So. Skin graft in a few hours. I’m told it’s a little like laying sod. First they take this Black & Decker belt sander to roughen up that fresh red meat I’ve been growing for the past couple of months (basically to velcroize the surface, so the new skin has some nooks and crannies to hook onto). Then they use a glorified cheese grater to scrape a Nazca Landing Strip off my outer thigh, and trowel the extracted porridgy flesh-sludge into the hole in my calf. One wound feeds another. (A second alternative would have been to use tissue donated from a second party. I put out the word, but the only one who stepped forward was Nalo Hopkinson and she’s not exactly a close color match.)<\/p>\n
Afterward I have to remain completely immobile, lest I jar the leg and cause the grafted tissue to drop off like a clot of dead autumn leaves. I will probably be out of sorts and uncommunicative for a while.<\/p>\n
Hopefully, though, I’ll have more pictures to share coming out the other end. I’m taking a USB stick to the hospital and will refuse anaesthesia until Dr. Beber stops stalling and hands over the necro shots from the last operation. I also intend to give him my own camera so any shots of this new procedure will not be subject to the same delay.\u00a0 (I have already asked the pre-op interview medtech to pass this information on to the good doctor, but she was the same medtech that refused to allow me to drink alcohol during “Sharktopus” so I don’t know how much good that did. We’ll see.)<\/p>\n
In the meantime, here are some pictures of a different sort to keep you occupied. “The Island” made the cover of\u00a0 ESLI <\/em>over in Russia (a bit more of a Stargate: Universe<\/em> vibe than the retrofitted asteroid described in the story, but I like the extragalactic perspective):<\/p>\n Here are the covers for the Czech and\/or Slovak release of Blindsight (not sure who the metal babe is supposed to represent but she looks cool), and for the upcoming Polish paperback (I actually hadn’t realized until now that the original Polish release<\/a> was a hardcover):<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/04\/Island-Russia.jpg\" "\\"Island-Russia\\"")
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