and sleeping in.

Except of course that’s not what actually happened. Continue Reading

The beating of my hideous heart!

February 11, 2018
MThomas

So much for my New Year’s resolution of writing more regularly on my blog.

I can blame “writer’s block,” which is sometimes just a convenient excuse for general laziness and sometimes stems from a genuine fear of being entirely uncreative and uninnovative.

(My software program tells me that uninnovative is not a real word. Well, now it is. So there.) Continue Reading

Month of the Gods – or Without?

October 26, 2017
MThomas

It’s been a very trying month, and yet rewarding.

At the beginning of the month, I found out that my science fiction novella/novellette Adam’s Stepsons had won an award (Readers’ Favorite). The next day, I was selected as a Featured Author by BookWorks. And then less than a week later, Adam’s Stepsons got another award, this time Finalist for Best Novella by the Independent Authors’ Network. Inspired, I worked on my next SF novel and got the word count up to around 25,000.

Pretty cool.

And then it started to rain.

And rain.

And kept raining. For about eight to nine days straight. Mold everywhere in the house: the entranceway, the hall, the bath, the kids’ bedroom, even our little library nook (which doubles as my writing room/man cave).

Yuck.

And then (not done with us yet!) the typhoon came. No damage for us but plenty for some of my colleagues and neighbors up north in Kyoto and Gifu.

Our daughter’s sports festival – her last at the nursery school, in which she gets to play snare drum in a marching band – was delayed, and then cancelled.

Then both kids got sick. Waking up several times a night, coughing with stuffy noses, and still having to get up early each morning (6 – 6:30) for school and work for all four of us.

The Month of the Gods (神無月) became the Month without Gods (無 = na (of) as well as naki (without)). As if suddenly abandoned.

So it’s fitting that after only two days of sun, October will end with yet another typhoon. Yikes.

Probably a glancing blow, but the heavy rain that accompanies the storm will no doubt scuttle our plans for a Halloween party for our kids and their friends. It may inspire some writing, however.

After all, isn’t that how Mary Shelley started?

The bells of silence

October 3, 2015
MThomas

It’s been a while since I wrote here for (again) work and family-related reasons. For starters, like most Mets fans I got caught up in the division-drive with its ebbs and flows and occasional near-cardiac-arrest-inducing turns. It wouldn’t be the Mets without some sort of chance of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

It was, in fact, during the last week of mind-numbing play that lead to the clinching game against the Reds that I started to notice a turn for the worse…in my health. My daughter Erina had had a fever approaching 40C (104-105F), and I had a lost at least a couple nights of sleep, running over to her room as she woke up every two hours or so. Fortunately, she recovered, but proceeded to pass whatever bug she had on to me. I endured — what else could I do, really? — and last Friday morning, woke up just in time to watch the final pitch from Familia that sealed the deal.

Problem was, I could barely hear the crowd.

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: