"A tiny amount of non-aggressive cancer" is probably the best biopsy result you can get, short of "no sign of any cancer at all."
And that is why I was so happy to hear those words last week when a urologist gave me the results of the prostate biopsy that I described in some detail here.
He delivered this wonderful news as I sat in his office, along with a specialist nurse and an audio recording system. I will come back to the audio recording system in a moment; the make purpose of this blog post is to make the point that not every prostate biopsy brings very bad news.
Even if you are at elevated risk of prostate cancer—based on family history and/or PSA score—that doesn't mean you're predestined to have a serious case of it. Many men live with a low level of prostate cancer that never produces serious symptoms. So, when a urologist says you should have a prostate biopsy, you probably should, even though a biopsy can be an unpleasant experience.
(To be honest, the urologist had to talk me into getting the biopsy. I was arguing that "just an MRI" would be enough, and they did do an MRI before the biopsy; but that was mainly to get the lay of the and look for signs that the prostate cancer, if there was any, had spread beyond the prostate itself—in my case, it had not.)
Obviously, what happens after the biopsy will depend on how much cancer is found. If there is no sign of cancer? Great! If there is some cancer? You and your doctors have a sound basis for determining the best course of action.
If you happen to be wondering what a prostate biopsy is like, this article should prove helpful.
In August, I underwent something called a transperineal prostate biopsy and I thought sharing my experience might be helpful to other people who are facing this procedure.
Like most prostate biopsies, mine was performed to evaluate whether or not the patient has prostate cancer. That means biopsies can be an emotionally challenging experience as well as a physically daunting prospect: a scary procedure at a scary time.
NCI's Dictionary of Cancer Terms
However, while I find the thought of needles piercing sensitive parts of my body unappealing, I found that this procedure can be relatively quick and painless. I say that based on my experience and the feedback of several other guys whom I chatted with over tea and biscuits in the recovery room. This should be positive news, given that a biopsy is an essential weapon in the fight to find and treat prostate cancer.
This is just a quick blog post to share some fun I've been having lately by combining old maps of England with current satellite photography. To be clear, I'm not the one doing the combining; that work is being done by the National Library on an amazing website that yields views like this:
What you are looking at is a map that shows the River Sherbourne in Coventry in the late 1800s, drawn over current satellite photos of the same slice of England's green and pleasant land. You can go to this interactive map view by clicking here.
And that's the fun I've been having, because when I was young I played on that land and explored it with my friends. We were all born on the streets you see at the top of the image. (This was in the 1950s so our parents always worried that we would either drown in the river or catch polio from the river, neither of which happened, mainly thanks to common sense, good fortune, and a great vaccine.)
In the two images below I have rotated the view slightly and marked where I was born on both of them. In other words, the house in which I was born sits in what was a field until these streets were constructed (1934-36).
What you can also see is that the course of the river has changed over time. This is part of the long and complicated story of the River Sherbourne, one that I am exploring these days on foot and, thanks to the National Library of Scotland, online.
I have already determined that the river was straightened out after the time I spent playing there in the 1950s and early 1960s. Time permitting, I will post photos of what is today called Lake View Park, even though there is no lake (another long story).
Based on Medium's statistics, this could be the most widely-read article that I have written since I retired in 2019. Here's a quote:
"after four days of taking the capsules my wife was better in nine out of 14 ways, meaning there were improvements in, or reduction of, nine of the 14 symptoms...after seven days of cannabis-based medication, Chey is now enjoying improvement in 13 out of 14 areas."
What's so special about this UK cannabis?
Friends and family will know that our household is no stranger to medical cannabis; Chey began exploring its potential to ease her pain and suffering even before we moved to California in 2011 and she received her medical marijuana card.
After considerable trial and error with different cannabis formulations—some of which she made herself—Chey found what worked for her: capsules containing a mix of the two main cannabis compounds, THC and CBD.
And when I say "worked for her," I mean: did such a great job of addressing her chronic musko-skeletal pain that she went from taking 140mg of morphine a day to zero, nought, none. She used cannabis to end years of heavy opioid use. Cannabis also put an end to years of nasty and unpleasant opioid side effects, not to mention recurrent medical harassment by doctors who accused her of being a drug addict.
When we decided to move from California to England in 2019 to be near my mum, who is now in her nineties, we knew that the Conservative government had changed the legal status of cannabis medications in 2018 to make them more accessible. What we didn't know until we got here is that the government's actions were in reality far less helpful than they sounded (a hallmark of Britain's Conservative governments for the last decade or so).
Three years on, this is still the case, with only a handful of Brits actually getting cannabis prescribed by the National Health Service. The result is that an estimated 1.4 million people in the UK are still using cannabis illegally for medical reasons.
At the same time, a few thousand people in the UK have managed to navigate "the private option" in which you pay a special doctor at a special clinic to examine your case and legally write you a prescription. (I have described the process in this Medium article: Getting prescription cannabis meds in the UK legally: a beginner’s guide.)
When Chey's supply of California-sourced cannabis meds ran out, and her health got worse and worse, we decided to try the UK's pricey private option. This required many phone calls and emails, took many stressful weeks, and of course involved paying consultation fees and product costs. Not ideal for someone who is suffering multiple symptoms that are seriously eroding their quality of life.
Eventually, and very thankfully, we achieved the transformative delivery that happened in July. Since then Chey has been able to get her dose adjusted and her prescription renewed. Yet this is bad news as well as good news; it's good news for Chey, but bad news for millions of Brits who cannot afford to get cannabis through this process. This is clearly wrong.
Frankly, I fail to see how the UK's convoluted and deeply unethical three-tier approach to cannabis medication can continue in the face of mounting protests and outrage. Most Brits are repulsed by the current a situation in which "the rich get high quality cannabis meds, the poor do not, unless they take their chances breaking their law."
Fortunately, there are plenty of groups working to change this. I have included some here, along with some relevant articles:
Patient-Led Engagement for Access: PLEA: a volunteer-led non-profit community interest company, established to challenge the inequalities in access to cannabis-based medicinal products in the UK.
MedCan Support: MedCan Support provides free resources and educational material on medical cannabis, with a focus on paediatrics and lobbying for NHS access.
The Centre for Medicinal Cannabis: a membership association for organisations operating at the forefront of the UK medicinal cannabinoid industry.
Project Twenty21: working toward affordable medical cannabis treatment, aims to create the UK’s largest body of evidence for the effectiveness and tolerability of medical cannabis.
Clearly, the absurdity of the current status of cannabis-based medicine in the UK is well understood in some circles. What is needed now is to spread that understanding and ensure that it reaches all corners of power and governance in the country. An enlightened approach to cannabis, led from the top, would enable huge improvements in quality of life for millions of people as well as generate jobs and wealth. Consider the manifold benefits of a blended model in which:
a. recreational use of cannabis becomes a revenue stream for UK companies (growers processors, dispensaries), employees of those companies, and of course the UK treasury, much akin to the alcoholic beverage industry today, and
b. the national health system provides affordable medicinal cannabis prescriptions to people in the UK who need them and thereby: reduces use of addictive opioids, treats conditions such as depression, anxiety, ME/CFS and Long Covid; potentially eliminates some conditions, such as childhood epilepsy; and generally improves quality of life for millions.
There are no legitimate barriers to the UK adopting this model and becoming a world leader in responsible cannabis production, research, and medicine. I would certainly vote for this, and I have no interest in consuming cannabis myself.
[Disclaimer: future changes to my health may create a personal interest in taking cannabis for medical purposes, but in the past I tried recreational use of cannabis and did not enjoy it.]
Finally...
If you are writing about cannabis-based medicines, I have a request and a free offer. The request is that you use the more accurate terms "cannabis-based medicine" or "medicinal cannabis," and avoid using "medical marijuana." The latter is now widely considered to be inaccurate, confusing, and potentially inflammatory or prejudicial.
The free offer is a high resolution version of the public domain image below, created by me for anyone who is illustrating articles, brochures, blog posts, etc. about cannabis-based medicine. This image makes a welcome change from overused and grossly misleading graphics using smoke-shrouded foliage. Free to download from UnSplash using this URL: https://unsplash.com/photos/qzD_H7-Jcj4.
Like their creators, websites age over time, and sometimes they forget things, like where a particular image or document is located. This page is an attempt to provided some of the things that have gone missing on the various Cobb websites, starting with a link to my master's dissertation:.
I'm into classic glass photography. That's using lenses from old 35mm film cameras to take pictures with modern digital cameras (for example, the Minolta lens on my Olympus camera shown here).
I will write more about my hobby here on this blog. Here are some articles on classic glass:
BTW, if you have old 35mm SLR camera lenses around you might want to use them like this, or sell them on eBay. I get the impression that some old lenses are now fetching decent prices if they are in good condition.
(Just FYI, this blog post is being used as a test. I want to see if the image of my camera—shown above—appears automatically when I tweet the page.)
Abstract: A simple and efficient system for managing information found on the internet a piece of Javascript called "Blog This" hidden in a bookmark (but no coding experience required). I will provide the script and you will just need to paste it into a browser bookmark.
This technique, often referred to as "blog this" or BT, enables you to record and annotate a search result with two clicks, storing it in a place that is automatically indexed, easy to find, and sorted by date. This is accomplished via Google's free Blogger service and the Chrome browser for Mac and Windows. I made a short video that shows the technique in action. Further down the article I have documented the steps in more details. Here's the video:
To collect internet research results like this you first create a personal blog to store your research findings, then you "clip" the URLs and annotate the content that you want to record. You can make your findings accessible to you alone, or to a select group of people of your choosing.
Of course, you can also make the blog visible to everyone on the internet if your intent is to share your findings with the world. However, going public with your research curation can have copyright implications, which I will address later in the article.
Before providing the steps to set up systems like these, I should note that I did not invent the "blog this" capability - referred to hereinafter as BT for brevity - nor did I write the script that BT uses. As far as I know, the BT story goes back to 2006. That is when Google made available a Chrome extension called Blog This! to assist users of Blogger.
I installed this extension in 2006, about a year after I started my first blog (scobbs.blogspot.com). Unfortunately, about 10 years later, some sort of Google/Chrome disconnect occurred that left Blog This! out in the cold, as you can see in this screenshot from one of several threads in the Google Chrome Help Forum.
But don't worry - I will describe a workaround that uses the core BT capability. The point is, when the BT extension was installed it displayed a button in the browser's URL bar. If you clicked this button after selecting a piece of text on a web page, it would create a new entry in your Blogger blog, made up of two things:
A blog title: made from the title of the page you were on when you clicked the BT button
Some blog content: consisting of the text you had highlighted and a link to the page it came from.
At some point, the functionality of this BT button was made available as a piece of Javascript that could be stored in, and activated by, a Chrome bookmark. To be honest, I don't know the origin of this approach. Maybe it was Google or some code-savvy blogger. However, I do know this script works. Readers who are code-phobic can look away at this point - as I said earlier, you don't need to be a coder to set up this system - but I don't want to keep code-curious readers in suspense, so here is a basic version of the code:
javascript:popw='';Q='';x=document;y=window;if(x.selection) {Q=x.selection.createRange().text;} else if (y.getSelection) {Q=y.getSelection();} else if (x.getSelection) {Q=x.getSelection();}popw = y.open('http://www.blogger.com/blog_this.pyra?t=' + escape(Q) + '&u=' + escape(location.href) + '&n=' + escape(document.title),'bloggerForm','scrollbars=no,width=475,height=300,top=175,left=75,status=yes,resizable=yes');if (!document.all) T = setTimeout('popw.focus()',50);void(0)
The key to this "clip-n-post" capability is a special page that Google created at blogger.com. The URL is: https://www.blogger.com/blog_this.pyra. Anyone can visit this page, and when they do, Google checks to see if they are signed into a Google account. If they are, it checks to see if that account is currently signed into a blog on Blogger. If it is, a new blog post is presented, as seen here:
If you go to https://www.blogger.com/blog_this.pyra and you are not currently signed into a Blogger blog, you will be invited to sign in.
Don't worry if this sounds a bit technical - the steps below should be easy to follow and you now have the background needed to build a search curation blogging system.
Four step guide to a "blog that" book mark The process of making a bookmark to implement this system has four main steps, or five if you don't yet have a Gmail account. The official Google page for Create a Gmail Account has a pretty good description of the process. Once you have a Gmail account you will also have a Google identity.
1. Create a blog on Blogger: Assuming you are logged into Chrome with your Google identity, you can proceed to create a blog with Blogger. This process is described here by Google. The result will be a blog that is under your control, with a name of your choosing at a URL like this: some-name.blogspot.com or researchtoolz.blogspot.com.
I suggest you don't get too hung up on the URL at this point. The name of the blog is separate from the URL and can be different from the URL. Many of more obvious URLs on blogspot.com have been take - that's why I used 'z' instead of 's' in researchtoolz. (If your goal is to create a public blog, as discussed at the end of this article, then you can get a custom domain name - for example, gdprnews.com is actually gdprnews.blogspot.com.)
2. Tune blog privacy permissions and other settings: Either during the creation of your blog or at any time thereafter you can adjust the settings to ensure the level of privacy your blog enjoys. Under Settings > Basic you will find two Privacy items.
To keep this blog to yourself, choose No for both items. You can always change your choices later. Further down the same page of settings is a section headed Permissions. Read through the choices for Readers and decide how you want to proceed. For a private-to-you blog, select the Private. In fact, you can invite other people to be authors, or allow some people to read without author-access.
Some other settings you might want to adjust are Posts, comments and sharing, where you can remove or restrict the comment feature that is on by default for a new Blogger blog. For a private blog I suggest you set Comment Location = Hide; Who can comment = Only members; Comment Moderation = Always. These can be adjusted later if you decide to share your blog.
3. Prepping a 'Blog That' book mark: We are now going to create a dummy bookmark labeled 'Blog That' into which we will will then paste the code that makes this whole technique tick.
Go to your Chrome browser on you Windows or Mac computer and make sure that the Bookmarks Bar is displayed. Here's what that looks like on my Mac, where a "Blog That" bookmark has already been created:
If you do not see the Bookmarks Bar, then you need to tell Chrome to show it. Use the Chrome menu, then the Bookmarks option and select Show Bookmarks Bar.
Now use Chrome to display any web page and click the Bookmark icon (the star on the right of the URL field seen in the next screenshot).
A small dialog box called "Bookmark added" should appear. For example, here I am at one of my websites - www.4amusia.com.
You can see that Chrome has already created a Name for the bookmark based on the title of the web page [Amusia], and a Folder has been selected [Bookmarks Bar] in which to store the bookmark. At this point you need to do two things:
a/ make sure that Bookmarks Bar is selected as the folder. b/ change the name of the bookmark to Blog That, or something similar.
When you have done those two things, click Done. You should see your new bookmark in the Bookmarks Bar, but don't panic if you can't see it. For folks who have already have a bunch of bookmarks in the bar, the new bookmark may not appear on screen. That's because it was added somewhere down the list of bookmarks. Just use the Chrome menu, Bookmarks option to display the list of bookmarks in the Bookmarks Bar and drag it to a location near the top of the list, which will display it towards the left of the bar.
4.Activate the 'Blog That' toolbar: All that remains is to copy and paste the Javascript into the bookmark you just made. To do this:
a/ use your mouse to select the code shown in Courier font earlier in the article, b/ right click on the selected text and choose Copy, then c/ right click on the 'Blog That' bookmark in the bookmark bar and choose Edit; d/ select all of the text in the URL field then right-click it and choose Paste.
You have now replaced the URL with the script. The Edit bookmark dialog will look like this:
Be sure to click Save to save the change. You are now ready to collect search results!
To test the system, go to web page, select a small piece of text, then click on the Blog That bookmark you just edited. A dialog box should appear like this (if it does not, check to see if you have pops blocked and allow them for blogger.com). Note that if you are clipping to multiple blogs you can check the currently active blog in the upper right and change it if needed.
At this point you can add anything you like to the blog post. You might want to write a note to remind yourself why you clipped this item. If I am posting to one of my blogs that is visible to the public I will add quote marks around the quoted text to make it clear it is not me who wrote those words.
When you click Publish Post, you will see confirmation of the post as seen on the right. You can then close the pop-up box.
I have found this system to be of great value over the years. For example, I have a tendency to open a lot of tabs in my browser, full of things I plan to read later. Every so often I got through my tabs and clip them to a blog set up for that purpose.
Of course, you might be wondering why I don't just bookmark things to which I want to return. And that works for some people. But what if you are in someone else's office, or at a party, and you want to get to "that page I was telling you about"? I can go to my clipping blog and either scroll down or use Search to find the item - on my phone or their computer (the clipping blog is not private). By adding my own notes to clippings I can store more data more quickly than using bookmarks (unless of course you are better at bookmarking than me).
Just FYI, I have curated over 5,000 web pages with BT. For me, managing that many bookmarks with Chrome itself would be quite challenging.
While I use BT to collect and organize Internet research results for myself, I have also used it to create topic-specific public websites. These can be a cool way to share your research and connect with other people. An example is the About Amusia site that I built last year at https://4amusia.blogspotcom.
I was motivated to create the site after I found out that I have congenital amusia (sometimes referred to as being tone deaf). Before I went on a research binge to find out everything I could on this subject I made a simple private blog to stash the results with BT. After I had annotated some of my search results, I dressed up the site with a Blogger template and an image and made it public. I went one step further by getting my own domain name for the blog - 4amusia.com - and then made the blog public as www.4amusia.com.
Whether that particular use of BT appeals to you or not, I hope you found this article helpful. If so, please share.
