a "favourable" letter

It's a year and a couple of weeks since I looked at a kindly whalloper blankly with dilated pupils and couldn't tell him my date of birth ...

New neurologist is a gem.

Beyond having merely a professorial fascination with the rarity of my fuckedupedness, he's an advocate: and what a change that makes to my world.

So, having confined the complex partial seizures to (usually) just the morning one - which now after 21 years is much like vegemite and toast - he declared Monday evening he'd write a "favourable" letter to VicRoads ... though he's still not too happy with the EEG results, he is convinced by my experiential ones.

All the reasons I built my little slice of goodness in the messmate gum forest of Red Hill are the same reasons having no ticket to drive can send you insane.

Hopefully VicRoads Medical Review Board backs Dr Butler's call and reinstates my licence before Christmas.

I owe way too many friends, family, colleagues, clients and neighbours too many favours for the past year.


I shouldn't, but still do, get pretty uptight about the MRIs. I think for anyone who's had them on a regular basis they'd know the dual anxiety. There's the result. Nobody can ever say that's going to be favourable - until you've got the radiologist's comparison to the last 6 months. But there's the stripping down - the defacement.

That's the bit where, despite all your work on being 'normal/ish' again - ocean races, mountain range adventuring, pleasing a few clients along the way and feeling confident about being on a ladder to clean the gutters again - they strip you back to a hospital robe. They lay you flat, there's the serious procedural tone of the nurse, the clamping down of the head mask where, through the little mirror you see nurse retreat behind the door and radiologist checking computers - then there's the little journey backward into the tunnel, and the fucking hideous cacophony begins.

All of which are a jolt. A kick in the head. A revolting half hour in a bread oven tube with digital jackhammer pulses. All of which says things aren't right, you're not ok. You're treated just as the 85 year-old next in line - and he looks like he's never buying a green banana again. You can go forward and drop a #3 to raise the #2 in howling, pitching, screaming Bass Strait - but fact is you've got a 'mass' in your brain. And it has potential serious ramifications.

Anyway, v thankful that this time around the time between scan and results was just a day (rather than the fortnight of worry it has been in the past) - and the result, compared to the last scan, showed no change.

And my garden's burst of spring colour - the ranunculi, irises, and those William Guinness columbines - has never looked better.

Cocktail hour

EEG results were still too active for new doc's liking. New plan. New drug.
Lamictal now being introduced into my days - on top of the 400mg breakfast 600mg dinner Tegretol. Keeping a daily log which will hopefully show some change over the coming 2 months. Then, hopefully, I've got a good shot at driving again.

Blue glacier juice & mountain bling - fossils return to sea

There's a take on the world that only rambling time in a range like NZ's Southern Alps can give. See, this ridge, these crests were all seafloor just two million years ago - not too long ago in geological terms. Geologists get excited about the meteoric uplift of Mt Cook and her 16 sisters: these peaks and ridges are moving skyward at 15-20mm EVERY YEAR.
...and yet the hundreds of Southern Alps glaciers - like Dave and Jim's favourite 'Rob Roy' - right now seemingly have that uplift in check.
There's about the same amount of shaving, shearing and grinding going on as tectonic heave; the ice returning particles of granite and shale - seafloor hardened to stone by cataclysmic forces - back to the sea, suspended in beautiful milky blue glacial juice that makes postcard creeks and streams (with the glittery splashes of pyrite - mountain bling).

There are marine fossils up here, returning to the sea from 3kms up.

... and then car licence suspension really doesn't seem to matter.
Nor unidentified gob in temporal lobe.

Nor much else really, other than making time for more mountain time (and a couple of Monteith's Black Ales along the way - a great lubricant of philosophical cogs)