The Distance of 108 Miles...

A couple of weeks ago I left the comforts of a blustery and dark Victoria to join my friends Chris and Catherine and their two kids Eric (aged 5) and Caitlin (aged 7) on a trip to Chris' parents place in 108 Mile House.  His parents are a wonderful couple.  His father is English (or Welsh or something equally Anglo-European) and thusly has an understated, dry, sense of humor, which has been passed down to Chris.  His mother is equal parts motherly warmth and cut-the-bullshit-no-nonsense.  When I was 18 years old, it was the basement of their old house in North Delta that I had moved into after I had moved out of my parents house.  I have thought of them as surrogate parents ever since.  Chris' Dad, Peter, loves it when I call him dad.  Ok.  Not so much.  {grin}

So, how does this trip factor into my knowledge journey?  Well, a couple of things were learned during my time there.  First off there was the rudimentary basics of operating and effectively using a chainsaw. Once we were armed with that knowledge we took advantage of the second thing learned.  Apparently it is illegal to cut down the trees in the green spaces around 100 Mile House (and surrounding areas including 108 Mile House), HOWEVER, you are allowed to traipse through the forests and chop up and cart away as much deadfall as you like!  

One day I want this life!!!  A life of getting up the dawn after a big wind storm, putting on layer after layer of warm woolen clothing, loading a tobogan with my axe, my chain saw and a thermos of coffee or hot chocolate and going on a search for fuel as the snow drifts gently down.  Finding an alder or spruce collapsed in a tangle of branches.  Taking my axe to the thinner branches and chainsaw to the bigger ones until I have whittled the tree down to the trunk, then using the chainsaw and cutting that trunk into transportable logs, loading up the tobaggan and carting the logs up to the wood shed.  When I  have the full tree dismembered and relocated, going inside and grabbing a warm lunch, then heading back out to chop up those logs into firewood and kindling.   Once that is done, sitting on the couch in front of the fire with a book in one hand and my lady fair snuggled up beside me enjoying the same or surfing the net on her laptop, while texting on her Iphone and watching a show she has PVRed. {Grin} {Sigh}  One day.  One day.

"But what about this new attempt at getting the blog published on a regular basis mentioned in the previous post?" you may be asking.  Well, this all boils down to a challenge that Chris put to me while in 108 Mile.  The premise?  We each choose three things that we would like to do on a daily basis but have thus far failed to achieve.  In my case it was this blog, doing some sort of exercise, and brushing and flossing.  We would then keep track of what we complete each day and log each activity as complete or incomplete over the course of 12 days.  The winner at the end of that would get something from the other.  In my case it was for Chris to play a game of chess with me.  In his case it would be for me to cook breakfast for him and his family.  

It has definiitely encouraged me to post more frequently, but I fear I may have lost this challenge.  I will know for certain on Saturday, also know as tomorrow.  I shall petition for another challenge after this one regardless of the outcome.  I have found that a sprinkling of good natured competition is quite nice.  {smile}.

Next post:  My quest for a Tim Hortons homestyle biscuit!

A Test on the Quest...

It was a rainy night on November 2nd, when I left my girlfriends apartment with a confident, "I'll be back in an hour!"  I got into her Prius and drove the dark, windy, back roads out to Comosun College's Interurban Campus to put my quest for knowledge to the test for the first time.   Before I left, I had searched the interwebs to determine which of the many buildings held the classroom wherein I would meet my fate. 

It is a funny thing how something looked at on a 2D computer screen, in the light of day, fails to translate well when attempting to use that knowledge to locate it's 3D counterpart on a dark, dank night.  And thus I found that while I had left the apartment with nary a butterfly circulating through my digestive system, I had seemingly ingested a flutter of them between point A and point B as my worries of arriving late grew.

After navigating the parking lot, running to the building, and following the signs within, to the door marked "Testing In Progress", I entered the room to find myself the centre of attention.  Twenty-five women's heads lifted from behind twenty-five computer screens and stared at me while I stood confused.  Why were there all these computers?  Where were the booklets, scantron sheets and HB pencils?  Was I late?  From the front of the class came a woman's voice, "You must be Nathaniel.  You are just in time.  Grab a seat behind one of the empty computers."  With a nervous smile to the other ladies I made my way to a lone computer at the back of the class.

On the computer terminal was a screen that had two options, Test A or Test B.  The instructor then preceded to explain that all the tests were now paperless.   This test was a 50 question, multiple choice quiz.  The questions were chosen at random from a bank of thousands of questions created by the Vancouver Island Health Authority.  She told us when we were done the test to raise our hand and she would come over and take down the result.  We could then leave.  With those instructions given she told us to kindly close our medical terminlogy textbooks and turn off our cell phones. 

I looked around and saw that the textbooks used by those that had taken the medical terminology course were about 2 inches thick.  "Oh oh", I thought to myself.  The instructor then told us that we would be doing Test A and that we could begin when were ready.  

The questions were pretty straightforward and yet it was more challenging than I had anticipated.  I breezed through the first block of five questions, but then came up against one that I had no clue on:

 AD refers to the:  a) Left Ear

                                  b) Right Ear

                                  c) Left Eye

                                  d) Right Eye

So I skipped it.  I mean all I needed to do was get 36 right so I wasn't worried.  I continued on and slowly became more and more concerned.  It seemed to me I was skipping more and more questions.  Not only that, some of the questions that I HAD answered I was beginning to second guess.  It wasn't all Carditis and Infarction.  The test covered a lot more than my minor introduction to medical terminology had prepared me for.  My initial belief that this would be a quick "in and out" rapidly faded as first one lady and then another raised their hands.  Those two women seemed to be a catalyst for the others as hand after hand shot up until there were but three of us left.  I read over my answers one last time, with trepidation pressed the "complete" button,  and hesitantly raised my hand.  As the instructor come over my results flashed onto the screen.  Turns out I had answered 37 of the questions correctly.  74%!!  I had passed!!! 

The Pause continued... (and hopefully at its end {wink})

And now.... For your viewing pleasure!!! The conclusion to Nathaniel's Wonderful Adventure into the Mysterious World of Medical Terminology!!!  {overwhelming canned audience applause}  Thank you...  Thank you... It's a pleasure to be back.  This post was a couple of weeks in the making.  Not for lack of experience but rather for lack of a regular posting schedule.  <grin>  I seek to change that.  I will be writing about how in a couple of  posts.  However, words are cheap (and so easily written) and the proof is in the pudding, as they say.

Onto the meat and potatoes.  Hhhmmm...  I must be hungry as that was two food idioms in as many sentences.  {shakes head} Anyway, so in my previous two posts I wrote of the wonder and magic of the more common latin roots used in medical terminology and then I drifted into an investigation into suffixes and prefixes.  I shall (finally) unveil what I have learned about the actual suffixes and prefixes that pertain to medical terminology.

Some word suffix basics:

• -Ectomy = Removal of
• -Gram    = Picture of
• -Graph(y)= The process of making a picture
• -Otomy  = To make a cut in
• -Scopy  = To use an instrument for viewing
• -Stomy  = create an opening

Next we move on to the possible prefixes.

• Macro- or Megalo- or Megaly- = large
• Micro- = small
• Hyper- = above normal
• Hypo-  = below normal
• Tachy- = fast
• Brady- = slow
• Peri- = Around
• Trans- = across
• Inter- = between
• Endo- = inside, within
• Echo- = using ultrasonic wave
• Electro- = using electricity

And there are colour specific beginning:

• Chloro- = Green
• Cyan-   = Blue
• Leuk-   = White
• Eryth- = Red

And lastly, there are the prefixes and suffixes that denote problems:

• Dys- = not working properly
• Mal- = Bad
• -Emia = Blood
• -Itis    = Inflammation
• -Osis  = Condition/Disease
• -Pathy = Disease

Armed with this knowledge I went bravely forth and tackled my Medical Terminology test.  It consisted of 50 multiple choice questions, I had an hour to complete, and I needed to get a minimum of 72 % (36/50) to pass.

That tale my friends is for another time.  Tomorrow, in fact.  And how can I make such lofty promises when all my concurrent posts have fallen short on delivering on a regular schedule?  Simple, I shall write it now, and post it tomorrow.  (I sure hope this works.  lol.)

Till then my friends.  Enjoy your own individual journeys!!

The Pause that Refreshes (an interlude)

I have been fighting a cold the last couple of days.  I think it is on the outs.  I, however, become very good at putting things off when I am in that state, as evidenced by this blog.  <sigh>  But I am back now and eager to update everything that has been going on.  Starting with my medical terminology endeavors.  But before I do I am going to digress.  So, lets get right to it, shall we?

Linguistics:Prefixes and Suffixes

When I was in public school the class that I could have done without most was English.  I didn't see the need to, nor was I interested in the theories of how sentences are formed or why they do what the do; I could talk and make myself understood, I could write and get my point across; These were things I just "got" (or so I believed).  But that was then and this is now.  Today as I explore the different pieces of the words that make up the terms so frequently used in the medical profession I find myself incredibly fascinated.

As you may have noticed from viewing my former posts the "quest" for knowledge is very rarely a straight line for me.  I started this blog with the intent of it being a "learn one thing new each day" type endeavor and find that I end up learning ten.  I thought that was just a phenomenon of the beginning (ie. large gaps in knowledge that needed filling to move forward), but it continues in these posts.  This will, most assuredly, be a reoccurring theme throughout these posts.  I will try not to bring it up too often, but I find it quite interesting {smile}.

The reason I bring this up is that while my search for insight into the different medical terms was fairly straightforward, I then started to look into WHY the words were organized the way they were (you know..... those topics I didn't care to pay attention to in high school).  And found it fascinating.  It lead me to the study of linguistics.  From there I delved into what makes suffixes and prefixes.

Linguistics is the scientific study of the human language.  It can be broken into 3 basic branches:  The study of language form, language meaning, and language context. To explore this topic in any sort of depth, be it basic level or otherwise, would take us down more rabbit holes then I care to count.  So in the interest of keeping these posts short(er), and thus more engaging I am going to shelve a deeper explanation for the moment.  What I am interested in is language form and of that topic only a sliver of it, called morphology(which, in part, is the formation of words).  Which leads to the next part...

Prefixes and Suffixes:

We are taught in elementary school that by adding little pieces to a word either at the front or at the end we can change that words meaning.  This is the job of the prefix (from the Latin præfigere "to fix in front") and the suffix (from the Latin suffixus "fastened below").  The prefix can change the meaning of a word in many ways and those ways are varied and confusing.  Take the prefix "un" for example.  "Un", can mean "not, or opposite of" or it can mean "reverse action".  Case in point is the word "unlockable".  Based on the first meaning this word means "not lockable" but in the second it means "able to be unlocked". (It was stuff like this that confounded and frustrated me in school because there were no hard perfect rules to the English language; there were ALWAYS exceptions....  well, except sometimes {grin}.  Now I find it fascinating and beautiful.  To speak and write the English language well is arguably an art form.)  Then there is the suffix.   

The suffix is placed at the end of a word and its uses are a little more straightforward.  There are inflectional and derivational suffixes.  I was going to try and write the differences in my own words but the description given on Wikipedia is concise and well written.  I recommend you check it out.  

All this gives me a bit of a better understand and at the same time muddies the waters a little further, which is just like the English language. {grin}  Later today I shall be putting up Part 2 of my Medical Terminology post.  Until then, hope you are enjoying your weekend.