Classical Music & Opera Forums

Change of topic:

I recently bought myself a digital camera for a trip. Sigh! I really miss the point and click cameras. You took the film in and had them developed. I even miss my old SLR cameras. But the digital! Now I can crop the shots, enlarge them, adjust the color, saturation, etc. I'm wondering if progress really is progress. Granted the cameras are very small and you can see what you just shot and delete the shot if it's bad.

What I really want is a camera that can identify what I just shot! Instead, I'm scrambling through books I just ordered to find out where I was and what I saw. Life gets very complicated and I think I should just put my camera away.

What size binoculars would anyone recommend for field trips. I bought an inexpensive pair at LLBean and they weren't that good. I couldn't spot a fence if my life depended on it and didn't have time to spend finding it. I think I need a stronger lens. (And need to spend more money). And they should be light weight to hang around my neck for about ten hours. Any suggestions?

Jim: I always thought that Elton John's re-writing of the lyrics to "Candle in the wind" was pretty lame. A great artist (and I think Elton John was a fine song-writer at one point) would be inspired enough by Princess Di's passing to write a new song. Changing a few lyrics to a previous hit just didn't feel all that special to me, though John (and everyone else) made a big deal out of it.

jimacko wrote:Valentino's passing resulted in a song written almost overnight by a Tin Pan Alley songsmith called "There's A New Star In Heaven Tonight"...I wonder which of our pop artists will be the first to come out with a memorial ditty for MJ?

Well, let's see, in the operatic world we could have:

"Song to the Moonwalker," from Rusalka.
"Luna-Camminatore d'Estate," that delightful Neapolitan song.
"Un fanciul col serto di Re," a gripping recitative from Verdi's Macbeth.
"E una cosa bizzarro," from La Cenerentola.

And for a glimpse into MJ's bedroom, a couple of passages from Peter Grimes: "Come, boy! Steady there - don't take fright, now!" and, "Leave him alone! He's mine!" (To which his lawyer replies, "Hush, hush, Michael! Hush, Michael!")

Or perhaps, a simpler summation of MJ's life from the end of Un Ballo in Maschera: "Orror! orror! orror!"

kashie:

I believe John's lyricist was Bernie Taupin. But I might be mistaken for the lyrics to that particiular song.

Well, let's see, in the operatic world we could have:

"Song to the Moonwalker," from Rusalka.
"Luna-Camminatore d'Estate," that delightful Neapolitan song.
"Un fanciul col serto di Re," a gripping recitative from Verdi's Macbeth.
"E una cosa bizzarro," from La Cenerentola.

And for a glimpse into MJ's bedroom, a couple of passages from Peter Grimes: "Come, boy! Steady there - don't take fright, now!" and, "Leave him alone! He's mine!" (To which his lawyer replies, "Hush, hush, Michael! Hush, Michael!")

Or perhaps, a simpler summation of MJ's life from the end of Un Ballo in Maschera: "Orror! orror! orror!"

And from Broadway, we've got:
"Secondhand Nose" and "I've Got Bleach Under My Skin"...

And then there's "Sonny Boy", "Climb upon my knee, Sonny Boy, though you're only three, Sonny Boy"...oh no, let's not go there...

OK, OK, I know we shouldn't speak ill of the dead, but the word "genius" is being bandied about all too indiscriminately.

The principle, "De mortuis nil nisi bonum," does not apply to celebrities or politicians.

Another great one has gone: Mollie Sugden.

For those who watched and laughed at "Are You Being Served?" you will remember her as Mrs. Slocumbe, she of the ever-changing hair colors. One of the funniest shows around and still be shown.

For those who haven't watched the shows, try catching them on PBS when these shows are being shown.

R.I.P. Mrs. Slocumbe a/k/a Mollie Sugden!

A very happy Fourth to you all. And kudos to the Wimbledon finalists; this should be a fine weekend for tennis.

A Surgical Keystone Cops Comedy

The following would be quite funny if it weren't so disturbing, and if it were not I who was the patient involved.

On 22 June, I returned to hospital — a major university teaching institution ranked among the ten best hospitals in the country — for a standard postoperative diagnostic procedure following the removal of the gall bladder which radiological procedure is performed by the Interventional Radiology (IR) group whose practitioners are themselves qualified surgeons, and which procedure checks the function of the common bile duct (CBD) to make certain it's free of any stones or other impediments to the flow of bile to the small bowel. If any impediments are found, the impediment is removed or corrected by the IR practitioner on the spot using various methods depending on the nature of the impediment. The procedure is done on an outpatient basis which means, barring any complications, you go home the same day minus the drain (called a "T-Tube") and its associated external drainage bag which was put in place at the time of the original gall bladder surgery.

A simple, swift, and perfectly routine business.

So I have the procedure done on the 22nd, and the IR guy reports no stones in the CBD, but the flow of bile to the intestine is slightly sluggish. My attending (i.e., the big-name surgeon who did the original gall bladder surgery) decides to first cap off the T-Tube and wait two days to see whether I develop any untoward symptoms (capping off the T-Tube makes it effectively invisible to the CBD as if the tube didn't exist), and to see whether the sluggishness corrects itself. That means I'm no longer an outpatient but am admitted to hospital for at least the next two days. I make no objection as I've implicit faith in B-N surgeon, and it sounds to me like the prudent thing to do.

After two days, back to IR for a repeat of the procedure, and this IR guy (not the same IR guy who did the first procedure on the 22nd) reports an obstruction of some sort in the CBD, but he's not sure it's a stone although it most likely is.

Excuse me? First there are no stones, now, two days later, there's at least one? What kind of string betting is going on here? What is this, some sort of tag team operation?

I'm starting to get a bit pissed. Apparently, so is the B-N surgeon, because he now decides to hell with these IR guys, and turns this over to the endoscopy group so that they can go into the CBD with an endoscope and see directly just what it is that's causing the impediment via a procedure called an ERCP (short for Endoscopic Retrograde Cholangiopancreatography) which is a very big deal indeed requiring an anesthesiologist and deep sedation just short of complete general anesthesia which deep sedation carries all sorts of risks of its own not to even speak of the risks inherent in the endoscopy itself. What they do under this deep sedation is thread an endoscope directly into the CBD and, once the impediment is visualized, either remove or correct it surgically directly through the endoscope.

I'm not entirely thrilled by this idea, but it seems to me the surest way to handle the thing once and for all.

So, the next day I'm down in the OR to have the ERCP done.

It fails.

Fails? What in bloody hell does that mean? In this case, it means the ERCP guy never even gets the endoscope into the CBD to take a look. Why? Because the bloody ERCP guy can't bloody find the bloody opening to the bloody CBD, and instead keeps ending up in my pancreas(!!), and so he requests that the IR group thread a red-line marker through the biliary system to show him exactly how to get to the opening of the CBD so he can do his thing.

Say what? What have I got caught up in here? Some Marx brothers or SNL sketch? I mean, this is no Mickey Mouse hospital, but a top-ten medical institution fer chrissake!

I'm now whole orders of magnitude beyond being merely pissed. These clowns are scaring the shit out of me.

The IR group responds to the ERCP guy by telling him that what he's requesting makes no sense. If they're going to go to the trouble of threading a red-line marker through the biliary system for him, they might as well go the next step and take another shot at doing the whole job themselves via the T-Tube as originally planned. B-N surgeon agrees. And so back I go to the IR group for the third time to have the IR procedure done yet again, and this time they find a single, tiny stone in the CBD which, under light sedation, they remove successfully by a process called a balloon sphincterotomy via the T-Tube wherein a small balloon is inflated within the CBD to enlarge it and at the same time push the stone out. That being done successfully, they then again cap the T-Tube, and tell me I have to wait two weeks after which time, if no complications develop, I have to return to IR to have the thing looked at yet once again and if everything is A-OK, have the T-Tube removed permanently, and then I'm home free. They then discharge me from hospital to wait out the two weeks at home which is where I am at the moment, and where, so far, all seems to be going well.

Total time spent in hospital for this ordinarily same-day outpatient procedure: 10 (ten) very scary inpatient days.

And what have I learned from all this? I've learned to never again get sick as that's the only sure way to prevent this sort of thing from ever happening.

ACD

Yowza, ACD! However, with the [possible] exception of the ERCP fellow who couldn't steer to the CBD properly, it sounds like your stone was simply so small it was pushing the resolution limits of the imaging technology, which is why they couldn't be sure what was going on until they looked from inside, up close. With the scary exception of that detour through ERCPland, it reads as though they took the most reasonable decision at each juncture.

Fingers crossed that removing the stone was the last needed intervention, and they can remove that T-tube without further ado!

Scary as hell, acd. Glad you are around to tell the tale. Put on some Wagner with a great bottle of wine to make you feel truly relaxed (drink as much wine as you feel needed to get you relaxed as you want to be.)

pczipott wrote:...it sounds like your stone was simply so small it was pushing the resolution limits of the imaging technology, which is why they couldn't be sure what was going on until they looked from inside, up close.

But that's the thing. They never were able to "loo[k] from inside, up close." The ERCP procedure, which is the only way to do that, failed. The first IR guy simply screwed up. The second IR guy, not to appear derelict, simply hedged his opinion on the basis of the first IR guy's experience. It was only the third IR guy who visualized the thing properly, and then proceeded to do what was necessary to remove the visualized stone.

ACD

Aha -- I got the impression that the third IR go-around involved endoscopy as well as the angioplasty. I sit corrected. Nevertheless, it sounds like the visualization was not easy to do. You just needed to have a larger stone!

I think Sheila's prescription of wine and Wagner is a good one.

Proud To Be An American On This July 4th

Link

ACD

Oops

In my post above about the surgical Keystone Cops comedy, I referred to a procedure which I called a "balloon angioplasty." That's the wrong term for the procedure as the "angio" of "angioplasty" should have alerted me to ("angio" refers to a blood vessel or artery). The correct term is "balloon sphincterotomy." I've corrected the original text to incorporate the correct term.

ACD

I was wondering about that "angio", myself, but decided not to make a point of it.

pczipott wrote:Aha -- I got the impression that the third IR go-around involved endoscopy as well as the angioplasty. I sit corrected.

My fault, not yours. I was too imprecise and sloppy in my wording. That, too, has now been corrected in the original text through the courtesy of A.C. Douglas (Site Admin) who's a very accommodating fellow in such matters.

ACD

As usual, ACD, you are trying to get all the attention again. And if you cannot get it by being your usual cantankerous self, you are now using hospitals, surgery and T-tubes to get our sympathy, yada, yada, yada...

Have I made myself perfectly clear? See how that works? *




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