There have been some positive developments this season on CBC Radio’s morning schedule.

The Current is an excellent current affairs show, and Anna Maria Tremonti and Jim Brown are excellent hosts.

Even Sounds Like Canada, which is otherwise chaotic and unfocused, has its good points, not the least of which is permanent guest host Bernard St-Laurent, who has managed, inside his tenuous shell of a job, to tilt the show a little to the positive.

That all said, there’s a substantial problem with the morning schedule, and that’s simply that the schedule itself is far, far too confusing.

Here’s the progression as I hear it. Island Morning, the local morning show, now ends at 8:30 a.m., and is followed immediately by about 15 minutes of news and sports. Then comes The Current, which breaks for news almost immediately at 9:00 a.m. There’s another newscast at 9:30 a.m., and then, before 10:00 a.m. comes the “mid-morning break” from Halifax, which huddles around the top of the hour and is a sort of garage sale for otherwise unused bits of vaguely local information. Sometime after 10:00 a.m. Sounds Like Canada starts up, and then there’s more news at 10:30 a.m., 11:00 a.m. and 11:30 a.m. Somewhere before Noon, Out Front may or may not cause Sounds Lilke Canada to end early. Then there’s more news at Noon.

That’s six newscasts alone between 8:30 and Noon. Some of them from Toronto, some from Charlottetown, some from Halifax. Some are local, some are regional, some are “national and international.”

While much of the individual programming has its good points, it’s scattered over such a confusing schedule that a listener tuning in for Island Morning and listening through to Maritime Noon — as I’ve done every morning for the past week — can emerge feeling mentally pommeled.

The roots of this can be traced back to the introduction of the bottom of the clock “update” newscast into the former 9:00 a.m. to Noon show This Morning. Apparently the Big Bosses felt that we listeners needed more local updating in the vast Sargasso Sea of contemplative current affairs. While this may have made sense in places like Toronto, where perhaps the Don Valley Parkway is backed up and drivers need alerting, here in The Regions, I’m sure most of us can hold our breath and wait to be updated at Noon.

The ultimate demonstration of the insanity of this idea came several years ago during a This Morning interview with former New Brunswick Premier Frank McKenna: the interview was just developing a nice head of steam when the host had to break for a “local update” and we got to hear Aubrey Bell rhyme off a couple of headlines, and then update us on the IODE meeting scheduled and the status of various lost cats.

I don’t think the CBC has to keep the Peter Gzowski-era format forever, and I’m not opposed to progress. But the chaotic panorama that is the morning schedule needs renovation and simplification.

Being that the gallbladder is spurred into action to produce bile to aid in the “digestion and absorption of fats and fat-soluble vitamins in the small intestine,” I was advised, during my time with a bum gallbladder, to avoid foods containing fat.

As you might imagine, this meant that I became much more aware of what fat is, and what foods it’s found in, and in what quantities.

The first problem a newfound fat-watcher must face is the distinction between “fat” the food ingredient, “fat” the body part and “fat” the adjective.

Let’s go through these one by one:

Fat the food ingredient, or “dietary fat,” the NIH tells us, is “one of the three nutrients (along with protein and carbohydrates) that supply calories to the body.” Fats “are organic compounds that are made up of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen; they are the most concentrated source of energy in foods.”

Fat the body part is actually called “body fat” or, more technically, “adipose tissue.” Body fat is “a form of body tissue composed of cells which primarily store lipids.” Apparently, “just like saving money for a rainy day, our body stores excess calories as fat.” These excess calories can come from dietary fat. Or not.

Fat the adjective — “I feel fat,” “I’ve been getting really fat lately,” and so on — usually is taken to mean a combination of “I have more body fat than I would like” and “I weigh more than I would like.” Confusingly, losing body fat does not necessarily equate to losing weight. Nor does losing weight equate to losing body fat.

This whole situation is almost as confusing as having a two year old son who says “poo” to describe both a Disney character and feces.

The short version of the story is: foods with more dietary fat generally contain more calories because every gram of fat provides 9 calories, which is more than double the gram to calories ratio of protein or carbohydrates. So if you eat more foods with more dietary fat, you will consume more calories which may, in the end, get stored as body fat. Making you “fat,” so to speak.

But you can also eat protein or carbohydrates, which also contribute calories, which might also end up stored in body fat.

In other words, you can eat fat and get fat. You can also eat fat and not get fat. And you can also not eat fat and get fat.

To confuse the issue further, there are several types of fat, some of which are “good” and some of which are “bad.” The “bad” type of fat is saturated fat. Saturated fat is “bad” because, says the NIH:

Eating too much saturated fat is one of the major risk factors for heart disease. A diet high in saturated fat causes a soft, waxy substance called cholesterol to build up in the arteries.

This cholesterol-build up evil of fat is in addition to the “high calorie containing leading to excess body fat leading to obesity” potential evil of fats in general.

The Dietitians of Canada say the following about the amount of dietary fat in our diet:

Contrary to popular belief, fat is important for good health. However, most of us eat more fat than we need. Aim for less than 30% of total calories from fat. This amount is 60 grams of fat for the average woman (based on 55 kg/120 lbs) and 90 grams (based on 75 kg/165 lbs) for the average man.

This appears simple, but once the numbers start rumbling around in your head, it can get confusing, especially because there’s a 30, a 60 and a 90 in there.

The easiest approach, I think, is to simply fill out the Dietitians of CanadaNutrition Profile and find your Recommended Daily Intake of calories (mine is 2,700). Then divide this figure by 30. For me, the result, as above, is 90 grams of dietary fat per day.

Perhaps the best fat-related thing to come from my gallbladder journey is that I’ve managed to develop a taste for foods without fat. Or rather I don’t depend on fats in foods to define their taste.

I’m still confused, but I’m getting better.

I have been watching a lot of television this week while I wait for the gashes in my belly to heal sufficiently to allow me to resume a normal life. One of the programmes I watched was on Bravo and was a low-budget interview show hosted by Canadian Keith Morrison called The Actors.

Morrison, who used to come off as a sort of lightweight John Tesh, has matured into a creditable interviewer. His guest this week was Peter Coyote.

Coyote has appeared in the Whole Earth orbit several times, and this is how I first came to know of him. You’ve undoubtedly heard his voice, as he is a leading voiceover artist for commercials (and he narrated the Oscars in 2000). And of course he’s an accomplished actor. He is a fascinating man, a true polymath. And perhaps more than anyone I’ve ever heard interviewed, is skilled a being equally brutally honest and self-confident without appearing at all arrogant.

If you have an opportunity to see him interviewed, you will not be disappointed.

It’s amazing how sore you can get when surgeons remove one of your internal organs. But I’m on the mend. Thanks for all the good wishes.

Three days before Christmas last year, I was sitting on the couch watching television after supper. Over the course of about an hour I developed what I took, at the time, to be the worst case of “heart burn” I’d ever had: a dull pain, very strong, centred under my rib cage. The pain was accompanied by tremendous gas that manifested in burps the likes I’d never knew myself capable of producing.

I figured the problem was simply related to something I’d eaten, and when it passed a few hours later, I forgot all about it.

Then, two days later, the same thing happened.

On and off for the next several weeks I developed a regular pattern of symptoms: about two or three hours after eating I would begin to feel a pain in my lower back, followed, over the next half hour, by increasing abdominal pain, the aforementioned burping and, at its worst, chills and irritability.

I had no idea what was happening to me, but it wasn’t pleasant.

The week after New Years, I made an appointment with my family doctor, and she diagnosed me as having a stomach ulcer. There are two types of peptic ulcers, those of the stomach and those of the duodenum. Mine was pegged a stomach ulcer because of the time of day, and because eating more, which sometimes makes duodenal ulcers feel better, made me feel worse.

Because I’d appeared to have some relief from Pepcid Complete, my doctor prescribed me Ranitidine 150, which is a genericized version of Zantac.

I dutifully took the Ranitidine twice daily for 30 days. It had no effect whatsoever, and my symptoms only got worse.

Starting from the first time I noticed the symptoms, I started to modify my diet to try and reduce them. I continued this, and broadened the foods I limited or eliminated, once the problem was diagnosed as a stomach ulcer. Following the sort of guidelines you can find many places, I eliminated citrus fruits, caffeine, chocolate, fried foods, milk, tomatoes and spicy foods. While I could easily identify foods I could say for certain would cause me problems, I had a more difficult time finding foods guaranteed not to cause problems.

About three weeks into this experience, in late January, I’d managed to stay symptom free for a week, and naively thought I was “cured.” Catherine and I went out to dinner at The Pilot House, and I had what, in an earlier time, would be considered a pretty non-spicy, innocuous meal. We went out to the movies afterwards, and when we got home I was descended on with the wraths of hell, and was up, with the worst symptoms to that point, until 6:00 a.m. It wasn’t fun.

With neither the Ranitidine nor my dramatic change in diet offering any reliable relief, I made another appointment with my family doctor for late January. At that appointment she did two things: schedule me for an ultrasound, and change my prescription to Nexium.

An interesting sidenote: I was sent to Summerside to the Prince County Hospital for my ultrasound because they could see me right away whereas my doctor characterized the wait at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Charlottetown for an ultrasound to be “several months.” Thank goodness for Summerside!

I was on the Nexium for a week, and, like the Ranitidine, it offered no more relief than taking nothing offered.

I had the ultrasound the following Tuesday, and three days later I was in the office of a surgeon in Charlottetown talking about gallbladders.

The gallbladder, an organ I’d given no thought to before, ever, is a small organ located near the liver. Its function is to assist in the storage and pumping of bile (“A yellow, or greenish, viscid fluid, usually alkaline in reaction, secreted by the liver.”) from the liver, where it’s made, into the intestines, where it assists with digestion.

Gallstones are formed when “when liquid stored in the gallbladder hardens into pieces of stone-like material.” When gallstones form, they can block the normal flow of bile from the gallbladder to the intestines, and when this happens, the result can be a “gallbladder attack.”

I learned all of this from the surgeon I was referred to because my ultrasound showed that I had something in my gallbladder that was causing problems.

When I read about the usual symptoms of a gallbladder attack, it was a pretty spot-on description of what I’d been going through.

The “cure” for gallbladder problems is to remove the gallbladder. There are other approaches that have been tried that involve trying to remove or dissolve the gallstones, but my surgeon advised that the reoccurrence of gallstones, assuming these methods are even successful, is high.

Fortunately, we mostly don’t need our gallbladders. I get the impression that it’s “mostly” because it seems that the gallbladder, while we can live happily and healthfully without it, hasn’t quite reached the stage that the appendix has reached in terms of being totally useless. The best description I’ve read says this:

Once the gallbladder is removed, bile flows out of the liver through the hepatic ducts into the common bile duct and goes directly into the small intestine, instead of being stored in the gallbladder. However, because the bile isn’t stored in the gallbladder, it flows into the small intestine more frequently, causing diarrhea in about 1 percent of people.

With things getting steadily worse — the frequency and severity of my attacks was increasing from “once or twice a week” to “once every couple of days” — I had to do something, and it was pretty clear that the gallbladder was the source of my problems. So I agreed with my surgeon that we should schedule its removal.

Easier said than done.

It’s all very well and good to listen to reports about the “health care crisis” and think of it as an abstract problem. In my case the problem was very concrete and clear: the wait for a “cholecystectomy” (aka gallbladder removal) in Charlottetown was six weeks.

Now, granted, I could live through the pain, and I wasn’t in imminent risk of more serious injury (gallbladders, it seems, don’t “rupture” like appendixes do). So I can understand more serious operations going ahead of me. But I’ll tell you, back on February 28th when my appointment was made, the first week in April seemed pretty close to “the end of time.”

But here we are: I’m scheduled for a laparoscopic cholecystectomy tomorrow morning at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital. The “laparoscopic” part means that the operation is done with a video camera and some lower-impact incisions; this in contrast to an “open cholecystectomy,” which, from descriptions I’ve read, sounds like what you see the surgeons doing on M*A*S*H every night. Laparoscopic cholecystectomy is day surgery — you can leave the same day as the surgery — while an open cholecystectomy requires a week-long recovery in hospital.

What have I learned from this three month odyssey?

First is patience. I’ve basically been unable to eat a normal diet for three months. I’ve been subsisting on oatmeal, apple juice, rice, and toast. I’ve been able to function — not thrive, but at least function. I watched as “the end of time” receded into 5 weeks, 4 weeks, next week, and now it’s tomorrow. That’s been a good lesson in patience.

Second, I learned a lot about my diet. When you have to think seriously about whether or not to put something into your body, lest it cause you to hunch over in pain three hours later, you tend to take eating more seriously. I’ve gotten good at reading labels. I finally figured out the difference between protein, fat and carbohydrates. I know a lot about the relationship between what I eat and how I feel. I’ve learned a lot about the kind of foods I was used to eating, and how easy it is, relatively speaking, to do without them. I’ve shaken off an addiction to (or at least a predilection for) sugar, fat and fast food. My diet for the past three months has been abysmal, but at least I’ve been thinking. These are all lessons I hope will last.

Third, I’ve learned that one way to lose weight is to eat less. There’s nothing like threat of gallbladder attack to motivate, and because I’ve been averaging about 700 calories a day for three months, I’ve lost almost 40 pounds in the process as a pleasant side-effect. This fact alone has gone a long way to keeping my spirits up, as it’s just plain easier to live without an additional 40 pounds to carry around all the time.

Finally, I’ve had to come to grips, if not with my own mortality at least with my own fragility. Up until this point in my life, I’ve been pretty ignorant of any connection between my actions (or lack thereof) and my well-being. The “cheeseburger to body connection” has been an abstract ill, with effects in some nebulous future. I consider it a great gift from my body to alert me to this in such a determined but non-life-threatening way.

I’ve also learned the following very practical techniques for reducing the pain of a gallbladder attack; your mileage, obviously, may vary:

• Take a hot bath. This is like wearing a hot water bottle. It’s a great pain reliever, and also takes the stress off the lower back, where gallbladder pain lasts longest.
• Take Tylenol 3’s. This only worked some of the time for me, and only during the last couple of weeks. My surgeon prescribed these after the attacks increased to the point where they were going on for 6 or 7 hours. Rather than eliminating the symptoms, the Tylenols appear to shorten the attacks and make them easier to take. At least sometimes.
• Go on a liquid diet. My surgeon recommended going on a liquid diet for 24 hours after an attack. When he initially suggested this, I thought he was insane, and I ignored his advice. When things got really bad, I followed his advice, and it helped. Often I found myself symptom free for 4 or 5 days after 24 to 48 hours of clear liquids alone.
• Relax. I’ve found that if, at first sign of symptoms, I go upstairs and lie down, listen to the radio, and trying and just lie still, I can shorten attacks considerably. On the other hand, if I try and push through, or stay downstairs in the hubbub of family life, it’s amazing how the little stresses of everyday life can make things worse.

I’ve not written about any of this earlier because, frankly, writing about it would have made things worse by making it all appear more real and concrete. I was happier pretending it was all a sort of private dietary fantasy. But I thought it important to at least say a few words now, if only so that my experiences can go on the record and perhaps be of assistance to others.

I’ll be away from this space for the rest of the week. Talk to you all on the other side of the anaesthetic!

Although we have now lived on Prince Edward Island for a decade, the closest I fear we will come to being Islanders is through wee Oliver, who was actually born here, and thus presumably gets some sort of free pass (a pass that even David Weale doesn’t have). Once Oliver can say words other than “toast,” “Pooh,” and “Province House,” we will have to have him translate for us.

One of my friends phoned this afternoon to check up on me in advance of having my gallbladder wrenched from me on Tuesday. When I asked him what he was up to, he mentioned casually that he and his entire extended family had been at the Liberal convention on the weekend.

Other than New Liberal Kevin O’Brien, my lawyer [note: special “trick link”], and people I’ve come to know who’ve actually been in government, I’d been operating under the assumption that my Islander friends were of the same apolitical, dispassionate bent that I am. How naive of me.

It appears that not only these particular friends Liberals, but they are Liberals with strong opinions about Liberal Things. Apparently one half of the extended family bent one way on the leadership, and the other half the other way. Sunday dinner was cancelled. Relations are strained.

I’m now fairly confident that, lurking in the reeds of my other Island friends and acquaintances must be some New Democrats and some Tories. Perhaps even some communists? Do we have communists here on the Island?

Here’s the most recent news reported elsewhere on the presence of SARS on Prince Edward Island:

• Tourism worried by news stories: The Tourism Industry Association says it is worried about a couple of developments, problems at Air Canada and SARS. TIAPEI says both could have an impact on the upcoming season. [CBC, April 4, 2003]
• Quarantine ends for Island families: Two families will be resuming their normal schedules on Friday, they have spent the last ten days under a voluntary quarantine because of concerns over SARS. [CBC, April 4, 2003]
• Islanders under SARS quarantine doing well: Dr. Lamont Sweet says it will take seven more days to determine if people haven’t contracted SARS disease. [Guardian, April 4, 2003]
• Chief Health Officer Issues Update on SARS: Chief Health Officer, Dr. Lamont Sweet, issued an update on Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) in Prince Edward Island today. [Province of PEI, April 4, 2003]

I realize that I’m about a year late on the Janis Ian article published in Performing Songwriter Magazine a year ago next month.

But back then, I’d never heard a Janis Ian song other than At Seventeen, and, truth be told, I was unsure about the difference between Janis Ian and Janis Joplin (I am not that bright).

Then last night I had iTunes fired up, and a Janis Ian tune Days Like These started playing. I’ve no idea how it got into my playlist, but I’m glad it did: it’s a good song, and a good showcase for Ian’s talent.

So I invite you to tune Janis Ian in [link to MP3 file download page] if you’re not familiar with her work.

Google is the great enabler.

I made some rearrangments to this site last week that have had surprising side-effects.

First, I put “Reinvented” at the end of the TITLE’s on all the pages here, so that you’ll see “VooDoo Google (from Reinvented Inc.)” at the top of your browser, not “Reinvented Inc. — VooDoo Google” as it used to be. This makes links to stories here much more prominent in Google search results.

Second, I reinstated the archives feature on the site, so that stories back to May 1999 are now exposed to the web (and thus to Google).

Thirdly, and this wasn’t really intentional but rather was driven by world circumstances, I began writing more about things like Peter Arnett and about SARS. These happen to be the second and third “gaining queries” in the Google Zeitgeist for the week just passed.

The combined effect of all of these has been that more of Reinvented is appearing in Google search results, and it’s easier to identify the stories in the results. And so more people from different places are dropping by, and more new people are contributing comments to the stories.

Of course you can’t discount the first inbound link from a Farsi-language page either!

So, new readership: welcome.

Here’s the most recent news reported elsewhere on the presence of SARS on Prince Edward Island:

• SARS situation improving on P.E.I. [CBC, April 3, 2003]

No other media outlets contained SARS-related Prince Edward Island stories today, although there has been frequent mention in national and international media (for example Washington Post, April 1) of SARS on PEI because on an AP wire story that went out mid-week with the sentence “with possible cases for the first time on Prince Edward Island in the east.”)