~ my intimate blood-borne saboteur.

For better or for worse, I’ve enrolled myself in the trial of a new drug which may be a potent HCV inhibitor. It’s a triple therapy: as well as the study drug, I’m on the standard-of-care - peg-interferon and ribavirin: a toxic cocktail which tends to cause anaemia, flu-like symptoms and a genocide of the neutrophils, those fundamental elements of the innate immune system which are seen most often as a constituent of pus.

I’m desperate to shrug off the virus. It’s not killing me yet. For a fifty year old my liver’s in pretty good shape - according to the painful biopsy I had a few weeks ago. And my level of ALT (an indicator of inflammation) is within the normal range. However I’ve had the accursed invaders for upwards of a quarter of a century and there are rather a lot of them: at last count nine million viroids per millilitre of blood. The moment age begins to weary me, to weaken me, I fear they will grasp the opportunity to scour me from the surface of the planet - like a fastidious girlfriend with a box of tissues, scrupulously seeing to a clumsy boyfriend’s spilled red wine

Weird simile, I know. I’ll trust my subconscious and leave it there. Oh, and I was stung by a bee the other day. The hottest of those recent days. In Bruce Butler’s pool. A bee, of all things. There I was, lounging peaceably in one of Bruce’s vast and colourful collection of floatation devices when, lo, the underside of my upper-arm descended upon a bee. When did this last happen? Was I six? Younger perhaps? Of course, even a painful incident like this will not undermine my love and admiration for bees. The creature was acting purely out of instinct. I know that. Though I admit to taking a soupçon of pleasure in what must have been a painful, extended demise.

Polly, however, was out of the pool in a flash, pale as a sheet, trembling in the corner furthest from the water, demanding that we leave immediately. She is terrified of bees. And wasps. Snakes too, I think. (About a fortnight ago, I was walking with her and her friend Megan by Scotchman’s Creek when I spied what I believe to be a tiger snake side-winding across the path. I was a child when I last saw a snake down there.)

Just to finish up on the subject of bees ... Robert - as I have explained previously - cannot stop himself feeding the surly, obese, ill-humoured local population of brush-tailed possums. He built a beautiful possum box for them to inhabit - put it atop the shed in the hope they would cease forcing up the tiles and sleeping in the roof. Robert knows the ways of these possums. Intimately. He can tell them apart as they come for their nightly serving of putrid bananas. They seem to trust him too; he alone is allowed to stroke the fur of the matriarch’s offspring peeking from her pouch ...

Unfortunately, before the possums even noticed Robert’s labour of love, a swarm of honey-bees appeared and automatically made it their home. They became a fixture in the yard. During the Winter, for a time, the hive disappeared and shortly after we found pieces of depleted honeycomb amongst the dried leaves and the dust beneath the box. With Spring the bees returned, and they remain there now ...

I would love to steal a little of their honey... but I dare not risk it.

But back to the point ... this is my fourth attempt to flush the (stubborn genotype 1a) virus from my system. The first was a a monotherapy: interferon-alpha on its own (I responded, but barely). The second was trial of something called Rebif: interferon-beta, typically used for MS patients (The injections hurt like hell, I felt like shit and it did nothing). Then came the double-therapy - still in use - interferon-a and ribavirin (my viral load dropped from 10,000,000 to 1200, but then, like the Borg, the virus adapted and resumed its deadly replication).

Each of these attempts have excised more than six months from my life. It’s simply impossible for me to operate as usual while on these drugs. I’m not myself. I’m reduced, functioning at a minimum.

It’s a gamble: surrender these swathes of time in the hope that, later in life, I will avoid cirrhosis, or liver cancer - or else take a chance and let the virus do its evil work. Always a hard choice. And Polly must be considered. I don’t want to be sickly and weak when the time comes to wield an axe - or machete, or shotgun - when suitors come a-calling ...

I have benefited from the treatments. The most recent, though technically a failure, has caused my liver to show signs of improvement - despite my viral load careering back up to nine million.

This time round, at three weeks in (I’ve just had my fourth weekly injection of interferon-a) the side effects have been milder than I recall. The initial fortnight was bad - I might have had a poisonous creeping ague caught from some queasy, debilitated swine - but since then I’ve been normalising. There is the anaemia of course. It gets in the way of the exercise I rely on to bind my body and soul. But if this is the worst of it - this and the fatigue and the fogginess and the low-mood - then I will plough through the twenty-one weeks remaining with ease.

Perhaps the virus is already gone? The new drug - BMS 790052, which directly attacks a protein necessary for HCV replication (NS5A) - is supposed to work very rapidly. Perhaps I’m feeling better because I’ve cast it out at last. My dark passenger, as Dexter might put it. My intimate blood-borne saboteur.

Or perhaps I’m one of the unlucky ten percent who, instead of the new drug, are receiving a placebo?

~ dead chick

This is a sad and compelling something, encountered by Polly on our driveway.

"I don't know what it is," she said. "But if I look at it again, I'll vomit."

In a night or two I will have finished reading her Enid Blyton's Faraway Tree trilogy. Next will be Arabel's Raven.

~ I try my hand at oding

Down at the Grey Creek, since the rain, there is a super-abundance of dragonflies and their smaller cousins the damselflies. In my experience, there have never been so many. They are hovering, flashing bolts of iridescence, almost surreal in their variety, like echoes from J G Ballard’s The Crystal World. They are hypnotic, suggestive of fairy tales, and cousins to the butterflies in that they bring fanciful unexpected colour to the world. At times, as I sit observing them, I feel a shimmer of magic, glimpses of another world briefly seen and then gone.

I’ve set about cataloguing them. Thus far, among the damsel flies, blue ringtails are by far the most common, tails striped with sky blue and black. There are common flatwings, a dark metallic green with a lightning bolt on the thorax, and tiny prismatic aurora ringtails. The most populous dragonfly is the tiger-striped tau emerald with its bold green face. There are blue skimmers. And red wandering perchers.

I’m beginning to see variations in their behaviour. Their mode of flight and their habits can be used to identify them, but I’m not quite an oder yet. Oder? Oding is the habit of dragonfly watching. Many of them flit by too fast for my eye to track (They are among the fastest insects) and few stay still long enough for a photo, but I lucked out with this common flatwing ...


and this wondrous spider, which I’ve been unable to identify. Perhaps, if there is an arachnophile reading this, he or she may be so good as to shine a light on my ignorance ...?

~ donald's christmas fear 2010

~ soulless machinations

Walking Polly to school today, there were more musk lorikeets than I have ever seen in Mt Waverley. I love these birds - so much sweeter and gentler than the brash, squawking rainbow lorikeets who vastly outnumber them.

This is the best I could do by way of photos.



About a month ago, the house was burgled while we were taking Polly to school. My camera was taken, and my ipod - two things I find it hard to live without - despite their being in such poor condition I doubt if our robber would have got a penny for them. Indeed, I cannot think of one item of loot he might have recouped on. Jenny’s wisdom tooth? My back pack? My car keys...?

People say the sense of invasion is the worst thing about house robberies. For me, it was the vision of what went on in the guy’s head ... the soulless machinations ... the utter lack of empathy ... Why did (he) give Polly’s room such particular treatment...? It would have been blatantly obvious that our household was low on valuables ... but still he went for the very little there was ... It’s saddening to me that such dismal creatures live amongst us.

The bright side, however, is that I’ve replaced my camera - and can resume my record of Mt Waverley’s most meagre denizens. It continues to amaze me how such a cheap little device can reap such results ...

First, a blue-tail damselfly ...


an orchid dupe wasp ...

and some green grocer cicadas.