Blessed by the Potato

It was not so very long ago that we were having a conversation with Ryan about lactose intolerance, or “lactardation”. Many people in his family are lactarded, and he was ordering essentially a cheese-covered dish of baked cheese with a coffee and cream on the side. He waxed on about how much he loved cheese, and that if he ever became lactarded like the rest of his family, to just put him out of his misery because life just wasn’t worth living without cheese. So it would be fitting that at that very meal I ordered a chocolate milkshake, and about an hour later found myself with terrible gas and cramping. The realization set in:

I was lactarded.

Oddly enough, I seem to be fine with regular milk and cheese — in fact, as a vegetarian cheese is one of my primary protein sources, and it never seems to bother me. It is somehow the combination of chocolate and ice cream that seems to set my stomach off. Not wanting to blame chocolate ice cream for anything (that stain? it’s… umm… blood), I resisted seeing the connection between my intestinal issues and ice cream consumption. After all, I couldn’t actually be lactose intolerant, because of all the other dairy I eat without a problem! Perhaps there was some other reaction with ice cream and chocolate that could explain the issue… but I couldn’t find any. Not even made-up ones on the internet.

The big test came this weekend when we went out to the marble slab and I packed one of my sister’s lactaid pills. Lactaid pill + chocolate ice cream = no tummy issues. That to me suggests some sort of lactose issue, even if I can’t explain why I’m fine with cheese. Of course, coming out fine after a single test isn’t really definitive, so I suppose that, in the name of science, I will have to go out and eat more ice cream. Just to be sure. It’s that or go to the doctor for a proper test, and between you and me, I’ll take the ice cream.

For a week I had bad headaches, that were made much worse by moving my head, looking down, etc. On Monday (the first day), I felt like throwing up, then Tuesday through Thursday were relatively normal, aside from the pain. I tried to hold still and not do much and it was actually quite manageable that way. On Friday, things took a turn for the worse. I was sick to my stomach, spiked a fever of 39°C, and was just ruddy awful. On Saturday, I had a rash start on my chest, and continued to feel nauseous and had no desire for food. Reading up on the internet, I found that I had the whole grocery list of symptoms associated with meningitis, just none that were quite severe enough to really worry me enough to go get checked out. On Sunday, nothing had changed, but this was starting to worry me, so I went to the hospital.

As the title may have spoiled it already, I won’t try to draw out the suspense: I don’t have meningitis. I do have shingles though, which I always thought was one of those made-up old people diseases my grandfather used to get. It’s basically childhood chickenpox, which has remained dormant somewhere inside some of my nerve cells, rearing its ugly head. So it’s been a pretty miserable few days here. The shingles manifests as a rash on my chest: basically a concentrated collection of a few dozen chicken pox spots all merging together — and it’s exactly as itchy and painful as that sounds. It burns. On top of that are the systematic effects: the headache, nausea, and what I still don’t quite understand: the fatigue. I seem to wake up from a sleep feeling pretty good, energy wise. As long as I don’t move my head or touch my shingles rash, I figure I can do something normal, and I can (witness: blogging!) for a short while. But after a few hours I have trouble concentrating, and after about 5-6 hours of being awake, I just crash, and have to go back to bed. Then I sleep for 7-8 hours, and repeat. It’s a very strange schedule to be on, and unfortunately doesn’t mesh well with a standard 24-hour day.

I’ve lost 4 pounds in as many days, and while that weight won’t be missed in the slightest (bye now, don’t write!), it’s not a healthy rate. Fortunately, that seems to have leveled off today and yesterday, now that I’m back up to two decent-sized meals a day.

Oh, and calamine lotion is amazing. I wish they had invented it when I was a kid and had the chicken pox.

Canada has been at the forefront of nuclear research right from the very beginning. We also had some of the world’s first nuclear accidents at Chalk River in 1952 and 1958, and those early mis-steps lead to an incredible culture of safety in our nuclear power industry. No matter the cost over-runs, the delays in a project, or the engineering required, safety was always the highest priority, and our nuclear watchdog the CNSC was there to make sure that safety stayed priority number one. The CANDU, our series of Canadian-designed nuclear reactors were designed from the ground up to be as safe as possible: using natural uranium means the core can’t naturally go critical (and has non-proliferation bonuses), and heavy water as a moderator can be easily drained/evapourated in an emergency to shut the core down, etc. This reactor has also been sold with some success around the world (granted, we engaged in some fancy lending practices to sell it, and the design may owe as much to a concern about safety as it does to our position as a major producer of heavy water).

I’ve been a proponent of nuclear power for a while: sure, waste is an issue (though again, less so with the CANDU design) for the long term, but for the medium-term (10-50 years) nuclear power is really going to be our only cheap, GHG-free source of electricity, and I think we’re going to have to rely on it until other renewables can get off the ground. (I also think it’s better to plan to build one over the span of ten years and start now than to realize 8 years from now that oh shit, we need another nuclear power plant, like, now!).

Now, the Harper neocons have forced me to possibly reconsider that. First, they interfered with and politicized the issue of the NRU shutdown, and ordered it back up with a bill in parliament (yes, the other parties supported it, but they were also in a bit of a hard place with that). That move I thought was possibly the right thing for the moment: there was a big backlog of nuclear medicine tests because of the lack of isotopes. In the greater scheme of things, that might have been a time to forgo absolute nuclear safety, let the reactor run as it had been for a while, stockpile some more moly-99, and then shut it down again for the upgrades in another month or so. Beyond the moment though, it was a very dangerous move for the government to take. Once that step is taken of a government stepping in and overruling the nuclear watchdog, how hard is it to do again, for increasingly trivial reasons? Sure, this time the greater good may have been served by letting a downright ancient reactor run in a somewhat risky state (and note that this is one of the very few reactors in Canada with a design that will allow it to meltdown in a failure mode) to help thousands of patients. But what about next time? Will they overrule the CNSC again just to cut corners and get a steam-generating nuclear station set up for oil sands extraction? Maybe a bill to let another nuclear project run without safeties just because it’s too gosh-darn expensive to install them? (After all, they’ve got some taxes to cut!)

Out of the blue today, they fired Linda Keen, the president of the CNSC. This has gone way too far now. She was just doing her job as far as I can tell. No matter what Lunn might have to say about it, her job is to make sure that nuclear energy and isotopes in Canada are handled safely, and to regulate that. That’s it. Her job is not to balance safety with health concerns and isotope availability. If the ancient NRU somehow became the only source for Moly-99 on the continent, and hospitals all over are facing shortages, well, that’s above her pay grade, and the short-sightedness of people who should plan that sort of thing is not her fault. The reactor is not safe, so it doesn’t come back up. Even under pressure from the government, she kept her chin up. The government can (and did) do an end run around her in the case of a health crisis/isotope shortage, and that’s fine. It was a special set of circumstances beyond the scope of her agency. But there’s no reason I can see for firing her. In fact, reading her letter it looks like the CNSC was trying to work with AECL to get a modified license to bring the reactor up without the backup equipment, but the ball was dropped by AECL (whose chief resigned already).

There are a few choice quotes from the Globe & Mail’s article about Lunn defending his decision:

Bloc Québécois MP Claude DeBellefeuille accused the Minister of undermining public confidence in the CNSC.

“You have shaken the confidence that people should have in this independent watchdog for nuclear safety. You have sown doubt about this body,” she said.

The article doesn’t have an answer to that one from Lunn, and that is an exceptionally valid point. The parliamentary override, as controversial and short-sighted as it was, could have been done with a lot less name-calling and finger-pointing. Most importantly, it could have been done with a lot less politicizing, which might have given people some reassurance that this trouncing of the nuclear watchdog, just doing its job, was a one-off affair, and not a recurring madness in our government. Either way, this episode is going to strengthen the arguments from those opposed to nuclear power.

Asked by the NDP’s Catherine Bell if he would resign if censured by parliamentarians, Mr. Lunn replied, “No, I serve at the pleasure of the Prime Minister and I have his confidence.”

I predict that in a few days, Lunn is going to find out just how fleeting the “confidence” of the PM is. He’ll tear up a key campaign plank and break a promise, like taxing income trusts, and sow havoc in the markets about random, unjustified government intervention in the marketplace, on a complete whim. When he’s got as much political pressure as there is now to axe Lunn, and when Lunn has been as embarrassing to the PM as he has been, well… loyalty and confidence count for very little in the neocon party of Canada.

I’m in favour of nuclear energy for Canada. While it does have a history of delays and cost-overruns, the delays are often a result of making sure that we implement it safely. Plus even at double the cost, nuclear power is still one of the very cheapest forms of energy available to us, and the only large-scale carbon-free source we can count on for the medium term. There are hazards with nuclear power. The risks are very remote, but when things go wrong, they have the capability to go very wrong (whereas with other sources of power, the risks associated with them occur more frequently, but usually are more minor). However, Canada has a reactor design that is inherently safe, and a strong history of keeping things above-board and putting safety as one of the highest priorities (which is part of where all the crazy budget overruns come from).

…until the Harper government decided to thwart the nuclear regulator in order to bring the NRU reactor in Chalk River up sooner. The NRU shutdown has had a big effect on nuclear medicine scans across the country, and in fact, across the continent. Somehow, this one reactor had come to be the dominant source of molybednum-99 for much of the world, with no backups, anywhere. The shortage has turned the nuclear medicine corridor at my hospital into a ghost town, with the tiny bit of remaining isotopes used strictly for emergency patients. There was a stockpiling process before the reactor went off-line, but since the isotopes break down so quickly that could only last for a few weeks, and as the shutdown stretches on still…

Personally, I think the reactor probably could be turned on for at least a short while to do another round of stockpiling, and then upgrades can be made over the next year a week or two at a time as necessary, while keeping the medical isotopes flowing.

But I must strongly disagree with what the Harper government is doing here. Politicians do not have the expertise necessary to say with any degree of confidence things like:

“There will be no nuclear accident,” Prime Minister Stephen Harper asserted in the House of Commons, saying the government has received independent advice indicating there is no safety concern.

“On the contrary, what we do know is that the continuing actions of the Liberal-appointed Nuclear Safety Commission will jeopardize the health and safety and lives of tens of thousands of Canadians. We do have the responsibility to demand that Parliament step in and fix this situation before the health of more people is put in jeopardy.”

The Harper government has a nasty habit of closing up and relying on “independent advice” without ever sharing its sources with the public, and this is absolutely not the time for that kind of bullshit. Likewise, it’s not time to throw in nasty, probably untrue snipes at the Liberals (Hey, “Canada’s New Government” you’ve been at it for well over a year), especially as the spendiest government in our history has found billions for Quebec, arctic patrol routes, etc, but didn’t bother to throw some money at the new Maple generators until a crisis hit.

This is not an issue that should be politicized: in fact, that’s the sort of thing that makes nuclear reactors dangerous. Design them well, operate them meticulously, listen to the careful watchdogs, and spend the money it takes, and then we can all benefit from nuclear reactors (whether for energy or isotope production).

Well, like every year since I started working at the hospital, I got my flu shot as soon as it was available. And like every year, I got some kind of mild flu/bad cold right at the beginning of flu season (one year, I got the flu before they started offering shots). After being sick for 4 days, I think I’m finally on the upswing.

It’s been fun though, Wayfare came back home on Sunday and won’t let me go near her. I know she has a craptacular immune system, but sometimes she acts repulsed in such a way as to suggest she thinks I’m sick on purpose, and cruelly trying to make her sick. She’s running around opening doors with her shirt, and steadfastly refusing to touch the orange juice container I was using. She put a kleenex around the TV remote so she wouldn’t have to touch the buttons. She gives me a dirty look any time I touch something…

I’m a pariah in my own home!