Lossiversary

This week marks an anniversary of sorts for me. Ten years since I made the decision to resign from the Bar and let go of that official status that I spent so much time and effort acquiring and maintaining. Not an easy decision, but one probably made more inevitable by my HIV status and my own expectations about my longevity and my immediate future.

Chalk that one up as a loss.

Two things are odd about my having decided to commemorate this milestone today: that it is the tenth anniversary, and that I’m focusing on the loss.

I can hear you saying it: “What’s so odd about marking a tenth anniversary?” This is because you don’t know me as well as you might. I am a tireless warrior against the tyranny of the fives and zeroes, as I like to say. This means that I have made my whole family (except the ornery ones…you know who you are, and, more importantly, I have not forgotten who you are!) put strange times on the timer of the microwave when heating something up. Never a round number, always something with an odd number of seconds. We even had quite a time last summer when I was visiting, ensuring that we set the TV volume to a prime number. I never claimed not to be an odd duck.

The focusing on the loss thing might be less surprising. We in the AIDS movement often talk about (or hear about) losses and coping with them. Here we have something rather significant that I worked for many years to build, with firm intentions for doing something socially useful with my acquired skills, and ten years (yes, ten, *groan*) after having been sworn in as a member of the Bar in Québec, I let it go.

I did gain from my loss, if we must delve deeper into it. I gained a certain ease of my finances as I no longer had to pay those membership fees and compulsory insurance costs that did not differentiate between the guy working for a low salary in the community-based AIDS movement and the one with the wealth clients driving a luxury automobile and taking frequent trips to exotic locales.

And if I am to be completely honest, I didn’t really lose it all. I generally say — much to the chagrin of those who have heard this once too often — that I am a recovering lawyer. I will never really be free of the influence of those years I spend studying law, or explaining the rules as a provider of legal information. It’s a long, long process.

Looking back at this point, how comfortable am I with the decision to resign? I am comfortable with the choice. I took pains at the time to do things in a way that would allow for a potential return to the profession if I should ever reconsider. That possibility gets more remote with each passing year, not only from the decreasing number of years I might have left, or have left to work, but also because the task of updating my knowledge to qualify to practise law becomes more daunting as my experiences grow more remote.

I only have to worry that scientific progress in the treatment of HIV will continue to call into question the wisdom of my perspective, as it continues to push back my expectation of decrepitude and death. I guess that is not such a loss for me.

Bring on the Ballot Box!

It seems that the Harper Government will fall on Friday, 25 March in the afternoon. There will be a motion of non-confidence put forward by the official opposition related to the finding of the government’s being in contempt of Parliament and the vote is supposed to take place at 1:30 pm. I, for one, will try to catch this streaming on CPAC or on CBC.

Now, I have never voted for the Conservative Party or for any of its predecessors, but I want to take a moment to share my perspective on why I think others should avoid them, without necessarily recommending any of the other parties, all of which seem to have their own shortcomings. A little list, then, of terrible things that this government has done that need to be undone.

The In and Out scheme. According to the last court decision, currently under appeal, the party illegally transferred money to the campaigns of certain candidates who were not going to reach their expense limits in order to have those candidates re-contribute the money for ads that were part of the national campaign, which had already reached the limit. This way, the candidates got bigger refunds of their (inflated) expenses and the national campaign got to overspend. One candidate considered the scheme so suspect that he refused to participate. As a voter who expects the rules to be respected and a taxpayer who doesn’t care to subsidize (through refunds of campaign expenses) schemes that skirt around the rules, I feel like I’ve been subjected to a little of the “in-out, in-out” and I’m not feeling like having a cigarette.

Ideologically-based decisions on matters that shouldn’t be politicized. From the cancellation of the prison tattoo program (evaluated as a success in terms of disease prevention and skill development) to the persistent attempts to close down the supervised injection site (that they do no pay for) to a broad rejection of proven harm reduction techniques, this government has ignored evidence to make the decisions they want to make. Worse, they have cowed their own staff and those seeking funding into avoiding key words they know will get them fired or defunded, and that is not supposed to be the way our professional public service works.

Blaming others for the decisions they have made. We saw it with the decision to make the long form census optional (and render it statistically irrelevant, because why would you want good information for your decisions?), when the minister responsible tried to claim that the Chief Statistician at Statistics Canada had recommended the move. The professional resigned. We saw it more recently when a minister had “someone” insert the handwritten word “not” in a sentence that would otherwise have accorded a renewal of funding to a group that is well-respected in the world, and then claimed she didn’t know who had written in the word. A junior staffer took the fall for that. You’re entitled to make your bad decisions as a government, but you should be brave enough to take responsibility for them.

Spending billions of dollars on major projects while not disclosing the whole cost. Not even to Parliament, which actually has a right and obligation to receive such information. In this category, we have the fighter jets, coming in at three times their announced cost and not even subjected to a bidding process (we call this sound fiscal management?), and plans to build prisons for supposedly “unreported” crimes, because I guess we are going to start imprisoning unconvicted felons…or will people be so inspired by the existence of new prisons that are costing them more than disclosed that they will start reporting the crimes of which they are victims? Referring back to our second point, I might add that a few calls to an office do not constitute proof of the level of “unreported” crimes.

So Friday we are set to make history, with the first instance of a sitting government being declared in contempt of Parliament anywhere in the entire Commonwealth. I can only naively hope that some other voters in this country will consider these items and others that I haven’t enumerated here to make a decision based on the evidence, something this government doesn’t seem to like to do.

MRI

Well that was interesting.

I had an MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) this past Saturday, part of the ongoing process of understanding just what it is about my psoriatic arthritis that we won’t be able to do anything about. And I had this modern procedure in one of the least modern looking hospitals in town.

I know what you’re thinking. Saturday? You had a medical test on a Saturday?! I was quite surprised by that, too, but happy to have one medical thing happen for which I didn’t have to take time off from work. I did find out that this Saturday thing is not without its downsides: getting up when I might have wanted to sleep in; finding the side door I had been directed to locked; and having to ask the guy in the commercial café for directions because there was no one at the reception desk.

So already being a bit annoyed by the aforementioned inconveniences, imagine how happy I was when the technician took one look at me and said “You’re not going to fit.” Thanks lady. I came here on my Saturday morning, found the door you directed me to locked and now you’re telling me I’m too fat to have the test that won’t actually result in any improvement in my health? I almost left then, but I had to stay around for the humiliation of the hospital gown.

The technicians made sure at several points leading up to the experience that I had no metal on me. The video I found on YouTube and have embedded below demonstrates the importance of that.

We ended up putting me on the table face down in what they called “the Superman position” (one hand outstretched — and attached — in front of me), and I did fit into the tiny hole. Even with the earplugs, the noise was disturbing. Like some kind of industrial noise band practicing for a gig by playing short selections from their various numbers. I had no idea how much time had passed, and spend all of my time trying not to tense the attached hand, dealing with the other arm falling asleep, and not moving my sweaty brow from the “free” arm for fear of hitting the back of my head on the machine and panicking at the concrete demonstration of just how small a space I was in. It was a blessing that I was face down so I could ignore the smallness of the space.

A word on why I was having this done. My most recent experience of having an ultrasound on this wrist in order to have a cortisone injection was not conclusive. The ultrasound people recommended to my rheumatologist that I have an MRI to see things more clearly. It is all a bit of an exercise in futility, however, as any treatment other than palliative for the arthritis is out of the question: arthritis treatments are immune suppressive and I already have something working on suppressing my immune system that I am trying to fight, not help.

Upon emerging from the machine, and once I had re-established the feeling in my right arm enough to get up from the surface I was on, the technicians tried to save a little face on the size comments. “If you have to come back for your neck, you definitely won’t fit. You would have to be on your back and your shoulders are too wide.”

That was a little easier to swallow.