Everybody in Barbados is complaining about the heat but is it less comfortable to be in the cold?
By 11 a.m. yesterday the temperature on the island was all the way up in 32 degrees Celsius but feeling more like 38. For people like me, who grew up with metric system measurements, those temperatures equate to 90 and 101 degrees Fahrenheit, respectively, which make you feel more like you are living in the Gobi or the Kalahari desert than in a supposedly cool, windswept tropical paradise.
By coincidence, at the same time on the same day, I happened to be up north in a little town called Randolph just outside Boston where the temperature on the outside was nine degrees Celsius but feeling more like two degrees which, in Fahrenheit, translate to 48 and 36 degrees, respectively.
What’s mind boggling about having a day that’s that cold is that for people living in Randolph and such other places up Norther, it’s not considered cold because October is by the second of the three months of autumn, meaning that there is still a month and a piece to go because winter officially sets in.
Well, for me this is already winter and I would give anything for a few hours of that heat which Barbados is currently finding so unbearable.
That night I, who seldom sleep in anything more than underwear, did so under a blanket, under a comforter, dressed in a pair of thick socks and long johns with a sweater for extra comfort. And I was still cold as you know what because for the people who live here there is no need yet to turn on the heating.
I took time to spend a few days here and in New York after having to go to a special clinic in a place called Plantation in Florida to have a PET scan.
The reason for this is that September 10 marked four years since the day I underwent surgery for life-threatening colon cancer.
My specialist says that if the scan shows that my body is still free of those troublesome cells which, in too many cases, take us to the other side before, as they say, our time is up, I should be good for a long time to come.
My surgeon was even more optimistic after the operation with a prediction that there shouldn’t be anything to stop me from receiving a visit from the Governor General when that time came. Based on current political trends, that person would more than likely be the President of Barbados than the GG.
The unusual thing about this scan is that the procedure starts with being injected with a radioactive sugar. My investigation reveals that approximately one hour following the injection, the sugar has travelled throughout your bloodstream and into your tissues.
And cancerous cells present soak up this sugar, which virtually lights them up during your scan. The PET scanner detects the energy from these “radiotracers” and a computer turns this information into three dimensional pictures, or cross-sections, of your body.
The first time I had the scan two years ago they gave me a letter which verified that I had been injected with the radioactive stuff just in case it set off a Customs scanner at the airport to identify me as a possible security threat.
This time, I forgot to tell them that I was flying that same day and didn’t get that piece of paper verifying my conditions. The result was that something that shouldn’t have been there apparently showed up on the full body scanner at the Miami Airport that caused the female operating it to shout to her companion as I was walking by to collect my bags to “stop him”.
That led me to being held by the arm and taken back to the female who then wiped all over my left hand with what I assumed was some kind of detection agent which she then placed in the slot of a machine before returning to do the same thing on the right hand.
Fortunately, nothing showed up on that external exam to indicate that I might have been handling radioactive materials prior to arriving at the airport and I was allowed to go my way without any further bother.
Al Gilkes heads a public relations firm. Email algilkes@gmail.com.