The inside story

Yesterday I had an endoscopy, where the doctor feeds a tube about a half-inch in diameter down your throat. There's a bright light and a small camera at the end of the tube, so the doctor can look around your esophagus and stomach and anywhere else he'd care to virtually roam. Step One of the procedure is swab your mouth and throat with a local anesthetic. Getting a general anesthetic was also an option, but that seemed a little extreme for a little endoscopic look-see. Also time- and money-consuming. So, a local.

Step Two is to put a small plastic apparatus in your mouth so you can't bite down; it's held in place by a big rubber band that's wrapped around the back of your head. It was at this point that I thought to ask how long this procedure was going to take, but with the plastic bridle in my mouth it was too late.

Step Three is getting the camera down in there. They made two attempts to feed the tube down my throat, and I gagged impressively both times. The doctor allowed as how this was a matter of physiology, not willpower, and I'd have to be put under. Which meant delay, and a bigger investment of time and money than I cared to make, so I asked him to try it again. This time I managed not to choke. He looked around for maybe 30 seconds, then the tube was gone, the mouthpiece removed, and I was left with a fresh appreciation for Jenna Jameson's skill set.

The bill was an American-sized 950 euros, but then, this was the American Hospital outside Paris. I'd decided to seek treatment for the hiatal hernia there so that if I said, "Everything is going dark...." someone would understand me. On Friday, Herself and I saw a surgeon there, who declined to immediately pop me open and wrench my stomach back into place. Instead, he sent me along to the endoscopy guy. Who confirmed that I have some small ulcers, and some pain in the wallet. Next step comes tomorrow, when I get the acidity level in my esophagus checked. I can't help but think I have better things to do with my time and money.

I haven't been writing, but I did bestir myself sufficiently to download two note-taking and thought-organizing programs, BrainStorm and NoteMap 2. I first read about BrainStorm in Hitchhiker, M.J. Simpson's biography of Douglas Adams, and was all hot to try it. Later, it occurred to me that the fact that Adams used the software might not be much of an endorsement -- he seems never to have gotten his shit together as a writer, although what he did write, on those rare occasions when he could, was often wonderful. NoteMap's target audience seems to be lawyers and other besuited types, and its web site is much more corporate-looking than BrainStorm's. And though I've just started to explore both programs, their approaches seem to reflect an artistic vs. corporate approach. BrainStorm seems looser, like a comfortable flannel shirt. NoteMap seems a bit more hierarchical and better organized. It remains to be seen whether one is better than the other for taming the megabytes of notes, lines, scenes, excerpts and other junk that accretes around one of my story ideas. Also, whether either program is better than, say, a stack of 3x5 cards.