h/t to my friend BA! Today, April 16th, is National Advanced Care Planning Day in Canada…have you started the conversation? Here’s a link for more information and a 3 ½ minute video produced by the Canadian Hospice Palliative Care Association. Please forward this video, share on your Facebook page, tweet
Continue readingTag: autobiography
My journey with AIDS...and more!: My camera survived!
This was the last photograph I took on Sunday before going ass-over-tea-kettle into the waters of the Tay River’s Grant’s Creek at Allan Mills. I then walked across the arched, stone bridge I’ve photographed on other occasions to get to the other side of the creek. In order to get
Continue readingMy journey with AIDS...and more!: Scanned: my first post-positive lab results
I found this in a plastic-covered folder in my Rubbermaid file drawer: My physician at that time, the late Ed Kamski, ordered these tests as a baseline after giving me the results of my “positive” HIV-antibody test. (He also told me that a blood sample taken about a year earlier,
Continue readingMy journey with AIDS...and more!: Honouring Dad for his birthday
This Sunday, yes April Fools Day, would have been my father’s eighty-fifth birthday. I last saw him when the whole family gathered in Perth to mark his seventy-fifth, within months of his first stroke. It was a very happy occasion, given the warning scare we had experienced when he was
Continue readingMy journey with AIDS...and more!: Ending the week on a positive note
I checked in with my doctor today to get results from my latest blood tests and the news was all good! CD-4: 310 (up from January) viral load: undetectable Hemoglobin A1c: .063 Weight: 144 lbs. So I’m good again until June, by which time I’ll have had some more routine,
Continue readingMy journey with AIDS...and more!: No sentence could undo the harms caused by Graham James
I join the outcry today over the sentencing of convicted serial pedophile Graham James to two years in prison for the sexual abuse of Theo Fleury and Todd Holt. Counter-intuitively (because I knew it would just get me stirred up) I watched the news coverage of the lawyers’ statements and victims’
Continue readingMy journey with AIDS...and more!: Recalling the optimism of Expo ’67
It’s hard to believe that it will be forty-five years ago this spring since the opening of Canada’s first World’s Fair – Expo ’67. I have assembled a number of post-card images from that summer (some photos, a few just artist’s concepts). (Post-cards were the text messages of the day,
Continue readingMy journey with AIDS...and more!: An authentic winter weekend in Montréal
Click here for a link to an album of pictures from my busy weekend in Montréal. (As I write this I still have a half-day left here so there will be more pictures added eventually.) Arriving here mid-afternoon Friday I`ve experienced the city in winter for the first time in
Continue readingMy journey with AIDS...and more!: Something that made me think “Huh?” on World AIDS Day
As I do every Thursday, I spent two hours late this afternoon with a group of gay men. We range in age from something like 35 to just over 60. I was curious, then disappointed, to see whether the subject of World AIDS Day would come up in the course
Continue readingMy journey with AIDS...and more!: Medical update: I could do better if ‘good enough’ wasn’t still good enough
It’s been quite some time since I had the run of tests for HIV and diabetes, in part because of my fear of the results, so today’s news was quite satisfactory with clear room for improvement. My viral load, a test which measures the activity of HIV in my blood,
Continue readingMy journey with AIDS...and more!: Pig Penn
Very puzzling, but markedly less infuriating than the sexual abuse and cover-up scandal shrouding Penn State University, is the thoughtless, pigskin-headed response last night by student mobs to the sackings of the university president and, much more o…
Continue readingMy journey with AIDS...and more!: Walking the Glen Tay Block
This time last year, visiting Perth for Thanksgiving, I set out for a walk, the route of which I could easily picture in my mind but the distance (see map)…not so much. It seems an even longer walk to recall, one year later, limited as I am by in…
Continue readingMy journey with AIDS...and more!: Bursa – and not the city in Turkey!
The ever-increasing pain I have experienced recently now has a name – bursitis. It follows the hip-femur repairs in 2003 and from years of strain on my minimal maximus – gluteus, that is. Yesterday I began physical therapy treatments and le…
Continue readingMy journey with AIDS...and more!: A most memorable trip to London long, long ago
I have been scanning some photos stored in shoe-boxes and managed to touch up several from a class trip to London which took place during March Break in 1976. (How fortunate I was – what a privilege – to have been able to go on such a…
Continue readingMy journey with AIDS...and more!: Follow-up on my aches and pains
The x-rays (not exactly as pictured) last week were negative for anything untoward. All bones, and metal objects substituting for same reinforcing my femur, are intact. That’s a relief! The aches and pains continue intermittently, however, with s…
Continue readingMy journey with AIDS...and more!: My journey with AIDS…and more! 2011-09-08 20:29:15
This post serves as a reminder of what has ailed me in recent days. On the day of Jack Layton’s funeral I spent an inordinate amount of time on my feet, standing in one place, taking pictures, standing in line, etc. A few days later I noticed som…
Continue readingMy journey with AIDS...and more!: There are some blog posts I’d like to forget – on returning to the NDP
I’ve always tried to make this blog somewhat of a record of my life, however fragmented, warts and all. Here in the archives is my defiant abandonment of the New Democratic Party for, let’s say, greener pastures. However right it felt a…
Continue readingMy journey with AIDS...and more!: There is no hierarchy in grief: Of Norway and Amy Winehouse
Please read this from Scott Dagostino, whose writing makes me admire the way his mind works. Being someone who might preemptively describe myself as naive (which endears me to world-wise friends and the ne’er do-well-alike), I must say the title …
Continue readingMy journey with AIDS...and more!: A change in “Mr. G’s eye exam”
Mr. G’s eye exam has been changed again, maybe for the last time, so that the antagonist, though dead for more than a decade, might only be identified by his last initial and the responsibilities he held. (Anyone familiar with the school at the…
Continue reading