Amnio

The following is a rant I wrote this afternoon to my father, himself a doctor, following today's amniocentesis.

Please bear in mind that when I was 18 I had Hodgekin's Disease, a type of lymph cancer. I was diagnosed at a teaching hospital (Kingston General) and treated at a teaching hospital (Tom Baker Cancer Centre of the Foothills Hospital) and was, for my entire cancer experience, very cognizant of my role in assisting medical students and residents learn about my type of cancer. I was a very cooperative and genial patient. As such it was not uncommon for my tests to be attended by gaggles of medical students, and my checkups to be rounds of telling my background over and over to residents who'd guess at my condition until someone finally got it right. I was repeatedly thanked for my attitude and willingness to be a guinea pig.

That was then. Now, I'm older, I feel I've done my time, and I just want to go home. I want the real doctor to be my attending and if someone wants to watch, that's... okay with me, but please, don't touch. I am no longer the willing guinea pig.

Which leads to today's rant.

Dad -

So, I'll start with this, just this:

I think it is outright wrong to tell people in the amnio prep seminar that the clinic doctors are all fully qualified perinatalogist blah blah blahs who have each done QUOTE "tens of thousands" of amnios, but, then when the door opens, in come TWO doctors, one of whom is obviously the perinatalogist blah blah blah guy and the other is absolutely giving off WAVES of Inexperience. At this point in my career as a patient I can smell a student a mile away.

This perinatalogy Fellow proceeds to smear an absolutely unnecessary amount of sterile dye from stem to stern before she prod-prod-prods around in concert with the ultrasound deciding on an entry point. And then, of course, with a great deal of deliberation and slowness in general p-u-u-u-u-u-u-ts in the needle and p-o-o-o-o-o-okes it through the uterine wall and swi-i-i-i-i-i-rls it round and round and round and round and round until even Turner knew that she wasn't doing it right. I had to force my eyes closed because I was going to kill her with my newfound eyebeam lasers.

I was within about three seconds of saying, "I think that's enough, could the other doctor please do this?", when I guess it was finally sufficiently clear that she just wasn't getting it right, and the perinatalogist blah blah blah guy decided to take over. He had to take it out and start over from the beginning: pushing the needle into the abdomen and through the wall of the uterus, to squiggle it around bouncing off my spleen and ovaries and spine AGAIN. At least it was quick, the second time.

But Dad, and here is my issue, it is wrong, saying in the seminar that they're all so good and they're all fully qualified and then sending in someone who is clearly still learning what to do. That is wrong advertising, wrong all around. It's an uncomfortable, somewhat painful, rather scary test to begin with, and then they add the extra factor of having to deal with someone else's learning experience. I was livid angry by the end. I should have said something right at the beginning, when she was smearing the dye and I could tell, I KNEW she wasn't the attending. I should've just said that I'd prefer the perinatalogist blah blah blah guy do it please, and follow up with the whole yes-I-appreciate-the-teaching-hospital-thing-but-I've-been-the-good-lab-rat-thanks-and-I'd-really-prefer-the-attending-please spiel.

I think I would probably feel differently if I hadn't been such a willing pincushion when I had cancer, but I really really REALLY feel like I've "done my bit for science" at this point and I'd like to have the following plastered onto my forehead in gentian violet for my next hospital visit: RESIDENTS, FELLOWS AND ALL OTHER "LEARNERS" - KINDLY FUCK OFF AND GO PRACTICE ON SOMEONE ELSE... PERHAPS START ON AN ORANGE.

...That said, once I had my big cry in the bathroom afterward and got all my hate out, it was ok.


Alright, I'm ready, bring out the knives.

Categories: Ash | Pregnancy

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Definitely Dying, Possibly Dead

Sick here, sick sick sick.

Some kind of terrible awful no-good very bad flu has descended upon Chez Bristowe Turner.

I was down for the count by 10am yesterday, and we got a call mid-day to come fetch Sloaner from playschool after she'd barfed all over her naptime bed and blankets. But she seemed mostly fine by the time she got home and essentially scored a free day of videos on the couch, much to a toddler's understandable delight.

I've been hit a bit worse - ok much worse. Rolling-around-in-agony-type worse. Turner has had to wait on me hand and foot (literally - I had to beg him to rub my legs at 12:30am last night because they were throbbing and terrible). I woke this morning feeling a great deal better, so after Sloane headed off to school I went around opening windows and lighting candles, something my old friend Jenn Foley Foster used to do; her Cherokee grandmother believed it burned the sickness out of the house. So I'm on the mend, but not yet 100% - not yet able to eat anything, for example.

Categories: Family | Friends | House

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WorldChanging The Second

Turner's second column is now up at WorldChanging.com; this one talks a bit about Crystal Waters, the Australian permaculture community we visited north of Queensland back in July. As it happens, this column used one of the photos I included in the Nine show, that One Lane/One Planet shot I put up in an earlier post.

See the new column, here.

Categories: Ash | GeoHope | Turner

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The Daily Planet Book of Cool Ideas

Halloween - check. Ashley's birthday - check. Remembrance Day - check.

...I know what you're thinking! It's that time of year when thoughts turn to Christmas, and also to the horror that is Christmas shopping.

Oh, but fear not, my good friends and fans! Because Mrs Hilksom has the perfect thing for you to stuff into stockings this year.

You may have already seen it at the local bookstore or on the bestseller list, and here it is with a personal endorsement:
The Daily Planet Book of Cool Ideas, by Jay Ingram.



This was my contract for the first half of 2008, working on this book. I didn't talk about it on the blog mainly because it's just a good idea not to talk about your current work on your blog. ...So's to save yourself the understandable headache involved in possibly being fired, likesay.

This book was originally conceived as a published version of all the 'environmentally-themed' segments done over the last couple of years by Discovery Channel's daily science news show, Daily Planet. The show's host, Jay Ingram, well-known and beloved science popularizer, was on board to be the book's author. Eventually the project concept evolved into a book involving the complex re-contextualizing of these Daily Planet stories, plus other, new material gathered from around the world on what's going on right now in climate science and technology. Illustration and photo-heavy, it was designed to target the Daily Planet viewer demographics as well as having broad appeal to kids and adults alike.

The job basically entailed managing and coordinating the research and logistics between Jay Ingram, Discovery Channel, and Penguin Canada. I worked on designing the chapters and overarching themes for the narrative and guided portions of the contract negotiations; re-cleared all the publication rights to the material we already had from the television show, and sourced new material and imagery; screened, shortlisted and selected footage from Daily Planet and myself shot some new photographs for use in the book; and generally liaised with the source subjects, promised them copies of the finished book, negotiated use fees, and overall spent most of every single day, seven days a week, for five and a half months, constantly on the telephone and sending emails at all ungodly hours, even ones you've never heard of. Although it was a vaguely ungrammatical title, my email signature told people I was the "Managing Research Editor" for the book. Go slowly through the words, and yep, that's the best description, overall, of what I did.

And I loved it. As a contract it was a fantastic fit for my background and mad diverse skillz (yo). Jay Ingram and I worked fabulously together. He's a man who doesn't suffer fools gladly, has a fantastic work ethic and focus, and possesses a great absurdist sense of humour. And he's a real person. When I came to Toronto to meet the Daily Planet team in January, he picked me up at the airport.

I worked damn hard on this book and I was really, really proud of what we accomplished with this all-out-sprint of a project. When we left for Australia my portion was mostly complete, and after a few long-distance calls at really ridiculous hours to clear up last details, my contribution was finished. 

...And then, about a month ago, we came home from the September/October travels to find a little something in the mailbox. My contributor's copy. The book turned out beautifully - 265 pages of text and photos and illustrations, wonderfully laid out and clearly presented. Turner did one of the blurbs on the back cover: "The Daily Planet Book of Cool Ideas is as concise and accessible a primer as you'll find on the subject, and its calm and ultimately optimistic tone makes it that rarest of reads - an invigorating climate story."  True dat. Honestly, a great book for anyone interested in the climate question.

And then, in the back, from the book's author:



In case you can't read the text, it goes thusly:

This book might have set some sort of record for the number of people who made significant contributions to it, but one person stands out. Ashley Bristowe was, as she puts it, "managing research editor" of this book, but actually, she ran it. If there's anyone out there who's better at cajoling, researching, challenging, organizing, record-keeping, or working 24/7 to keep a project on track, I'd like to know who it is. (She's pretty funny, too.) Without her this book would simply not exist.

Categories: Ash | Work work work

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The Teeny Ones Are Best

Sometimes people tell me they'd like to hear what Turner and I talk about at home. Y'know, to be a fly on the wall and hear what the famous writer and the jane-of-all-media-trades talk about whilst kicking back at Chez Bristowe Turner. I think mostly they envy an idealized conception of the work-at-home life balance and some of the snazzier stories about our projects. Or maybe Sloane's impressive vocabulary is the culprit. She gets it from Toopie and Binoo, we swear! 

But so just to give these lovely folks a taste: Here's us, last night, in the midst of settling in for another dvd episode of Battlestar Galactica. We join the supposedly fascinating couple just as I'm stuffing a whole mini mandarin into my mouth.

Me: (through orange goosh) Y'know, we never shoulda bought these mini mandarins. They are so good. They totally make those regular xmas oranges taste like shit.

Turner: Laughing. Laughing and laughing.

Me: What?

Turner: Laughing. ...Like "shit". They taste like shit. The big oranges.

Me: ...Okay, possibly not actual shit.




Tah-dah! Excitement she wrote!
 
(Thanks go out to David Friese, who inspired this post.)

Categories: Ash | Married Life | Turner

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The "Nine" Show Opening

Ya, ya, how did it go? It went well. Fairly well attended, not as packed as last year but not bad. As I've told many people: Sloane ate her weight in chips, friends came to cheer me on, people said nice things about my work, and Turner got me a corsage for the occasion.

     
One Lane/One Planet, Queensland Australia. 2008. Colourchrome print and acrylic

From my "Artist's Statement" for the show: I’m interested in language and words, and in particular Found Words – misspellings, graffiti, ironies in signage, language as backdrop for larger themes. One of the pieces in this show, the One Lane/One Planet work, is from this series and was shot at the side of the road in Queensland, Australia. We were visiting Crystal Waters, the noted permaculture eco-village northeast of Brisbane, an environmental and idealistic enclave surrounded by very conservative farming culture and remote countryside. One road lead to the community from the bush highway, and a resident had, with two well-placed letters, provided a note-perfect introduction to their overarching philosophy.

Initially this photo looks political, and in word content it does skew that way. However, the reason I included it in the show was actually due to my pleasure with the background after a very long process of work & tweaking in Photoshop. Not evident at this size, the trees and grass and hills in the background have been distorted and rendered very "painterly" after much effort. I think 'artists' always have other reasons for why they like their own work - this is mine for this piece.


  
A-frame Advice, Nakusp BC. 2005/2008. Colourchrome print and acrylic

From the artist's statement: Another piece from my Found Words series featured in this exhibition is the “SMILE, SOMEBODY’S WATCHING” work. During the Vietnam War Canada took in many American draft dodgers, and communes sprung up along the remote valleys of British Columbia. One such group built an A-frame on land now owned by my mother outside of Nakusp. When we first began visiting this structure it was full of old clothing and kitchen utensils, Kahlil Gibran posters and letters detailing concerns that the FBI would somehow find and extradite them back to the US. This old bottlecap, bearing a cheerful phrase I remember from my own childhood, also echoes through the decades another message, the uneasy melody of paranoia and tension that affected the lives of these exiles.


    

L:  Motel Knowles, Saskatchewan. 2005/2008. Colourchrome print and acrylic
R:  Roxy Theatre, Coleman AB. 2006/2008. Colourchrome print and acrylic

From the artist's statement: I’m also interested in the neon signs still in evidence on the Canadian Prairie. Neon gas, brought into widespread use in signage during the 1920s, changed how we light the night, bringing amazing vivid colours and dancing shapes to the palette of our nighttime world. Even today, neon signs are compelling as a combination of practicality and nostalgia. But neon’s initial impact, especially on our rural Canadian landscape of wild space and distances, must have been magnificent beyond our imagining. There are two pieces from my Neon Signs series in this show, from Saskatchewan and Alberta.

     
Netcasters I and Netcasters II, Queensland Australia. 2008. Colourchrome print and acrylic

The Australia spiderweb 'diptych'. The green one should look greener and the blue one should look more teal-ey. Limits of the internet, etc.
...Only Melinda Topiko called me on the fact that this is not an actual diptych! (I would expect no less from you, Melinda!)

I didn't sell any work, but I didn't really expect to. There was a commission I had to factor into the pricing, and I'd decided to backmount my pieces to acrylic, which is an expensive process at the best of times. The prices were higher than the show's 'market' could bear, and in general people don't like to pay for photography, especially now in the digital age.

Mainly I was participating to nail down my Canada Council qualifications, which, for the Visual Arts category, seem to stipulate that you have to have a certain number of gallery shows. Never mind whether you make your living taking and publishing photographs, never mind the artistic merit of those publications, never mind the other work you may have done in other artistic fields... last year I didn't have three gallery shows on my cv and I was deemed ineligible for funding.

So, ok, whatever, fine. I've got the chops, and now I've got the gallery shows. Woot, hear me roar, august federal funding agencies!

Categories: Art school | Ash | Work work work

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Turner At WorldChanging

Hey hey hey. This is to announce a new GeoHope collaboration with the illustrious and definitive WorldChanging. Turner has been brought on board to do a monthly-ish column on his work, The Geography of Hope, climate change, hope in general, and etcetera-type-stuff. I have a tiny role as the contributing photographer to his columns, the first of which has now hit the site. See it here.

This photograph was taken down in Taber, Alberta in September 2007. I was originally down there to do a shoot for the Globe & Mail at the big Enmax wind farm south of the town. (For the record, this was indeed the same site shoot during which I lost my shit, spooked by the giant scary wind turbines whooshing high above, and I had to hide in/shoot from the car, with the radio on full blast.) This photo was taken out the passenger-side window, and of course the text on the mirror reads, "Objects in mirror are closer than they appear".

Enh! ENH? Symbolism, see? Metaphor! Wind turbines, wind power, sustainable and renewable energy are... CLOSER than we think! Get it?

Turner's blog posting about his new WorldChanging column, here.

Categories: Ash | GeoHope | Turner | Work work work

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"Nine" Show At Arthouse

Categories: Art school | Ash | Work work work

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Happy Birthday, Past Present & Future

Hi! It's my birthday today! I'm 35 GLORIOUS years old.



Here's me and Sloaner a few days ago, visiting Jenny & Korey's new daughter, Emmanuelle. Lookit that grin on our Baloner, eh? Hopefully she's ready to be a big sister? Because I'm/we're pregnant. Due in May 2009. Hurray!

Categories: Ash | Mom-ness | Sloane

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The Geography of Hope: Nominated!

Turner's been nominated for the 2008 Governor General's Awards! Woooot, way to go Turner!

Categories: GeoHope | Turner

Comments [1]