Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Not dead yet
My doc ordered a slew of labs for me, which I had drawn yesterday morning. Everything’s back except for the occult blood test, and in particular my PSA is normal, so no prostate cancer. Yet. They say it’s inevitable for men if they live long enough, so I guess I haven’t lived long enough. As for the occult blood test, I didn’t quite follow directions. I didn’t pick up the little test kit with its specially designed “poop flotation device” napkin. No, let’s just say I brown-bagged it.
Too bad my son doesn’t read my blog regularly anymore; he appreciates a disgusting pun.
Also not dead are Abe Vigoda (88) and Betty White (88), both of whom I saw minutes ago in a Super Bowl commercial, and both of whom are still working, per IMDB. Mickey Rooney (90) is still kickin’ around, and still working. Funny how some actors keep at it and some pull out of the limelight. Paul Newman, who died a couple of years ago, had his last big role in 1994, with the Coen Brothers film The Hudsucker Proxy. Newman had a few more films after that, and a smattering of TV and voice work, but he essentially retired in the 90s. (Of course, he kept busy with his philanthropic work right up to the end.)
It’s fun cruising Wikipedia, looking to see who’s alive and who’s dead. Mikhail Kalashnikov, inventor of the AK-47 assault rifle, is still alive (90), along with author Frederik Pohl (90) and SNL announcer Don Pardo (92). Here’s Don Pardo blowing out the candles on his birthday cake at age 90.
When I turned 40, that’s when I first started having the thought, oh, something like, “It’s not quite half over.” Getting harder and harder to convince myself that I’m not yet on the back half.
I’m holding out hope for the longevity researchers.
D.
I’m waiting and hoping for immortality pills.
You know, I think they predicted that by 2015 or something, we’d have the technology to augment our brains with computers and eventually transfer ourselves to them. Not sure how appealing that is. For one, I don’t think we’ll have that in the next five years. For the other thing, would that robot walking around be you or just a copy of you? Because, while it may think it’s you, if it’s just a copy, you’re still dead. You just have a computer clone walking around that thinks it’s you.
Which would be a real problem if reincarnation is real and you eventually come back as yourself.
I’m with you that crossing 40 feels like crossing the halfway mark. In some ways, not a bad perspective – certainly encourages one to stop waiting and start doing.
BTW, I’m a fan of the AK (from the standpoint of someone who likes to go to a range and make a lot of noise and shoot stuff).
Dan: reminds me of James Blish’s Spock Must Die!, wherein some of the Enterprise crew (McCoy and Kirk, perhaps?) keep arguing about whether transporters kill and recreate you quantum state by quantum state.
Interesting. According to the wiki I just linked to, SMD was the first of all of the Star Trek paperbacks . . . and I own a beat up copy! Wonder if it’s worth anything?
Kira: Start doing? What am I supposed to start doing? All I do is work. And play computer games.
Do you have the ’70 edition or the ’85 edition? Don’t know if it’d be worth anything.
There was also an episode of TNG where it was revealed there were two Rikers; one having been a duplicate created years earlier due to a transporter accident.
There was an episode of Enterprise that very superficially touched on the question of whether transporters kill you and simply recreate a duplicate. It was something that was more or less brushed off as nonsense by the creator of the transporters. So, a hardly unbiased opinion. 😉
And, really, how would you know? The person that comes out at the other end of a transport would have all your memories and think that he’s you, so how would we know whether it’s really you or not? You would know that it’s you and if it wasn’t you the other person would still think he was you, so there’s no way for someone other than you to know if it was really you or not. So, people could go around saying, yeah, it’s fine, it’s me, but if they’re all copies and don’t know that they’re not really themselves, then they’ll just lead everyone else into death by assuring them it’s safe.
Which is probably why McCoy preferred shuttles.
“Occult blood test”?
Read it, took double, as they don’t say.
A test to see if your blood plasm(a) is of the Type-Ecto variety, perhaps.
Yah, I googled it, and the truth is far less interesting, although a negative result is a relief, of course.
Me, the dreaded colonoscopy had; and recently. The negative result also was a relief. But the 12 hours before it? No Fun.
Dan, dunno the date, since that book is in boxes with all my other books. I do remember its condition, though, which could best be described as WW (well worn).
John: mine came back negative, too. I overheard some docs talking to each other a while back, though, that the colonoscopy was so important, they were going to taint their specimen with beef blood so as to get a false positive on the test, thereby justifying the colonoscopy. Clever bastards 🙂
By which, I presume, you mean that the colonoscopy is a far more definitive test (the so called “gold standard”) than the occult blood test, and these savvy docs wanted to make sure they got the best info?
Meaning THEY felt colonoscopy was the gold standard. I’ll have to look into the false negativity rate for the fecal occult blood test.
Okay, just did that. Well this isn’t terribly reassuring. According to wikipedia, the sensitivity (the proportion of actual positives which are correctly identified as such) of one test is 30%. So that sucks.