UNMADE RELEASE DAY – COMMAND ME!
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(Yes that IS a shameless amazon link but if you have a local indie I love you for supporting it!) and I have had the beautiful Cassandra Jean make me a poster for its release, like a movie! A movie with a darkly ominous tagline.
(Our Characters, from the front left and proceeding: Jared Lynburn, Kami Glass, Ash Lynburn, Holly Prescott, Ten Glass, Tomo Glass, Angela Montgomery, Rusty Montgomery, Lillian Lynburn and Jon Glass, Team Good… ish… and Team May Be Marked For Death. You’re welcome, y’all!)
I am also doing a blog tour, so look out for my various posts on various subjects around the web. The writing advice post where I talk about cocaine may, in retrospect, have been an error.
This post is not JUST a showing off of beautimous pictures and sharing my love for y’all. It is, since this is Unmade release day, the place where you can discuss Unmade spoilers of any kind and ask me questions of any kind, though since the book is new it would be super appreciated as in the last post if the spoilers were signalled by a line of stars!
And I wanted to give you guys a present to celebrate Release Day, but wasn’t quite sure what you would like, so like a DJ and since–wow, hey, two trilogies done, give me five, I am a grown-up writer lady–this is a special occasion, I thought I would take requests.
So tonight, I am at your service. Ask for a little story about any characters you want. Any characters or stories that are exclusively mine, that is: I couldn’t do anyone from The Bane Chronicles without Cassie and Maureen’s input or from Team Human without Justine’s.
I hope you’ll like Unmade! Thank you for suffering through the series. (I know you were suffering because you TOLD me so, and I ENJOYED it.)
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CategoriesAsk the doctor: High blood pressure is making my heart grow too large | Daily Mail Online
High blood pressure is making my heart grow too large
20:11 BST, 24 August 2009
Dr Martin Scurr has been treating
patients for more than 30 years and is one of the country's leading GPs. Here he
tackles thickening of the heart and childhood spots. Eleven years ago I was diagnosed with very high blood pressure. My consultant said that as a result, the muscle on the left side of the heart was thicker than it should be. I was prescribed 10mg enalapril, although the amount has increased over the years to 20mg, plus 10mg of felodipine. I'm worried that the muscle might have become thicker so it needs looking at again, but my GP says this isn't necessary.
Diane Johnson, Knaresborough, North Yorks.
Feeling the pressure: Hypertension can make your heart muscle thicken
Dr Scurr says: Many people don't realise that high blood pressure can cause the muscle on one side of the heart to become enlarged.
In fact, if your blood pressure is raised for more than a few months then it's almost an inevitable consequence.
It's usually the left side that's affected because this side works much harder anyway, as it contains the main pumping chamber of the heart. While the right side has only to pump blood to the lungs, the left side has to pump blood all around the body. Just how easy this is depends on your blood pressure.
When you have high blood pressure, this makes the heart's job harder because it causes the arteries to tighten.
Drawing on one of my favourite analogies, imagine how much harder it is to blow through a drinking straw as opposed to a six-inch length of garden hose
that's like the strain high blood pressure puts on the heart.
And like any other muscle in the body, the harder the heart muscle is worked, the bigger it will become
in the same way that your thigh muscles get bigger if you cycle a lot.
Fortunately, a thickened muscle can easily be detected by an electrocardiogram (an electrical recording of the heart's activity) which is performed by your GP.
There is a further type of investigation, called an echocardiogram, which is performed in hospital using an ultrasound scan and measures the actual thickness of the heart muscle.
The risk with a thickened heart muscle is that it can lead to a condition known as hypertensive heart disease.
This is where the heart's pumping chambers change shape, affecting how well the heart works.
In the end, it becomes impossible to pump blood to all the body's tissues and the result is heart failure. You then get a build-up of fluid in the system, particularly in the lungs, causing progressive breathlessness, weakness and, ultimately, death.
Even before that late stage, patients with hypertensive heart disease are at much higher risk of heart attack or stroke. The good news is that caught early, an enlarged heart muscle can be treated with medication, as yours was.
These drugs reduce blood pressure
this in turn reduces the strain on your heart muscle, so it gradually shrinks.
But to your question. Yes, you are right, you are well overdue a check-up to ensure the medication you're taking has helped reduce the size of your heart muscle.
Even though there is no NICE guideline on this, most doctors would consider it essential that you have an echocardiogram, as relying just on blood pressure tests won't reveal the state of your heart. So do talk to your GP again.
Then if the test shows that your heart muscle is still thickened, you need your blood pressure monitored for 24 hours to establish what's going on.
A blood pressure measuring cuff, attached to a small device, will take your blood pressure every 30 minutes while you're awake and asleep, to see when your blood pressure rises.
If it reaches 140/90, the limit considered to be acceptable, then you will need further treatment to reduce this.
My 12-year-old grandson was diagnosed with molluscum a year ago. He is very embarrassed about it, as the spots are unsightly. The doctor tried to freeze some of them, but it's not been very successful. Is there anything else we can try?
Mrs N Hill, Bolton.
Dr Scurr says: First let me reassure you that molluscum is a common yet harmless viral skin infection. The reason why so many youngsters develop it is because it's highly contagious and spread by skin contact.
Even if you've never heard of molluscum, you would recognise the clusters of small waxy bumps it creates on the skin, as these are so common in childhood.
The number of bumps can range from one up to two dozen, and they can form anywhere on the skin except the palms and soles of the feet.
Molluscum can easily be transferred to other parts of the body because it causes i scratching the lesions and then touching the skin causes the infection to spread.
I've always found that children aren't too bothered about molluscum because it causes no pain and it disappears on its own after a year or two. The body gradually becomes immune to the virus and the lesions heal without a trace.
Mothers and teachers, on the other hand, can be very anxious about it. Indeed, the stories that parents tell me suggest that teachers are becoming almost irrationally anxious about the infection
it's almost as if they fear they might be blamed for it spreading on their watch.
The basic principle behind getting rid of these lesions is to damage them. This causes inflammation in the body and seems to speed up the body's ability to fight the virus. ASK DR SCURR
Do you have a health question for Dr Scurr? He will answer a
selection of readers' queries every week. Write to Dr Scurr, Good Health, Daily
Mail, 2 Derry Street, London W8 5TT, or e-mail drmartin@dailymail.co.uk
Dr Scurr cannot enter into personal correspondence.
Please include contact details. His replies cannot apply to individual cases and
should be taken in a general context. Always consult your own GP with any health
When I was first in practice, we used to treat each individual molluscum by pricking it with a sharp cocktail stick dipped in a chemical solution called phenol.
This was effective, but the young patients were not enthusiastic about the experience!
Then, in the 1980s, a new approach, cryotherapy, was developed. This involves freezing the lesions with liquid nitrogen so they are eventually killed by frostbite. This has made treating molluscum more tolerable for the patient.
However, I still only use this treatment in children over the age of eight
any younger and they can't put up with the sting. This is why I try to persuade parents to tolerate the lesions, because they always disappear in the end.
The pity here is that your grandson has become so embarrassed at the appearance, perhaps because of comments from other children.
He's unlikely to be comforted by the fact it will ev firm reassurances aren't overly effective in this age group.
The key is to treat as many of the lesions as possible by cryotherapy, not just a selection, and there is nothing to be lost by asking the doctor to treat him again
most GPs would agree.
At 12, he should be able to tolerate the degree of tingly burning that lasts for half a minute as each of the bumps is frozen. After all, he has a good incentive.
By the way... I was sitting by the swimming pool on my summer holiday in Greece when one of my patients from London turned up.
As you do, we started chatting about the skin changes caused by ageing
not just the wrinkles and baggy eyes, but the tendency to more and more moles, skin tags and other harmless but ugly acquisitions.
My patient was particularly interested in the small bright red dots
like tiny blobs of raspberry juice
we both had on our tummies.
Beyond the call of duty: On holiday in Greece, Dr Scurr bumped into a patient who asked about skin changes caused by ageing
These are Campbell de Morgan spots, little knots of painless inconsequential blood vessels. They are not significant and simply just appear, causing no harm. But my patient's acupuncturist said they meant his 'blood is too strong' and has 'too many red cells', and that to get rid of them he should become a blood donor.
Such an assertion is so way out of line with any scientific understanding of the way the human system works that it defies belief.
Health care should not be the province of fantasists, con men or comedians, but should
be based on an understanding of science
and we've known this for centuries.
Indeed, this was the principle on which Henry VIII founded the Royal College of Physicians and the Royal College of Surgeons.
Astonished that my patient, an intelligent man, should believe such drivel, I decided to use my own form of evidence-based medicine to prove the acupuncturist wrong. I suggested he wager ?1,000 with his acupuncturist that there is no such thing as 'strong' blood. (Indeed, treatments such as being bled went out with George III.) He could then donate to the National Blood Transfusion Service
and when the Campbell de Morgan spots do not disappear, he can have another holiday on the winnings.
Somehow, I suspect she will not accept the wager.
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Copy link to paste in your messageThis is the week, it seems, of people reading my posts and making them better. First, Ken Hite revealed the infomantic significance of the . Then, Barista‘s David Hiley expanded my link to Jess Nevins’ post on with , the golden calligraphy-writing robot.* David also pointed out the secret through-line between the automata and index card stories:
he [ie, me] combines two wonderful and pathetic factoids in the one zany flow. Handy, dandy, it has the logical flow of the management of information which leads to proto-robots which takes us ultimately to these machines, which we all share as we prowl the world from our keyboards.
The way I see it, I didn’t combine the Ford’s Theatre and Gakutensoku stories, he did. I just put them . But I appreciate his kind words and the phrase, “wonderful and pathetic factoids.” That goes on my ever-growing list of alternate taglines for this blog.
This is what I love love love about the 21st century: Barista posted about Gakutensoku three days after Jess Nevin’s original post, two days after my own. Granted, I’m impressed by anyone who writes a post in two days. (I have on my hard drive a half-written response to Seth Shulman’s
that I started writing when I saw Shulman give a talk at MIT… in 2005.) But the real infomancy is the way these not-necessarily-pathetic factoids carom around the internet. A librarian in Texas (who knows , by the way) writes a short piece about a 1920s Japanese robot. It bounces off a Canadian history professor, and is read by an Australian film writer. Who then researches the history of that robot, using an amazing online encyclopedia of more than 2 million user-generated articles, not one of which existed eight years ago. It’s easy to take it all for granted, my friends, but we are living in the future. , you ask? You’re driving it right now.
(At least until
takes away the keys.)
*Barista says Gakutensoku “ain’t no robot–it is an automaton.” But are the two categories mutually exclusive? , , , can I get a ruling?
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My friend Jess Nevins, the extraordinary gentleman himself, offers up
and the blasted gaijin who keep making off with them:
Japan’s first modern robot was created in 1928 by Makoto Nishimura, as part of the formal celebration of Emperor Showa’s (a.k.a. Hirohito) ascension to the Chrysanthemum Throne. The robot, Gakutensoku (or “learning from natural law”), was 7+ tall, painted gold, could open and close its eyes, could smile, could puff out its cheeks, and at the beginning of each performance would touch its mace to its head and then begin to write.
How much do I want a 7+ gold Japanese robot called “learning from natural law”? , as they say, for a robot haiku by Kobayashi Issa*, an unscrupulous American magician, and intimations of occult robot conspiracy.
Speaking of occult conspiracy, Ken Hite showed once again why he is the king, picking up on
yesterday and spinning it into :
[Collins:] In the U.S., for instance, the War Department struggled with mountains of haphazard medical files until the newly touted method of card filing was adopted in 1887. Hundreds of clerks transcribed personnel records dating back to the Revolutionary War. Housed in Ford’s Theatre in Washington DC — the scene of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination a generation earlier — the initiative succeeded a little too well. Six years into the project, the combined weight of 30 million index cards led to information overload: three floors of the theatre collapsed, crushing 22 clerks to death.
[Hite:] Can anyone say Ascension of the Bureaucrat in 1894? Blood sacrifice to begin the Information Age? Creation of the “mass man” from data (which is to say, DNA) and crumpled flesh (of 22 people — where was the 23rd, necessary to complete the full chromosomal pairing?), intermingled on the blasphemous regicidal altar of America? The possibilities are limitless.
Do not fold, spindle, or sacrifice.
Also, there’s a nice link back to me today at . (Dug, I owe you an email.)
Edit: Engadget has video of
in action. (Hat tip to my man .)
*Question: Would the great 18th century haiku master really use the word “coolness”? Answer: He would if he were writing about tea-serving robots!
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(Originally published on my old .)
Goddamn, you half-Japanese girls / you do it to me every time.
—Weezer, “El Scorcho”*
Last week was Lisa’s birthday. We went out with a bunch of friends to , and ran up a big bill on dumplings and tropical drinks. As a present for her, I had a couple of large prints made and framed from the photo archive of the
in Salem. Lisa’s worked with the PEM on a bunch of Asian history things over the years. She took some of her students to China under the museum’s auspices in 2001, and would have taken more last year if not for SARS. (They’re supposed to go this year, so we’re watching the spread of Mad Chicken Disease with alarm.) And she also ran a workshop on their photo collection last summer, which makes the prints a pretty cool present if I do say so myself.
The PEM is absolutely worth visiting if you’re ever near Salem. They’ve got a huge gorgeous new building, they’ve got , an entire house brought over peg by peg from southeastern China and rebuilt here, and then they have great rotating exhibits on Asian history and New England maritime history. There’s an exhibit of
on now and an exhibit on
opens this week. You can see many of their photographs (though no bigger than these images) at something they call .
Above are the two prints I had made. They’re both from around 1880, by a Japanese photographer named Kusakabe Kimbei. I really dig the nineteenth-century photos—actually, I really like all old photos. Kusakabe was one of the first and best-known Japanese photographers. His pictures differ from most taken by Westerners of the era, who were more likely to pose their subjects directly facing the camera. Kusakabe’s photographs are not without artifice—the samurai era had been over for twenty years when the samurai picture there was taken—but they’re just a little more alive then the formal Western pictures, a little closer to offering a window on the past, which is what makes pictures like these so compelling for history nuts like L & myself.
That’s not to say that the Westerners’ photographs in the collection aren’t cool too. Especially since the main aspects of Asia that Europeans tended to want pictures of were: 1) “exotic” clothing and costumes, 2) cool architecture, 3) nekkid ladies, 4) torture and mutilation. And who can argue with wanting to see any of that?
Here’s two more pictures from the PEM I really like. On the left is a pagoda in Fuzhou, China, photographed in 1871. On the right are three Indian soldiers serving the Maharaja of Kashmir in the 1870s. At this scale you probably just notice their funny hats, but if you see this picture full-size you can tell from their faces these dudes are BAD ASS. I’m reminded of a comment in the letters column from League of Extraordinary Gentlemen:
The depiction of Verne’s Nemo is born of dislike for the fashion by which Western media unvaryingly characterize those of Indian descent as high-voiced, wobbly-headed, timid, ineffectual shopkeepers … Clearly such people have never had several hundred wild-eyed fanatical devils over-run their cannon positions. Or wondered why [Hindu] deities possess so many arms, the great majority of which are holding something sharp.
The only depressing thing about the Peking Tom outing was how it was one of the very few times I’ve actually seen and interacted with Lisa in the last few weeks. We’ve both been busy and stressed lately, and when that happens we tend to revert to our natural biorhythms—I stay up and get up later and later, she gets up and goes to bed earlier and earlier. Eventually we’re like acquaintances who pass each other on the way to and from bed around 3 am. Lisa declared Sunday a mental health day for both of us, which meant no work, not even email or weblogs. A lot of lounging, snogging, canoodling, and we even started drinking before noon. Heaven. Lots of things to get stressed about again come Monday—medical problems in the family, the job hunt, the dissertation, her grades due, money—and oh yeah, our roof is caving in! But Sunday was a damn good day.
My Linking Technique Is Unstoppable!
! ! ! ! Did I mention that I’m on a samurai kick?
last week for the first time in ages. I’ve seen Ran and Rashomon, never seen Yojimbo. Besides that, what other Kurosawa movies are must-sees?
Lisa ran her -inspired classroom LARP last week. This is I think the third time she’s done it, and something cool and different happens each time. This time the ninja assassin killed the daimyo, but she let him hang around as an unquiet ghost. I wish I’d had her as a teacher in high school. Except for the ickiness our being married would then create.
just gets better and better, doesn’t it? I can’t tell how “seasons” work on Cartoon Network, but virtually all of the newer episodes (Robo Samurai versus Mondo Bot, the secret origin of Aku, the one where Jack and Aku agree to fight without sword or magic) have been priceless.
Anyone out there seen the movie ? Worth renting? Mostly I want to hear the soundtrack and find out if everything
does is as cool as the song on the Kill Bill soundtrack. I’d hate to drop $40 for a import CD and have it turn out to be noodly 80s J-Pop.
Speaking of that, what = up with Kill Bill Part 2? Wasn’t that supposed to be coming out this month?
Getting away from samurai per se: Chris/Gamma Fodder had a great post on
recently. I’ve seen many of those films, mostly with him, but I’m still saving the link to fill in the ones I’ve missed. Plus here’s an
with more samurai movies and comics for me to go through.
Edit: One more link for my own benefit, from China rather than Japan: .
*”El Scorcho” came very close to being the first dance at our wedding. As a public service I will explain for you the part of the lyrics that nobody can figure out:
I asked you to go to the Green Day concert
You said you never heard of them
How cool is that?
So I went to your room and read your diary:
“watching Grunge leg-drop New Jack through a press table”
And then my heart stopped:
“listening to Cio Cio-San”
I fall in love all over again.
The fifth line refers to wrestler Johnny Grunge putting the hurt on Nu Jack Isone in (I’m told) the old ECW wrestling league. “Cio Cio-San” is the title character in Madame Butterfly—which, like the album “Pinkerton” and this post, is about a Westerner’s infatuation with the East. A girl who shreds the cello, has never heard of Green Day (in 1996!), but writes in her diary about wrestling matches and Madame Butterfly is clearly a strange girl worth holding on to. Is it any wonder that this is “our” song?
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