Seriously... who shot a rabbit... opened their lunch... passed gas...

I'm sitting in my office catching up on emails at the end of a Friday afternoon.

There are three of us in here.  Me, the dog Ben and one of our cats, Rocky.

There is the unmistakeable odour of something gone terribly wrong in here.

I'm trying to narrow it down.  I had a goat curry roti for lunch; could be me.  Ben?  May have eaten a cat turd or two... Rocky?  Rocky just left the room and something really nasty, evil and altogether wicked followed him on the way out the door.

Apparently, he, too, had more than enough.

Me and the dog are close behind.

"Wow... it's a little crusty in here..."

These few words are not exactly what one wishes to hear laying on a hard and quite uncomfortable table in a room so cold, you can practically see one's breath.

That short statement came from the lips of Dr. Paul Daly, my cardiologist at Toronto General Hospital in the early afternoon of November 12, 2009 as he was negotiating one of the arteries leading into my heart.

I swear I could feel the 'English' he put on the catheter wires as he attempted to open this artery that was, by all accounts 99% blocked.

The procedure was a resounding success - as the image to the right will attest.  On the left side, you can see clearly to the right of a dark, shadowy 'roadway' there is nothing; this would be where the blockage of plaque occurs.  The image on the right shows that very same artery, now wide open after the painless insertion of a small, drug-eluting stent.

Amazing.  Truly.

In an earlier post I stated that I had never experienced any symptoms that would have alerted me to this condition.  There was no pain in my chest.   No shortness of breath.  Nothing.

Now, however, I feel great, energized even.

I can only surmize that my previous state of normalcy was bad -- relatively, for me.

My thanks to all medical staff at PRHC and TGH for their diligence, thoughtfulness and dedication.

Obviously, I cannot say enough about my former family doctor, Dr. Carolyn Brown... except, again, thank you!

Socialized medicine rules!

He may be (in)famous, but he does not presume...

Not to make a big deal about this, but to date, in this whole Tiger Woods thingie, one small point has stood out - to me, at least. 

In a voice mail allegedly from his Tiger-ness to one of his alleged female friends, inspite of his celebrity, the individual does not say, "Hey, it's me."  Rather, there is a hesitant, "Hey... it's, uh, Tiger."  This call was to a woman whith whom he allegedly had an affair for two years or so.

Some might say that the reason for the specific ID was to avoid confusion with other male friends... Others that he makes no assumptions and was taught some manners by his parents... Others still that he collects a royalty each time he refers to himself by name.

Thoughts?  Discuss.