Squirrel (v)

The verb "to squirrel" - to lose focus of something and pay attention to something more interesting.  As in the dog on "Up", talking about something, and "squirrel!"

Infinigrudge

Okay, I'm going to list all the new words that we come up with.  This one just happened a few minutes ago....

Building a playset - delayed

So my wife likes to build stuff, and next on the list is building a playset.  We were supposed to start yesterday - we have all the wood delivered and bought most of the parts.

Yesterday we had a fun run in the morning (the 10yo thought she won, but at the last minute we realized she was registered for the 5K and not the fun run, so she won the "5K" in 12 minutes, but really ended up being around 8th in her division).  I mowed the lawn - didn't take 2 hours like last time, and spent about 1.5 hours removing obstructions from the sprinklers (yes, I should have done that 2 months ago).  I had to whip out our new chainsaw for a bit of it, and while I was at it I took out a lilac.

So we were tired and lazy and didn't do the playset yesterday.

But we did see "The Avengers"!  About time.

Divergent and Insurgent

"Divergent" turned out being a pretty good book.  My wife and I read it together driving 4 hours and back with the kids to see the eclipse (which was pretty cool).  Too bad we didn't try using the camera with the solar glasses...

The sequel is "Insurgent" and we've read a bit of it, but it's been a few days, since I guess we get tired of reading aloud.

I'm also supposed to be reading "Son of Neptune", but I haven't wanted to start, perhaps because that was the book I brought to surgery and didn't read it there either.  I am a bit into the 3rd book in the Kane Chronicles ("The Slithering Serpent"? The <something> serpent?)

Week's running record

I ran a 5K at work in 28:39 about 2 weeks ago.  That means that I've lost 4 minutes since surgery.  It's weird - every other physical activity I'm back up to where I was before (even pullups).  Oh well - we'll get it back.

My wife, our 10yo, and I were supposed to run another 5K the weekend after the work one, but the 10yo got queasy and we left.

This week, I did 3 runs:
The treadmills 20 minute hill workout (I walked about 2 minutes of it)
a 2 mile easy run in the middle of the week
5 miles yesterday, at 6mph.  I walked 30s in the middle.

Zombie Dice

So, we bought a game called Zombie Dice.  It's a quick dice game made by the same people that made Munchkin.  Sweet game.

Our 2yo is now "brains? brains? zommie?"

(Edit: originally called it Zombie Brains, whereas it actually is Zombie Dice)

4 yo says:

Can I have more soil milk?

(Should be soy milk.)

Work goal of the week

To not put my feet up on coworkers' desks.  After 2 days, so far so good.

Doctor's orders: no spears for the kids

Had lots of follow-ups this week.

Monday: MRI

It's official:

MRIs are boring. 

Tuesday: Urologist.  Said everything is going reasonably, and I no longer have to manually empty unless I need to (which happens about once in 3 days these days).

Today: Neurosurgeon.  Said MRI looks clean, and everything is okay, and he's happy.

I mentioned that it hurts when kids sit on my back.  Response: "As it should".  I'm concerned about injury to the spinal area with force to the area where I'm missing bones, and he said that there's still enough bone to protect the area against most incoming objects.  "Unless you get speared in the back, it's probably fine". 

Gotta send back the spears we bought for Christmas.




(Not serious about that last sentence, in case you think I'm demented.)

Mozart's Sonata

My wife challenged me to learn  a new piano song this year.  I normally like to choose songs that are way beyond my level, like the 3rd movement of "Moonlight Sonata", so this time I chose one that I might be able to finish in less than 5 years: Mozart's Sonata in C.  I'm making good progress on.

I snapped a vid of me 2 weeks ago on it, and will do one again soon, (on a camera that has a few megapixels but not a lot of quality), and will post them once I figure out how to edit video, so that I don't bore people to death with long segments of uselessness.

I also tried to play the Sonata on the clarinet.  That didn't work out so well at all.

Book review

So, my wife and I just started reading this book called "Divergent".  So far it's about a teenage girl who makes a Hogwarts-sorting-hat-style choice against her family and the results.  We haven't hit the central conflict yet.

Recently I also read the first 2 Beyonders books (my wife bought me the sequel thinking I had read the first, so I figured I'd better read them).  They were pretty good.  Then my sister told me she thought they were kind of slow, and then I kind of agreed.

Before that, I read the "Ghost of Tatooine", a Star Wars novel taking place after "Jedi" and before the Timothy Zahn trilogy.  I only sort of like reading books like this, because sometimes they're just filler novels and don't advance the story.  I really enjoyed the Timothy Zahn trilogy a long time ago.  I imagine if I had read some other Star Wars trilogy I might have enjoyed that and then in the future had no interest to read the Timothy Zahn one.  Does that make any sense?

That being said, it was a pretty good book.

Perhaps I'm at the point where I've (finally) read enough books that I'm now recognizing "Hey, this sounds a lot like 'Book X', and I really don't want to get into that again".

Gas pumps want zip code

So, when you pay at the pump, a lot of them ask you for your zip code.  At first, I thought this was so they could find high population clumps of customers and build one closer to them.  But then I learned (possible rumor mongering) that this was a security feature.

What?

Clearly nobody who steals somebody's credit card could know what their zip code is...

3 runs this week

So I have a race next week, the one I sponsor twice a week at work.  I'm still a bit slower than before the surgery.  (I can do most everything else I used to could (sorry, I had to say it that way), such as pullups, pushups, situps.  I guess I can't reach the first knuckle past my toes either...)

Tuesday I wanted to see if I could do it at a 7mph average.  I couldn't - I made it 1.5 miles.
Saturday, I wanted to see if I could do it at 9 min/mile.  I made it 2 miles, but I ran out of time and had to go to...

... the finish line to watch my daughter finish a "Girls on the Run" race.  She's been running for about 2 months, and this was her first 5K.

(I tried to get her into running a few years ago, but she was (and probably still is) more into short sprints).

They finished sometime between 45 and 55.  The timer at the finish line had shut off for some reason.


Later in the afternoon, I decided that part of why I'm still slow(er) is that I haven't done anything to strengthen my legs (since muscle strength contributes to oxygen consumption rate or something like that). So I did a hill session on the treadmill, doing each incline level between 2 and 10, running at 5mph at each one and walking at 3mph between each one at the same level.  I did 2,3,4,5,9 at 2 minutes and 6,7,8,10 at 1 minute.

Going up the stairs was hard after that.

SWTOR cancellation

Oh, I forgot to mention that I cancelled my Star Wars subscription.  I didn't have enough time, my computer is too sucky to play it, and I found that the same thing that was true of WoW was true of it - you just wander around, push 113244231 until something dies, and repeat.

This time I pushed through till about level 28, whereas with WoW I made it to 73.

LAN party with Diablo 3

So, some friends of mine bought Diablo 3, and one of them invited me to a Diablo 3 LAN party.  I didn't want to buy it (yet), so we postulated that I could play with them for a bit with a guest pass.  So we and a few other friends tried to find me one for a few days (most of them bought the digital version), until a friend at work had a friend who didn't need one and I borrowed his.

So we're all excited, show up to the LAN party, and then after a few minutes we realize that guest players can only play with other guest players (or random strangers).  Cheap.  So I spent 4 hours and went as far as I could on the guest mode by myself (with the other guys from the LAN party).

All in all, it's a pretty fun game.  The story seemed a lot like the original Diablo I played in 1997 - you had to fight the Skeleton King, and then the Butcher.  The story presented itself a little more clearly and the UI was nicer.

However, after the 4 hours, I think that was good enough - I've had my feel and I don't really feel the need to keep going.

Runs of the week

I tried some speed work this week.

Tuesday I wanted to run a 7 minute mile, made it halfway and then did 2 more half miles somewhere around 7 or 7.5.

Saturday I wanted to run a 24:45 5K (7.5 mph), did a half mile (see a pattern?), and then 8 mph for .5 miles, .3 miles, and .25 miles.

Voiding status

So I posted earlier that my graph is like this:

Except that the period of the wave seems to get larger over time.  Right now, I'm on the upswing where last week was down.  I accidentally went of the drugs (Can't remember if I said that), and it seems to be okay.  I manually empty about once a day when I'm at the peak, or twice in a valley, and in those cases it's about half a cup.

Work pranks

So, I was working with somebody in his officemate, and his officemate (we, on average, have 2 to each office) had left his shoes on the floor.  So, I decide it would be funny to just hide them for a minute, and put them in a box in the office.

The next morning, I run into him in the break room, and he says, "Thanks for hiding my shoes; it took me 15 minutes to find them and I missed my kid's soccer game."

I was like "oops".

Then he was like "just kidding".

Whew!

Ice cream

2yo: Owwie!
Mom: Do you want some ice?
2yo: No! Cream!

Hooray for mouse pointers!

So, I run Fedora 15 Linux with Gnome 3 at work.  I'd rather run windows, because I think its desktop environment actually works (I respect your differing opinion in this regard - I think Linux is a better server environment), but the environments we develop server apps that run on Linux, so we develop on Linux.

Anyway, about 1/3 of the time, after unlocking my screen, the mouse pointer disappears.  The mouse still works; you just can't see the pointer.

The funny part is that sometimes it takes me about 20 minutes to notice - I can run my command line and editor without it, but Email with Lotus Notes is difficult without a mouse.  At least it implements mouseovers in decent places, so I can get close to my desired click and go trial and error from there.

Surfing the web is also hard - it took me about 3 minutes to click the 30 pixel "sign your timecard" button.

But then, on the next lock and unlock, it comes back, and there is much rejoicing.

Camping Curse

My back passed one of the ultimate tests: camping.

This was a father-son campout, and I brought my 7yo and a neighbor kid whose dad couldn't come.

However, I have a camping curse.  Seems whenever I go camping, I attract the heavy winds that keep me awake all night.  I also brought the wrong tent (or don't know how to use it), and this tent does not survive heavy windstorms.  I.e., we end up with the top of the tent in our face, and I remember looking at the clock at least once an hour from 12:30 to 6:30.

Lamentably, we had to be somewhere in the morning, so we were gone by 7:15, when the rest of them started to prepare breakfast of eggs, sausage, hash browns, and pancakes.  We had cereal at home.

Happy Valentine's Day

Here's a collage of Valentine's Day candy hearts I made to poke fun at the candy heart system.  Didn't get around to posting it until now.

Children biking

So I introduced my 10yo to a hill to bike down, and a shortcut it has to a local park.  She has since become obsessed with riding down this hill at top speed (to be honest, I have too) and then taking laps around the park's sidewalk.  This last week I told her she has to start biking up the hill each time we do that.  She can make it halfway before stopping, and about 3 times up the hill kills my legs to death.

My 7yo is starting to catch on to biking.  My approach has gone from constant critiquing (and him telling me that he refuses to go without training wheels) to leaving him alone and having him figure it out on his own.  We were using the same hill as above (just closer to the bottom) to teach the balancing without the need to learn pedaling and he has started to learn exponentially.  I even brought him on one of the park expeditions with the 10yo and he managed all right.  He averages pedalling about 7 seconds before having to restart, except uphill.

I think I now understand why people wear biker shorts.
1) Because pants hit the gear box
2) Because pants (particularly those on the tight side) cause pain in certain areas

Exercise update

I haven't exercised properly in over a week.  Oops.  I've been staying up too late and not sleeping enough, and have been exhausted pretty much since last Tuesday, so I haven't felt the desire to exercise. 

But after my 2-hour nap and 10 hours of sleep, I might be ready to start again in a few days.  Or later.  I have already put on the "you're not exercising" buffer weight.

I guess you might count biking with the children and being throttled in a sparring match with my instructor as exercise...

4 miles

So today I decide to try to add some distance if it kills me.  I have a problem though, and that is I find running slower than a certain speed "unacceptable".  This is part of why over the last few weeks I only made it ~1.8 before finishing on all but a few of the runs.

Anyway - I pretty steadily increased from 6.0 to 6.5 and back down for the duration of the run and ended up with 4 miles at 38:42 (5K split at 30:03).

We were sore.

Things to not say to dad:

I put on some reminiscing music from Star Wars.  Hey, the music's still good.

10yo: I bet you can't play that on the trumpet

Wife: Why did you say that?  You should know better...

Me - bring out the trumpet and play along.  Mind you, it was probably a grade III performance (higher number = bad), as I haven't played in a number of months, and I didn't bother warming up or whatever.

And for some reason, the 10yo was busting out laughing the whole time.

not going to knock anybody off

Me, to 4yo: Stop pissing off your brothers.  (Sorry if 'piss off' is vulgar to you)
4yo, a few minutes later: Don't worry, dad, I'm not going to knock anybody off right now.

L is for Ladycar

So, we have one of those puzzle thingies where you put the letters into where they fit.  However, this one talks when you put the letter in place.  As a consequence of that, it also talks when you have a piece missing and you turn off the light.

There have only been a handful of days since we got it where there hasn't been at least one piece missing.

So for the last few days, clearly the C and L are missing, because whenever I turn off the light, I hear "L is for Ladycar".

Another small run

I'm never going to get to that half marathon in November if I never try to run further. :)

Today I wanted to experiment with speeds on the treadmill.  So I did minutes at the following (or something like this):
5
6
6
9
8
7
3
6
6.5
6.6
6.7
6.8
3
7
310 - 9 (20s at 10)
3
8
7
3
6.8
4.5 * this and below is my "standard" cooldown
4
3.5
3
2.5

Return to Karate

I went back to my karate class on Thursday for the first time in 2 months.  I was the only one there, so we went at my pace.  I wouldn't let them make me do spinning kicks or big grabs.

Some of the katas we were working on, they said I did better than before I left :)  But there were some things I was clearly down on.

For instance:

• On the block-punch combinations, on the turn and do it with the opposite side, I was off
• I couldn't even do half a pullup.  How embarrassing is that!
• I couldn't even come within 6 inches of touching my toes.  That was because my back was really tight.

So today, 6 days later, I tried pullups again, and I managed 3.  I don't know how I managed that from 0 last week, but I won't complain.  At work, while I was waiting for compiles, I practiced stretching to my toes, and I eventually made it there.

My brother was right

... I hate it when that happens.

Most of my family has started ignoring me when I start doing something they don't think my back is ready to handle.  But when I started doing Bridges (laying on the ground and making a 'bridge' between your knees and shoulders, with your feet and hands on the ground), he said I probably shouldn't be doing that.

He was right.

My back was stiff all day Monday and Tuesday.

On the other hand, I do need to come up with new exercises to work my back muscles back up.

Saturday small run

So, I start running on Saturday, intending on doing 4 miles (1 more than the last run), but only made it about 1.8.  Got too tired, and decided to not push myself more this week.

But my wife ran a 10K!  Isn't that awesome?  She's never done one before.  And, she wanted to be able to beat me in a race.  Well, there's no way I'm up to 10K right now, so she got me.  Well done!

Ode to the door-to-door salesman

Do door-to-door salesmen drive you nuts?  Grrr.  (Sorry if you happen to be one - hopefully you've learned how to not be annoying.)

Last one we had was a guy who wanted to offer us free attic insulation.  "We just need to come in and take a look, and the power company will rebate blah blah blah."

Good offer?  Maybe.  But I say no.  Why did I say no?  Well, at the time, I had 3 children inside being ultra noisy and I just wanted him to leave me alone.  I didn't want him to take a look, and I just wanted him to go away.  (Why did I answer the door then?  Who knows.  But we were all in the front room so I knew he saw me).

But it took 3 "Not interested" and "Not right now"s to get him to go away.  But here's the clincher.  As he walks away, he says "Okay, I'm not going to waste my time".

It always seems that the ones offering free stuff are the most rude.  Last time it happened it was the "we'll clean 3 rooms of carpet for "free"" and he walked away insulting my intelligence.

So, after the fact, I thought:
a) I don't want you in my house
b) I don't want 2 feet of insulation in my attic.  I have to go up there and do electrical junk from time to time, and it's hard enough to find anything and to breathe with the 8 inches I have.

(And let's not forget that I probably wouldn't see the joists, and I don't need to fall through the attic again.)

Clarinet returns

I picked up a wind instrument for the first time tonight in a while.  I was working with my 10yo (this is the same as my 9yo, who recently had a birthday) for her near concert.  I managed to go up and below the break with much greater speed than before.  Going down seemed to be easier than going up.  Not near good enough, but much faster than I can strum between chords on a guitar.

We learned various sharps and flats, and various notes over the break.  I tried to play the trumpet part of my HS fight song (I'm a geek, it's true; no surprise), and did a C above the bar for a bit.  Except it's impossible for me to hold only notes on the back of the clarinet with no counterbalance from the front, so I [incorrectly, I'm sure] held it between my knees.

Then, all of a sudden, I ran out of gusto.  Not gradually, but very suddenly (yes, that's redundant), I just couldn't play any more.

Guilt

Okay, so this is going to be weird:

So, the last few months have been a little traumatic, but it's basically over -- except for the GI issue, whereby I left a lab work culture at the lab yesterday, with TBD results, and the urinary issue, which, seems to be good 2 days in a row and less good 2 days in a row, and the good days are about as good before all of this started -- and sometimes feels like a distant memory.

Today is the 2-month anniversary of the middle surgery.  About a week after coming home, and I got on antibiotics, and they were worried about things like meningitis (where, it seems, a for this is if you can't touch your chin to your chest), I find out that a neighbor of somebody I know dies of meningitis.  He was in his 30s, has small children, and it came on suddenly.  Various friends and family members are acquiring their share of chronic ailments.  Then there's me, almost sort of virtually back to normal.  How am I supposed to feel about that?  Lucky?  Guilty?  Weird?  I guess I'm a little of all of that................................

Ode to the Sweat Line

Oh, sweat line, how do I love thee, let me count the ways:
1 - It feels cool to exercise hard enough to earn it
2 - ...
3 - ...

I made it 5K tonight!!  In 31:12, slightly less than an average of 6mph.  That almost makes me feel comfortable enough to start planning a work 5K.  Yesterday, I made 1.5, going from 6 - 7 and back down.

Running

So, Monday, I went on a 10 mile bike ride with the boy scouts.  Then I had to sleep for about 2 hours.  This may or may not have to do with recovery, or my complete inability to ride a bicycyle.  I may have needed the nap if I did this 3 months ago.

In the Tuesday or Wednesday era, I ran on the treadmill - .5 miles at 6.3, minute walk, then 3x.25 at 6.3 with a minute walk between each one.

This morning I did 9 minutes ramping up from 5 to 6.6, minute walk, 5 minutes at 6.6, minute walk, 4 minutes at 6.6, to hit ~2.05 miles in 20 minutes. 

I don't really feel much pain any more.  I can tell my legs are still a little bruised, but they don't hurt unless I stretch into some weird unnatural/and/or pilates position.  My back muscles under and possibly around my incision site are a little sore or tender, but I don't think the incision itself is in any pain any more.

The primary pain I still feel is when I lean back, and I believe those are still effects of the laminectomy (cutting off the bone surrounding the spinal canal).

Stupid blogspot

So I'm confused - people walk up to me in person and ask if I've updated my blog.  However, blogspot reports 0 pageviews for every post for like 2 weeks.  blogspot: Why u no update pageviews?!!  (Oh no, now I'm sucked into that meme)

Almost thou convincest me to be a morning person

So, since the surgery, I haven't had a lot of energy to stay up past about 10:30.  But, going to bed that early, I don't have great desires to sleep past 7 or so.  And for you that might not be considered "morning person", but for me, who normally sleeps until he has to get up or the kids will be late for school (no comments about how they are regularly), it's kinda early.

So, to compromise, I usually just stay in bed.

Running and exercise

Last week sometime I ran 1.25 miles - starting a 4mph, deciding that was boring, and incrementing (wow, that word is misspelled according to my browser dictionary, and the person sitting next to me adds emphasis that it's not a word) every minute by .2 until we hit 6mph!  Whoo!  Then I lasted about 2 minutes there until my legs turned to jello and was done.

In other news I did an incremental lifting competition last night (at a family easter party) whereby I wanted to see what my back could support, starting at the smallest nephew and proceeded incrementally upward.  By the time my sisters saw me I was at the 15-yo and they told me to stop, and what was I thinking, etc.  Which is okay, I don't think I would have dared go any higher.

Note that it's not quite the same as dead-lifting - I was lifting them from their standing position, which is a lot less work on the back.

4yo says...

I got a cheesy song in my head, and I started singing:

"Catch a falling star and put it in your pocket", and then I decided it was too cheesy and changed the subsequent words to:

"Never let it eat your...", but couldn't think of the appropriate object, so my 4yo, finishes it with:

"brain"

(who says that "Plants vs Zombies" can't teach you anything?)

Cell phone vibrator algorithm

So, sometimes my cell phone vibrator works and sometimes it doesn't.  I used to keep it on vibrate all the time because I've that that it ringing was annoying, but I have little choice when the vibrator doesn't work.

But I've figured out when it works with the following algorithm:

Was it recently dropped?  If not, it works if it worked before.
If so, its working randomly determined.

See, my phone has been dropped more times each week than an iPhone can and still survive, and so dropping it makes the vibrator work.

Wasn't going to post, but...

My wife made me a really awesome chocolate cake, and I just got a pack of get-well cards from my cousin and his family.  Awesome people!

So, after my mile run on Saturday, I was exhausted the rest of the day, similar to when I ran a half-marathon two years ago.  Then I didn't exercise again until yesterday, where I walked half a mile a 4mph.  Felt mostly fine.

(Rationale on Saturday was that walking a 4 does more twisting at 4, so running at that speed was easier than walking at that speed, but I compared them both yesterday, and it turned out not to be the case).

The leg pain is almost gone.  Sitting on the ground, I can bend my right knee up as high as it can until "normal tension", but my left leg is still a little behind, as it has been the whole time.

Otherwise, I can do anything non-strenuous.  I am carrying the 2yo everywhere (carefully, and most certainly not lifting from a position of more than 6 inches away), and I picked up 4yo to a waist position yesterday (was scared to lift her the rest of the way).  I'm scared to do pushups...

I can still feel the line in my back where the scar is healing.  When I walk/run too fast, it feels like the line is pulling (like as if it were held together by a string, and you pull on the top of the string to cinch it up), and I back off immediately.

But I think I meet the criteria I made for myself last week to be at Stage 1 Recovery.

Work chili cookoff

So I may or may not have mentioned a few months ago that my wife made a chili that I actually like (historically, I hate chili).  Well, my work had a chili cookoff, and I prepared that chili.  Turns out it did quite well, and the recipe-doubled slow cooker was empty by the time it was over.

Credit goes to my wife for introducing the recipe to me, and to some awesome person on the internet for introducing it to her.

Here's the recipe:
http://www.plainchicken.com/2012/01/slow-cooker-cream-cheese-chicken-chili.html

Exercise

Exercise update:

Wednesday, we (a youth group and various adults and I) went to the mall to play "Where's Waldo", where we had to identify other adults from the neighborhood in disguise.  It was lots of fun.  Problem was, another neighborhood was doing it too, so at times we were staring at their neighbors in disguise, kinda creepily, and theirs were doing it to us.  So we're a bunch of creepy stalkers, oh well.

Well, the mall is kinda big, so there was lots of walking.  Chances are this was the most walking I've done to date, some of it kinda fast, too, but I have no idea how far it was.

A coworker who had surgery two weeks ago has started "competing" with me - he made a 3 mile walk a few days ago (maybe it's me who's competing with him).

Friday, I ran from one end of our office building to the other.  At around 4mph.  Then my quads and lower back (not my incision area) were stiff.  It was like I'd never used those muscles before.  But at least they're responding, and not just blocks of stone.  My competitor-at-arms-at-work walked about 2.5 miles during a lunch break.  He wins.

I told my wife about this, and she was supportive and encouraging, which is good.  I told my sister and she was like "what are you thinking" :)  I didn't tell my mom.

Today I ran a little less than a mile ranging from 4.0 to 4.4.  Why did I run?  Because running at 4 is less strenuous on the back than walking at that pace is.  Made it a total distance of 2.1 miles before I got tired.  Then I wanted to take a nap by 10:30.

Geohashing

So, a while ago, there arose a thing called geohashing.  Not sure if the XKCD guy came up with it or helped popularize it, but the idea is that you take the date, the Dow Jones opening number, and compute a longitude and latitude.  There's one for your local longitude/latitude (i.e., if you live at 104.12341234, 104.12341234, then you keep the 104 and replace the decimal portion with the computed value) and a global hash - exactly 1 per day.  I've been thinking about trying it.

See http://wiki.xkcd.com/geohashing/Main_Page
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geohash for more background.

Day 1 sample - local hash takes me to half way up uncharted paths in the mountains

Day 2 sample - local hash takes me to half way up uncharted paths in the mountains
Day 3 sample - local hash takes me to the middle of a military base.

A website I found computes the 9 local hashes around you, and it turns out I live within a mile or two of a longitude border.  Sometimes the coordinates to the next 'graticule' (the longitude/latitude box) over are more reasonable to find.


Major dis: I just found one from a few days ago in the middle of a parking lot about a mile from my house.

Almost to Grade 1

So, I'm almost going to declare myself as grade 1 recovery.  That is, live "normally" without pain.

I was going to declare it today, but I realized I can't quite sit indian-style yet, or get in the car knee-and-butt first without the legs getting just a little sore.  I'm lifting the baby for a few seconds at a time reasonably...  It is amazing that the legs were sore all the time, but now I barely notice them.

Perhaps in a week.

Then grade 2 will be walking at 4mph and lifting the next biggest child (maybe a few weeks later), grade 3 will be running slowly and lifting the next biggest child, and grade 4 will be running full, lifting the largest child, and doing anything I want with no pain.  That sounds pretty far away.

[un]lucky radio hosts

So, do you ever listen to the radio?  I mean, when you're in the car and can't get to Pandora and you're too cheap to buy a digital radio?  There are ads about products the hosts get, try out, and then "endorse".  Including cars (they might have to give those back :( ), mattresses, cookies, all the way up to LASIK, body sculpting and hair removal, lipo, etc.

So the question: how much choice do these poor hosts get?  For a consumer who doesn't know better, hearing a real person endorse a product might be great advertising.  Do they get a say?  Do the producers come in and say "you need to try this product"?  Hmmm.

So confusing...

Okay, so I'm confused.  I have back pain.  It comes in two sources:

1. I just discovered that this was the source:  Where a certain portion of my back leans against something and it aches, it's not "general back pain", it's where the lamenectomy (cut portions of the bone) was.  This is why driving is so obnoxious, because there's no way to sit in a bucket seat that doesn't have this part of the back pressing against the seat.  Whereas I can avoid that region of the back in any other kind of chair, or at least sit in a softer chair.
2. Aching along the inside of the incision.  However, its source is confusing.  It could be either:
1. Me overdoing it, and this (in the worst case) is a ripping along the inside of the incision, or whatever other healing is happening back there.  This is what I felt like yesterday.
2. Me exercising, it aching, and then getting stronger.  This is what I felt like today.  In the morning anyway.

So do I do less or more?  It's so confusing.  But I guess it's better in this case to err on the side of not having to go back for surgery again later.

In other news, we went hunting all over the valley for catheters yesterday.  The urologist had told us earlier in the week to use sterile, but the PA had told us earlier that cleaning them for up to a week was okay.  Which has the natural consequence of running through them 7 times faster.  We're waiting for insurance to clear a company to ship us a month's worth, but while we're waiting, we ran out of the doctor's samples, so we had to go get some.  Place A was out, and they referred us to place B, which only sells large supplies (like specific chairs, etc.), who referred us to place C, where we finally got some....

Human Flag

Today I did this:

If you're saying "You're kidding, right?" I would say "right".

Today, I decided I needed to settle down a bit on the increasing-speed-walking.  I did a 10-minute walk between 3.3 and 3.7 today, and decided that minor tugs on my incision aren't going to help me heal properly.

Monday, I called the doctor for something or other, and the assistant gave me the best advice I have ever received in my life:

            If you feel tired, rest.

4 weeks out

Wow, it's been 4 weeks since the last surgery.  Seems like a day and an eternity at the same time.

Happy 4-week-anniversary-from-surgery to me....

Remembering coming home, barely being able to move, taking 2 minutes to get into a car, in massive pain walking around, etc.

Yesterday I sat in my office chair in my second favorite position: sideways with my legs over the armrest,  lightly "hopped" (sort of) down the stairs on my toes, rolled over 360 degrees, and kicked open a door (sorry work-people).  The leg pain seems to be a considerable less burden this week, so long as I don't go crazy.   But within my current constraints, I'm not allowed to go crazy.

Walking progress as follows:
earlier: .75 miles up to 3.3 mph, realized 3.3 pulled a little hard at the incision site, and backed off to 3
Monday: 1 mile in 22 minutes, ~2.7 mph
Tuesday: 1.25 miles in 27 minutes
Today: 1.75 miles in 32 minutes - ranging from 3.0mph 3.5mph

I am WAY out of 100%, though.  Driving, because of the pressure directly on the back, is very uncomfortable.  It's not the same as sitting in a normal chair.  My legs don't quite have the power to produce a jumping or running motion, and even if they did, walking in the mid-3's produces a strain on my back.  I can't lift heavy stuff, yet, though I have raised the small children from the ground to their feet, or arch my back, and I'm still afraid of getting my back wet, though I'm technically 'allowed' to.

So where will be be in 4 more weeks?  Don't know.  I might be running, but running might still be too much strain on my back.  Might be back in karate (I don't know why I haven't talked about that on this blog yet; just never felt like it during that part of the week, I guess).  Might be changing diapers again.  Won't my wife be happy?

And the ultimate test: going on a scout camp.  Somehow, I think sleeping on the hard ground is going to be quite the test.

Cost effectiveness of taking train

Okay, so I enjoy riding the train to work, but haven't done it for a few weeks.  I guess it's a good thing I didn't get a February monthly pass :)

A while ago, I had decided that taking the train was a little less cost effective than driving all the way, but the benefits were worth the cost.  Well, with gas prices changing, it's time to actually calculate it.

In my case, I have to drive to a train station (or walk a mile each way, and transfer to a bus and then transfer to the train), which happens to be on the same route as driving.

M = distance driving to the office = 15 miles
M' = distance driving to the train = .2666M = 4 miles
mpg = car's average mpg = 28
Pg = price of gas per gallon
Pt = price of a daily train ticket = $4.50
Ptm = price of a montly train pass, amortized to a daily figure (given 20 days used per month) = $3.75

Cost of driving all the way:
2*M/mpg*Pg (+ neglected cost of wear on car)
1.07*Pg

Cost of driving to train station and taking train
2*M'/mpg*Pg + Pt
0.29*Pg + $4.50


Cost of driving to train station and taking train with monthly pass

2*M'/mpg*Pg + Ptm

0.29*Pg + $3.75

So, what price does gas have to be to be worth it?

1.07Pg = .29Pg + 3.75

.78Pg = 3.75

Pg = $4.81.  Wow.  Hope that doesn't happen any time soon.

EXTREME optimal case - 23 days working per month - $3.26 = Ptm, adjusting Pg to $4.18...

MOTD

Milestone o' the day:

I got into the car butt-first, with no pain.

Oh, and speaking of milestones:
The stairs leading up to my house are REALLY steep. I went up them without much pain either.

Theory on Life #4

(I can only actually remember one of the previous 3 theories on life)

I have a few theories on life.  #4:

Your net life experience is time you've lived multiplied by ALL YOUR HABITS.

TLDR;
You know calculus right?  There's this crazy concoction called the integral, which does nothing more than calculate the area between an axis and any particular function.

So say you were 99.9 years old, and you knew you were going to live to be 100, and you were looking back on your life.  Would you be pleased?

For every facet of your life, you could probably graph the activity.  The area under the curve would then be the "total" amount spent under that facet.  For instance, "junk food consumption", the graph might be a steady line high above the axis.  Or its converse, "healthy eating" would be a steady line low.  Mind you, you might have a spike or a valley once in a while, but chances are you've established your habits and you've stuck to them.  If you've managed to change your habits, then part of your life will be a steady line, and the rest of your life will be a steady line at a different position.

So, what other facets could we graph?
Time spent with your kids/spouse/family
Time spent working
Time spent working that wasn't necessary
Time spent developing some talent/working on a hobby/contributing to society
Time spent watching TV/playing video games
Days in a given week where we could work on lofty goals, but just decide we're too tired, so we lounge instead
Exercise

Now these are just some of the things that I think about; you could probably come up with others.  I would bet that the average person could graph their lives for these and other facets, and find that the lines would be pretty steady across their entire lives.  Why?  Because we have habits.  We don't like to change.  Sure, we might have a few moments of being "better", and make a spike or a valley in the graph, but in the end, those few moments of spikes or valleys are not going to make a significant impact on the total, or the area under the curve.

So, if we find a graph we don't like, the only way to change it and make any impact is to change our habits.  Making a goal (which on average, probably amounts to making a goal, not meeting it, and making the same goal next year) isn't going to cut it.  Temporarily trying a fad and giving up isn't going to cut it.  Make a real effort to turn your life to where you want it to be, by maximizing the graphs that mean something to you, and minimize the fruitless ones that get in the way of that.

Disclaimer:  The intent of that previous sentence is NOT to say that spending time with your family gets in the way of your watching television so you should give up on them and watch television all day.

Regression day

Today, everything is a little worse except for the legs.  I'm completely exhausted, voiding isn't happening enough to skip artificial withdrawal (it's as good as it was a week ago, but nowhere near as good as, say, Thursday), and I'm getting a weird back spasm.  Like a poke every 5 minutes.

Pull out your handy graphing calculator you had in high school that is probably covered with dust and/or the battery is dead and graph:

4*sin(x) + x

and if I weren't on a mac I might do a screenshot for you of an online pic of this, but in the meantime you can see: http://my.hrw.com/math06_07/nsmedia/tools/Graph_Calculator/graphCalc.html, type in the equation in line 1 and click graph.

You'll notice a general upward trend, but once in a while, quite regularly actually, it slumps back down.  Today is one of those days.  Hopefully, we'll back on the upswing tomorrow.

Ode to the Chevy Equinox

No, I'm not trying to sell cars.  And I don't know anything good or bad about this particular vehicle.

What I do know is all about playing the Alphabet game in the car (you know, you have to find A, then B, etc. and whoever finds Z first wins).  And that it's really cool if you're following an Equinox for a mile or two through town and it provides Q and X through 2 complete rounds.

Weight loss

So, when I came home from the hospital, I was down between 7-10 pounds.  My wife (and a coworker, who is thinner than a ..., no offense, I know you read this) think I need to put it back on.

In the meantime, a little math.  To have lost 10 pounds, I would have had to have been down about 35,000 calories from my usual habits.  Could I have really gone a week and a half and done that?  No exercise, half days eating normally, but the other half barely eating anything at all...

I can also tell various places of muscle loss.  Maybe that's where it went.

Well, thanks to my normal eating habits, and more than 1000 calories of Oreos consumed yesterday, I am proud to say that I am almost back to normal.  Well, perhaps up 3-4 pounds from the hospital.

River Trail

Went a-walking with a coworker down the river trail next to the office.  Yes, the very same river trail where people get attacked after dark.  Think I went a similar pace to when we did this various months ago.  Legs only hurt a little bit on the downhill parts.  Maybe about 2/3 of a mile or so?

Yes, there are no complete sentences above.

Today, I almost achieved a momentous milestone: being able to put on pants and shoes without pain.  Almost.

Oops - Oreos

So you know how I mentioned a few weeks ago to lose weight simply by not eating successive desserts?

Well now I have an entire package of Mint Double-Stuf Oreos on my desk staring me down, daring me to follow that advice....

'Best' error message in the world

"A problem has occurred which may have caused the current operation to fail"

Some dumb reflections on pop music

So, I have had 3 songs stuck in my head lately:

"I love you like a love song" (I'm sure those are supposed to be capitalized).  Song's okay, but I don't get the primary chorus: "I love you like a love song, baby".  Is it supposed to mean "I love you like I love a love song", "I love you like a love song is <some adjective>, or "I love you like you were a love song"?  Maybe we'll never know.

"I set fire to the rain": Seems pretty cool, but those are the only words I know.  I'll have to go google the lyrics later.

Theme song from "King of Queens": "My legs are getting weary, my back is getting tight".  That is to say, most of the pain is still in my legs, and when I feel stuff in my back, it's really just 'tight'.

Voiding status

So, everyday this week, I've been able to empty more.  I might even be daring enough to say that on Sunday I was able to void 10%, and today up to 20-30% of normal.  Where "normal" is what used to be, and "normal" is about 1/3 of what it should be.

So, with several of these during the afternoon, I decided I didn't need to artificially void the prescribed 4 times, and settled for 2. 3 on Monday, and 2 on Tuesday and again today.

For those who didn't catch the reference to the "yellow river", it was just to show the status for last week.  A little more than a week ago, I was starting to get very small amounts, which progressed into a small, short duration stream, and this week has progressed into a medium, medium duration stream.

Oops

I went to the store the other day, and when I came out, I came to where I parked, and I pushed my key fob, and nothing happened.  That wasn't surprising, because my driver door doesn't open automatically anymore, so I went for the key, but the keyhole wasn't there.

Surprised, I looked into the car, and it was clean.

Then I realized, it wasn't my car.  Oops.

As I walked 20 feet to my actual car, the car's actual owner walked up behind me.  I made some dumb apologetic gesture, and he indicated nothing.

More "running"

Wow, today I went hard.  But I'll get to that in a second.

Monday, I did a mile in 22 minutes.  That was pretty good, but it wore me out reasonably.

Tuesday, I only did a half mile, and counted the general walking around the office as my "required ambulating", and once around my neighborhood with the kids.

Today, I went to Costco.  Nuff said.

Running

Hey, I get to do a 'running' post!  Well, it's not really running yet, but we're twice as close as we used to be.

The last status was that I did .25 miles in 8:45 (1.7mph).  Well, a day or two later, I did it in 7:30 (2mph).  Yesterday, I did .5 mile in 11:00 (2.7mph average), with the first quarter at 2.5 mph (6 min) and the second quarter at 3mph (5 min).  Which is almost a respectable walking pace.  When I was done, I was almost starting to sweat, and I had to do a cooldown walk in the 1s to give my legs a break.

Then I took a half hour nap at work a few hours later, and had to catch up a little bit in the evening.

The ironic part of this is that a month ago, 2.5 and 3 were the slowest pace I would ever be willing to go, and they would be the tail end of a cooldown of a hard run.

On the other hand, at this rate, if I can drop my quarter mile time by one minute every day or two, then tomorrow I'll be about to do a 49 minute 5K, and the next day a 36 minute 5K, and the next day 24 minutes, and the next day 12 minutes (world record), and then 0 minutes (Buzz Lightyear speed).

Of course, linear progression is very impossible, so we'll take what we can get.

The Yellow River*

So, in China, there's a river called the 黃河, or in English we call it the Yellow River.  Although this picture from Wikipedia it looks more green.

Anyway, let's examine one of the dams in the Yellow River.  There is currently a leak in this particular dam where several days ago, little droplets would come through (I can't stop spelling 'through' as 'throguh'), and now for a couple seconds teeny streams are flowing through.  Like the sprayer on your sink on really low pressure.  I only imagine the leak will get bigger over the next few days, until it maxes out or some external force stops it.

* Yes, this is a metaphor.  If you have no idea to what it is referring, go read some back story :)

Famous Dave's stomacheache

So from late 2 days ago to yesterday can only be described as having a Famous Dave's stomacheache.  Not that they don't taste good if you order the right stuff, and not that they're irresponsible enough to not pay the insurance bill when their catering driver hits your car, but you have to know where to draw the line.  I.e., don't go back for that third helping of brisket.  You'll regret it.

RSA token patterns

So, my work requires that if you log into the network from home to use one of those RSA token cards with 6 digits that change every 30 seconds.

However, it seems that almost every number that comes up, there's a pattern.  Like repeated digits, or even multiple repeated digits, or the first 3 numbers being very close to the last 3 numbers.

So, I bring to you the probability of there being at least 2 duplicate digits for an n-digit number.

1- 0%
2 - 10%
3 - 30%
n - n!/(n-2)!2! * 10%

... okay I'm too lazy.  And I'm wrong too.  This formula counts a bunch of permutations repeated times, and I'm too lazy to figure out the right answer.  I first figured out it was wrong when 5 digits came out at 100%.  Oh well.

Brief update

Okay, so I lied.

Yesterday, I went to work full-ish time.  But I got exhausted come around 1pm, so I took a 2-hour nap on a nice thick mattress left by a coworker from when he was recovering from his cancer treatment (that other coworkers have used when they stayed too late or didn't go home).  Finished the rest of the day, and was exhausted when I got home, but I managed to get another hour a few hours later.

New personal record: yesterday I did 1/4 mile in 8:45.  Woohoo!

Today I did a full day of work without needing a nap.  Thank heaven my flu is wearing down.  I didn't do any exercise today, because I figured I'd be back and forth across the office all day, and I was right.

Going to work

Hey all, I'll see you at work for a complete 'normal' day. 

It's good, because I got tired of working via VPN where the VPN has a hard time competing with 3 distinct Netflix sessions running.

Last post on recovery

This will probably be my last post on the actual recovery of the surgery and stuff.  So if you happen to be following this blog, don't be surprised if there aren't any useful posts here on out.

My back feels very good.  I can do most anything.  I can roll into bed rotating around weird axes, I can squat and pick things up from the floor (I haven't dared to try straight-knee touching the floor yet), I danced with my wife, went to the store by myself to buy an accurate thermometer, I sat on the floor just to see if I could, and yesterday I worked a full 8 hour day.  Yes, it took until 11:45pm (I needed a two-hour nap to help settle my fever, and needed to spend a bit of time helping everybody else with theirs, and to beat a few levels on "Super Mario Galaxy"), but I did it.

So to be honest, for the recovery to be complete, there are only a few things left:

1. for my quads to quit feeling like they're solid stone (which is as a result of laying in surgery).
2. to heal enough to lift and do actual exercise.  I'm on a 1 month "don't lift or exercise no matter what" thing.
3. to pee on my own.  I'm certainly not going to give you a day by day on this, but I will mention it once I can do it.

And maybe to finish recovering the flu, which is mostly managed.  So there's not much else to say for recovery. 

I do need to say though that I feel strongly that the Lord has helped us get through all of this.  There were moments that were close to being really bad, but we made it through, and it looks like everything's going to be just fine.

I should also take a moment to thank my doctor, too.  My urologist said the other day, "You know, lesser surgeons wouldn't have bothered to spend 9 hours in surgery trying to save all those nerve roots; they would have just chopped them off", which made me happy to have the doctor we have, and made me a little sad for the other ones.

Big flu

So, this week, my wife has been flattened with the flu for about 3 days, and might be close to being over it, I've been flattened with the flu for 3 days, and I think I'm close to getting over it, and now one of my kids has it pretty bad and two of the others have low grade fevers.

Which leaves one person, the 7yo, who isn't sick.  Poor kid.  "Hey, can you get me this?  Hey can you do that?"  He's been very helpful.  We'll have to give him a raise.

Travels

Today has taken me everywhere.  We went to a followup with the neurosurgeon and got the stitches removed.

Then, we made a cameo appearance at work and said hello to a few people.

Later, we had an appointment with the urologist (the circle is complete Ba da da).  For some reason he was concerned with me having a 102 fever, and gave me some pretty psychadelic antibiotics.  Fever seems to be reduced a little now.  At this precise moment, I actually feel better than I have in the last few days, and what I said was overdoing it might have simply been me being sick.

Also, at the urologist, with the catheter removed, I haven't been able to pee yet.  He said that with the original problem being with the nerves being aggravated by the tumor, and them being aggravated with the surgery, it can take time, even months, if at all, for full bladder functionality to be restored.

10 hours and counting

And then I get to take off the bag.  You know which bag.

Brief update

So, somewhere over the weekend or Monday I completely overdid it and spent yesterday completely flattened, and went to bed before 9.  Which is doubly compounded by my wife somewhere catching a big nasty cold and her also being completely flattened.  Which means lots of television for the kids.  Oh well.

Last night, I exhibited brief signs of also catching the cold, but so far I haven't finished catching it, at least not to her extent.

So yesterday, I did a few hours of work and a few hours of SWTOR laying down.  I did a little more work on Monday.  I'm trying to build up to go back to work on Monday.

In general, things are a little more flexible.  Yesterday, I was able to lean over on something and grab something from the floor.  I think that my quads are also loosening up to actually be flexible.

Summary of overdoing it:
In addition to normal "ambulations",
I did a half mile at 1.2 mph on Sunday (or Saturday - don't remember)
I did 1 minute scale-backs from 2.0 to 1.0 on Monday

Incision and mobility

So I saw my stitches the other day for the first time.  Freaked me out.

A quick note about mobility.  Today I managed the following stuff without too much hassle:
* plugging something in - took a step and a half leg-sqat
* putting on socks - brought my legs up and had the sock wrapped around my non-thumb fingers
* putting down the toilet seat.  Sorry Dear it took so long.

In the hospital they said "No BLT - no bending, lifting, or twisting".  And I could bend/twist absolutely nothing on day 1 without miserable pain.  However, each day brings about 1 degree of mobility (maybe).  So right now I can do stuff like reaching over my shoulder without throwing out my back.

Wolves

So yesterday I spent the entire day worrying about throwing up, today I spent all day EATING!!!!  The ravenous wolves!  I actually ate dinner as it was served.

But now I worry I ate too much; I think it will be fine though.

However, I still have that "while I'm standing, I feel faint" issue, which I've had since surgery.  I called that nausea a few days ago, assuming that I'd been nauseated since surgery.  However, today, there were definite signs of non-nausea.

On the other hand, we did have diarrhea (since we spent 2 hours on the toilet yesterday to get all the hard stuff out, we had a soft one to show the softeners were actually doing good, and then a runny one).

Today was a trial work day, with a goal to get a few hours in, and we did.  However, it took all day, and I changed positions a bazillion times to get there.

Remember those french fries?

Yesterday status:

Poop achieved.  Awesomeness.

French fries and gyro - returned.  I didn't even try to make it back to the bathroom and let them come right on the carpet.

Called the doctor again.  Doctor stressed that the the number one important things were to not throw up and to not strain while pooping.  These could cause the suture on the spinal canal to pop and that wouldn't be good.

We started treadmill walking.  Sorry - there just isn't enough room in this house to ambulate enough to get anywhere.  Started at .5mph, but that was like "baby step - wait 3s, baby step, wait 3s", but then we found that 1.2 was a nice speed.  I did 1/6 mile 3 times yesterday.

Jacob Marley

I had to get up again around 4 to walk around.  Laying down around 8, and only getting up to go to bed, leaves one stiff.  This was the first time I got up with no backup (half of Saturday, I had either wife or her mom there to catch me if I fell), and I had to take a few dozen laps around the house.  My wife woke up and I told her I had to pull a Jacob Marley.

'Nauseated'

So I learned on 'Big Bang Theory' that you say 'nauseated' instead of 'nauseous'.   I was looking a video that explained why instead of simply that you do, but couldn't.

Anyway, I noticed that whenever we talked about nausea or being nauseous, our doctor would respond by talking about being nauseated.

Anyway, yesterday, we made it to cane status, went up and down the stairs twice, but I ate a greasy gyro and lots of fries, partially by which (and partially by spending most of the day in a seated position instead of a laying position) I ended up a little nauseated.  We noticed that the discharge instructions said that if you feel nauseated, you should call the doctor or return to the ER.  The doctor thought that was a little ridiculous, as the pain meds themselves can cause nausea.

So last night we went to fall asleep while my wife and her mom watched "Breaking Dawn" around 8.  The kids came out of their movie night after we were asleep already.

French Fries

Aren't good french fries just pure awesome?

End freakout day

<End retrospective>

Today has been the day of "What did we do last time we were here that got us into emergency surgery?" and freaking out about everything from "I ate some Nutty Bars" to "We took a careful shower".

Anyway, no pressing need to go back to the doctor.  Main difference being though that it's hard to be up so much - I'm sitting in a supported position much more than I was in the hospital.  I spent most of the time laying there.

Today I haven't cheated yet - meaning, when you get up, you're supposed to push off what you're sitting on and not what you're getting onto.  Yesterday I just wouldn't do that cuz it hurt so bad except that first time, but today it good.  I might even venture downstairs or trade up the walker for the cane a little later.

Discharge for real!

Get back to the same room, and another normal evening.  This time, recovery hurts more, as I expected it to, but:

THE ROOM ISN'T SPINNING ANYMORE

So we spend the evening watching the 1st disc of Castle Season 4.  I swear it looped 5 times before I made my wife shut it off.

Morning comes, we start inclining the bed (coming off of flat rest, prepping to walk).  We go walking, and this time it hurts really bad.  In fact this is the first time I haven't made it up yet.  I kind of got stuck at the extend-your-legs point.  But I pushed through it, and made it to a perceived 7 on the pain scale.  But the rest of it is okay, except maybe the sitting part.  The bed just seems so much further away this time than before.

The doctor comes and says he would like to discharge us today.  As long as PT says we're ready, he didn't see much point in us staying there much longer.  He draws up the papers and leaves it in our hands.

My wife and I talk about that and she gets her hopes up.  I feel the need to put my foot down and make it clear that it I'm not okay with it it's not going to happen.

So we wash, and the sink is too far away, and we walk a few more times.  Then I decide it's time to go, even though I only actually pushed up from the bed once.

Then we had to call in a guy to charge up the car, and call a repairman to get the key out of the ignition, get my mother-in-law and brother-in-law to come get us (he just happened to be in town on the way to ND).  Took about 10 minutes to get out of the car, because you know, they're not flat, and then get in the house.

Lots of family to celebrate finally getting home, and then went to bed early.

Back to the drawing board, part 2

The next day, we arise in good spirits - starting to get hungry, no pain, with the room still spinning.  However, with everything, nobody will give us food until the doc says so.  Problem is - he's in surgery.  (What? He has other patients??!!1)  But his PA comes in and examines my dressing, and was very clearly "That's CSF") - coming through the skin.

He does let me eat though - so I have 2-3 saltines and half a spoon of jello.   Bout an hour later we were talking about food with some staff, and then the dr walks in and says ""no food - we need to get back into surgery" to fix the leak.  He had spent the last few days hoping the exhibited leak would finish healing.

We spent the next few hours waiting with a very "we're ready" attitude.  Some visitors at work and family - it was very nice again.  We watched the next Castle (we had fortunately the previous season, and caught up on Psych).

This time the whole admission was more normal, and they covered things I had missed on the second one (since that one was more emergency).

The radio played "Already gone" as we were wheeling into the pre-op.  Jerks.

As I was coming out of surgery, it was very surreal.  It was like I was a part of a big puzzle waiting to be claimed.  I'm sure as I trying to explain this to my wife she thought I was a little nuts.

Back to the drawing board

So,

[Retrospective]
After we threw up the other night, we were grounded from eating and drinking anything until my body starts reestablishing its own natural order of things, meaning no more vomit and producing its own BMs, and then a natural appetite.  So, yesterday we enema'ed, and not much later released stuff, and led to 3 diarrheas later.

And then we waited.  More therapy, we're wandering around lazily with a cane now, and I am now completely off the pain meds.  So, as my wife said, "Did you rejoice in the small victories?"

However, we still had no natural desire to eat, and the room still spins really fast.  Various people have made fun of me because I have tried to non-loserishly describe the direction and speed the room spins.  And there were moments,where the room would spin at multiple revolutions per second.

Close to bedtime on the 21st, I was starting to scrape at the bottom of the barrel.  I'd been pretty positive most of the time, but this evening I was really starting to lose it.  You should know that I'm a religious person, a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormon).  I actually wasn't going to talk about religion on this blog, but oh well - I guess it's part of who I am.  It's hard to talk about religion without talking about faith, which is kind of where I wanted to go here.

I know the word 'faith' has its own set of definitions, but the way faith works for me is as follows:  Stuff happens, and it's okay.  That's really a short definition and all.  More specifically, I believe that the reason we are sitting here on earth living, having families, working, etc. is not the end of our existence.  Particularly, after death, at some point our bodies will be restored and our families can be brought together again.

I really do believe that.  Therefore, most of the time, I see death not as the end of the line, but as a change -  a retirement or a graduation.

However, as many people who believe in God, I also believe in prayer.  Here's a sentence that sums up the purpose of prayer for me: The object of prayer is not to change the will of God, but to secure for ourselves and for others blessings that God is already willing to grant, but that are made conditional on our asking for them.   For me personally, I find it difficult to reconcile these statements, or when to invest more in one side than another.  However, they are enough to swell the "God doesn't care about me" or similar attitudes.

So what I do typically is pray for assurance, guidance, and peace.  As we've been going through all this I've felt strongly that it isn't time to go yet, and that He will yet bring us through it.  At this point it's just been so hard to see.

My wife and I then had a nice cry-fest (where I think I elicited almost a tear), and I spent the next while praying, and I found it hard to hang onto any hope of pulling out of it, but I found the strength to keep trying, and after a minute I found one small, faint symbol of hope (think Star Trek - one life sign, very faint): the teeniest desire for food.

And then the vomit comes

Ate dinner, waiting for our last walk of the evening, and then right as the evening nurse comes in to check vitals, we vomit all over the place.  Well, by 'we', I mean 'I', and by 'all over the place' means 'in a manner where we had a few seconds to get a bucket, not get it all over everybody, and yet still fill a rather sizeable bucket'.

So we have to decide if it's the vomit that will cause more vomit later, or if it's the kind that "ah, that feels much better", so I make everybody bail the plans for the walk and let me rest for a minute.  Then, about an hour later, I'll all in freak-out mode, which is probably doing bad stuff for my body, and my wife and my nurse "convince" me to go for a walk anyway.  That turned out to be a good thing, and we returned to bed not in not-awful spirits.

We also have to decide if it did something insane like blew open incisions of the spinal cavity or anything last night, but we will don't have any signs of anything bad so far.

Today, so far, nurse comes in, we make a drug plan (to start letting the body take over again), a walking plan, (to let the body take over again) and bowel plan (which really involves doing nothing except eating softer stuff and to let the body take over again).

Was going to try to check work email, but we took work stuff home on Friday and didn't bring it back, so that can wait till later.  Since I was up to date on Friday, and yesterday being a holiday, I was hoping to not get really behind.

Down and back up

This morning we get up and I was pleased with everything.

Then we went for therapy, we walked two laps, and I wanted to push it a little it so I stayed sitting on the edge of my bed for about 5 minutes, but I get really really dizzy and lay back down again.  Then the doctor comes and in and is like "Okay, let's watch you today, but you should be good to go tomorrow", and he congratulated us on not having any emergencies in the middle of the night, no leakages, no anything, gave us a goal to get up walking 5 times today and leaves.

However, I was floored for the longest time after that walk this morning.  BTW - the walks are so much harder now than they were last week, with the extra time out.  My legs are really stiff and I am only doing about 0.3 mph (guessing).  So, I lay down for a nap for a bit with the intent of getting up in about two hours, but I was just so tired.

So, after about 4-5 hours, my nurse and I talk about it, and she convinces me that get out and go again, even though I don't feel entirely ready.  I think the problem was that I was experiencing a huuuuuge amount of vertigo, which is somewhat normal for people with spinal fluid problems, AND it's my body slowly waking up the anesthesia.

So we go for a walk again, and it's great.  And we've been on two more since then, and they've been great.

And I killed a horsefly with my fingers and it was great.

However, I will propose a definition for you:
Exercise is effort spent your energy pool trying to gain/maintain a skill.
Therapy or Rehab is spending effort that you don't have trying to gain/maintain a skill you used to have.

And the world is good for this moment, and for that I will say simply for this moment, "I thank God for the peaceful moments".

A step up

It's really hard to blog with the finger covered by an O2 sensor.

Saturday we spent catching up on rest.  There was some hope of trying to get up and walking around on Saturday, but we were just too tired.

The doctor said on Sunday Morning that we had been really leaking spinal fluid, so that was why nothing good was going on Saturday evening.  However, there was not much actual blood, which is good in case the hemotomas keep coming back, but bad in that blood is the best thing to seal up the spinal cavity.  So he right there sutured up the drain site, and we were instructed to try to get walking today.

We spent a while increasing gradually up the incline in the chair, about 10 degrees an hour, (20 was last week). I was perhaps freaking out about this a little too much because the doctor said that headaches were indicative of spinal fluid loss, but he said to not be hindered by dizziness or lightheadedness, so we push through it.  We do a walk in the evening and all was happy.

There was a nice visit in the evening with my parents, two of my sisters, and some long-time neighbors (thanks guys!) spend a while visiting, and then we walk again and all ways happy.

And back again

So interesting couples of days.  I also can't type with my left my left index finger, so that is clearly where any typos will be.

Within a half an hour of getting home, my legs start feeling tingly.  So I go to move to the couch my with my wife's help.  This is the first time in all of this I need help lifting.   After about 10 minutes of that getting worse, we decide we need to call the doctor, and he tells us to come back.

We had to get an awesome neighbor's help to get back in the car with some nursing techniques ( nursing as in medical and not as in breastfeeding), and the doctor got us back in the MRI once we got there.  We decide we need to go back into surgery to remove a hematoma.  I couldn't even undress at this point, and had to 3 guys taking off my pants.

Today was rough.  Now they had put in a drain to drain the blood, but once the blood was gone, it created a reverse pressure chamber against the spinal canal.  The doctor wishes the nurse would have notified him sooner that it wasn't just blood a little more quickly.

They were trying to work me up to pooping and to walking around, but I couldn't get up because of all the spinal fluid drainage.  But after the doctor came and looked at it early this afternoon, removed the drain, and having the nurses check the padding all day for spinal fluid or blood, then theoretically both problems are fixed, and I have to build the fluid back up.  We had tried to have me ready to walk by 4, but 2 hours wasn't enough to build it back AND work up to inclining, OR I just hadn't eaten much over the last few days and it just wore me out, so we'll try again tomorrow.

We're home!!!

Back to the house.  Probably going to sleep the rest of the day.  Stupid hiccups are going to be the death of me.  I seem to get them whenever I eat or drink anything.

I may have worn myself out with the exercises today.  Or maybe it's just the hiccups just wearing me out.  One of the nurses told us to try a spoonful of sugar.  Trying now.

Day 3

Kay, I think we have pan managed pretty well.  The things that hurt the most are laying down, standing up, sitting down, laying down, and HICCUPS!  Stupid hiccups.  While trying to manage them, I make them worse and end up with double-hiccups.

Basically when I move, I have to keep my shoulders, hips, and knees aligned. Otherwise it kills.

The thing we do is walk laps around our floor, and occasionally add a few stairs.

So, right now I'm standing in our room typing this.  The nurses removed the catheter this morning and now want me to pee on my own, and I think we're pretty close.  The doctor is expecting to discharge us tomorrow.

Regarding the goals I made about 2 week ago:
Run 30 miles - made about 10.   But 1 was outside trying to get to the next train transfer before two of the present trains would have gotten there, with my computer bag and going under 3 freeways.  I grossly underestimated the trip, but I made it in three trains' time, which is where I would have been if I just would have waited at the stop.

Run 5Ks under 24:00 - I did one, 23:49
Extra work - got about 8 hours.
Got some of the in-head code done.  One of them is a hard problem which I haven't solved all the way before.
Didn't do much music except a little doodling.
I did make a new Monkey at work - the "You're so monkey and you don't even know it" for a coworker who last week  quoted "You're so money..." from Swingers various times.
No real hot dates, unless you could laying down watching movies and playing games, which for us kind of does.

Hospital, day 2

Wow - there's a lot to say already, but I'll just sum up so far, and fill in the holes in a second.

We got here at 6am yesterday, waited a bit, filled out some papers and talked a bit, put in the IV and rolled me into surgery.  I remember being wheeled into the OR and seeing about 8 people in the OR.

About 9 hours of surgery later, we were done.  I woke up not being able to do much of anything.  My back was nice and stiff, and IIRC my arms and legs were too.  The surgery was, naturally, face down, and took longer than expected.

It was supposed to be 4-6 hours, but they had to dig the tumor out of the spinal coord branches moreso than they thought.

It turned out not to be a myxopapillary ependymoma, but a schwanoma.  Theoretically, that's better.  He said he got it all out, but 5% of what could be remaining scar tissue or more tumor remained behind.

I don't remember waking up, or for a bit later...

The rest of yesterday was uneventful - I tried to sleep most of it and didn't eat very much, as eating started to upset my stomach.  I was also supposed to be on "flat back rest", as I had lost a bunch of spinal fluid, and raising up would cause a big headache.

My upper thighs killed like crazy - apparently they were resting on something for all 9 hours and they still hurt.

The doctor comes in this morning and tells us he wants us to get off IV drugs today, and probably to walk today.  Right now I am inclined about 35-40 degrees up, and when we hit 90 we can start walking.  He had me lift my legs (while I was still laying) and I was afraid this would cause an undue burden on my back, but turned out not to, and the more I lifted it, the less they hurt.

They have already taken out the IVs too, and I am on Perkocet.  Then they took me for another MRI, during which I had no math problems to think about.  So far, I'm not in a lot of pain.

Oh, one more crazy thing - all, my heart rate monitor kept beeping.  Kept going below 50.  I think my at-rest-sitting heart rate is around 75, so my laying-doped-up-sleeping heart rate is around 48.  So they adjusted the machine, and we could get some sleep. That, and I would move my arms around and kink the oxygen tubes.

Sorry this is not terribly cohesive or organized.  I'm not going to fix it :)

It's go time!

See ya in a few (!) hours.  I probably won't actually be on the computer till tomorrow, though.

Adventures in Medicine, part 13

Got poked again today for a "Type and Screen".  Apparently, one's antibodies can change after 72 hours, so it needed to be done today.  I also got my bracelet-id tags.

"So I get to wear these to work all day?"
"Yup, you'll draw a crowd"
"Awesome."

I can still eat for 2.5 hours.  Any suggestions?

Adventures in Medicine, part 12

Today was pre-surgery registration.  Paperwork, lists of current medication, and blood work.  Woohoo.

More importantly, I transformed from Bryan, the mild software engineer to Bryan, the parking lot troll!!!!

The hospital's parking lot fills up quickly, and I didn't want to park in the parking garage, so I had to follow somebody inconspicuously to her car and wait for her to leave.

Nutrition code of conduct

This is about a week old in my head.  You'll see how in a sec.

We're going to prove by induction how to eat healthily.

Base case 1: not eating junk food is healthy.
Base case 2: eating junk food makes you want more junk food.

Inductive case: After eating bite N of junk food, you're going to want bit N+1 of junk food.

Therefore, to eat healthily, you must either not eat junk food, or understand that somewhere after eating some amount of junk food, that YOU WILL NEVER BE SATISFIED, so you might as well stop now.  Or rather, to understand that eating the next bite isn't going to make you want to stop eating.

This was my health conduct last week.  Last week, I pulled the carrot sticks out of my fridge in my office when I had the munchies. 

Today, I ate half a donut and a butterfinger.  Before lunch.

3D stereograms

Hey, you know those pictures that look like a bunch of blurriness, and you're supposed to cross your eyes and find a 3d picture?  Well, I've never been able to do them before, until tonight.  When my 9yo figured out how to do them, I had to as well.

Turns out I was doing it wrong.  I was trying to just find the right focal angle (or whatever), but it turns out you just have to wait for your eyes to settle on it.  Sounds backwards, I know.  It also wasn't what I expected either - I was expecting a full-color image, but all you get is a popping layer (and the color is whatever the picture is).  It's still pretty cool, though.

(I would post a picture, but they're probably all copyright or whatever).

Happy drive your car in front of the train day

Okay, so this is a day late.

Monday is now "Drive your car in from of the train" day.  Seems to happen almost every Monday.  Okay not quite, but in the 3 months I've been using the commuter train, there have been about 7 incidents involving trains, and most of them have been on Monday.

Yesterday, a train hit a truck, the train derailed, and blocked both rails for quite some time.

One week from right now...

I should be in recovery!!!!

Bejeweled Blitz

Not quite sure this counts as "gaming", but oh well.

So, about a year or two ago, when I actually looked at facebook, I would play "Bejeweled Blitz".  Right about the point where I thought I was any good, I noticed everybody else was 4x better.

So I discovered my 7yo playing it on the iPad.  He knew all the names of everything - "Dad, you could have gotten a hypercube".  But on average I could do a little better than him.  Then, I brought it upstairs, and my wife proceeded to clobber me.

Maybe I was just not meant to win any games :)

Anxiety

So, while I was feeling ecstatic and exuberant the other night, facing the prospect of surgery, the last few days I've felt a load of anxiety.  While I don't particularly like drawing attention to myself, I find that talking about it (particularly if I can joke about it), and particularly with those who have been there in one form or another, helps a lot.

Today I made a reference like this to my direct supervisor:
"I plan to ... unless I'm dead", but I meant 'dead' figuratively as in no energy/unable to concentrate, as opposed to actually dead.

Anyway, to combat the pre-surgery blues, I have made the following conservative and entirely completable (apparently not a word) pre-surgery goals.

Run 30 miles  (I've made it about 15 miles a week when I've made it a priority)
Two of those runs will be a 5K under 24 minutes (This might enable me to beat a coworker at our Spring 5K, if I'm recovered by then)
Work a little extra to help compensate for my lack of time off, maybe 15 hours.  Particularly the Saturday before surgery, as it counts as the same work week as the surgery.
Code the coding I've done in my head in the game I'm making, and a little work on my other projects.
Maybe work a little on a trumpet or piano song.
Publish another monkey at work.  Maybe retire one of the existing ones so they don't start pairing off.
And let's not forget 2 dates with my beautiful wife.

So... naturally... I spent all evening watching television.

Proxy rant

Sorry, not all posts are going to be updates on my condition.  For now I just have a rant about computers.

So, at work, to get on the internet (my browser's dictionary just flagged 'internet' as a misspelled word), I have to change the proxy settings to "Automatically detect proxy settings".

When I bring my computer home (I'll leave the question as to whether my computer is a laptop or not as an exercise to the reader), I have to change it to "No proxy".

Rant:
Why can't "Automatically detect proxy settings" automatically detect that there's no proxy?

Stupid youtube

Okay, so a few hours ago, my wife showed me this:

(Don't watch it if you are queasy, or if you passed out while your wife was in labor):

Video: Excision of Lumbar Myxopapillary Ependymoma

My wife was like "you might not want to see this, but ...", and I was like "hey, that's pretty awesome", but then I was like

"HOLY CRAP THEY'RE GOING TO COMPLETELY OPEN IT UP! WHOA WHERE DID THE SPINE GO!"

and then I was like

"Oooh, look at the slimy tumor they're taking out".

So, I think I had my 5 minutes of freaking out, and for some reason right now, I'm excessively giddy.

Not good example after all

So, we've sent all our kids to the same preschool teacher so far, cuz we think she's awesome.

She has a first-come first-served registration policy though, so for the last N years as far back as I can remember (sort of), I have gone over to deliver the registration at around 12:01 on the morning registration opens.

She has also apparently emphasized the FSFS nature by saying, "I have one set of parents that always comes in the middle of the night to drop off the registration"...

But last night we forgot.  Ooops.  Guess we're not that great after all.

Adventures in Medicine, part 11 - The Neurosurgeon

The neurosurgeon wanted us in today, immediately following the MRI.

He tells us that the C-spine and the T-spine look fine, which is something he was concerned about.

The L-spine still has something called a 'myxopapillary ependymoma'.

I learned a lot about the spine today.

So the spinal cord is surrounded by bone - big fat bone near the front of your body, with smaller pokey ones (lack of better word) toward the back.  Inside the bone, is the spinal sac with spinal fluid.  Inside that, is the spinal cord.  Between the thoracic spine and the cervical spine, the spinal cord begins to branch off.  Right around that point, I have a 30mm x 15mm tumor inside the spinal sac pressing the spinal cord against the edge.  He says the tumor can't get any bigger around - there's no room for it.

So he recommended surgery.  It will have to be open surgery.  To get to the spinal sac, he has to remove portions of the 3 surrounding vertebrae (T12 - L2), open up the sac, take out the tumor, and sew up the sac such that no fluid could leak, and sew me up.

He said he would be able to get it all out in one piece, at which point he will send in the whole thing to pathology (and that I couldn't keep it).

More as it warrants.

Oh, this was on his magazine rack:

What to do during an MRI

Had a second set of MRIs today.  The doctor wanted to see whether the tumor had spread up or down the spine, so he order a thoracic (t) spine and a cervical (c) spine mri.

This time, I left my eyes closed most of the time, as last time, I came out dizzy and had to spend some time laying down.  This time I was all right.

So, if you're like me, which you're probably not, what do you do during an hour-and-a-half MRI?  You invent and solve math problems.

(I did all the coding in my head that there was to do on Monday.  Problem with coding in your head is you have to go do it on the computer, which takes longer.)

So, here's what I came up with today.

Suppose you can put multiple MRI scanners in one room (which I don't think you can).  The scanner takes up 2 vertical units of area.  In order for a scanner to be present, it has to be surrounded by empty units of area.  Sorry, I'm too lazy to make pictures.

So, for one scanner to be in one room, you need 3 units wide by 4 units tall. 

For each subsequent scanner, you need 2 additional units horizontally, or 3 additional units vertically.

Question: Given N units of area, what is the optimal arrangement of scanners?

I had solved this up to the point where I would have to differentiate 1/x, at which point I couldn't keep track of all of it in my head anymore.

Black on khaki

Today is most certainly a black shirt/khaki pants kind of day (see related events in other posts).  I'm not particularly a fashion expert, but I think it looks pretty okay.

Adventures in Medicine - interlude

At least my cold's over :)  At the end of the year I had 0 vacation time, 0 sick time, and 0 personal time. I think right now, I have 4 vacation hours, 0 sick time (used it for the MRI yesterday), and 1.5 personal hours...............................................................

Oh, I should mention, that I now notice a near-constant pain near my tailbone, like around .5 on a scale of 0-10.  However, I can't tell you how long it's been there.

Adventures in Medicine part 10 - the phone call

That catches us up to today.

I get a phone call at work.  I'm at a special place inside of work where we can't get phone calls.  So I get the message that the neurologist needs to talk with me.  So I call him back, wait on hold for a few minutes, mildly freaking out.  He answers the phone and reveals to me that I have a growth in the lumbar region, called <something>-moma.

I call my wife, and she bums out.  (She called her family and my family and they freak out.)  She asks more questions that I didn't recall the answer to, so I call the doctor back, and they tell me further that they would schedule a neurosurgeon visit.

My wife brought me lunch while I was bummed.

I get a call back that says it's called ependymoma, and that she'd fax us (at work) further information, and that she scheduled the neurosurgeon appt. for Friday and another MRI for tomorrow, for C-spine and T-spine.

My wife gets a call from the neurosurgeon saying that he wanted to move his appointment to tomorrow because he was in surgery on Friday and wanted to get me in this week.

I tell various people at work that the next few weeks could be tenuous as we figure this out.  My boss asks how I am, and I tell him I'm depressed, and he mentions that I didn't look depressed.  I guess that's good.

I re-quiz an employee of mine that went through cancer last year on various experiences.  It's nice to be able to talk to him.

Adventures in Medicine - part 9 - the MRI

We go to the imaging place, this time at a place a little nearer our house.  All the other places so far have been about 20-25 minutes away.

MRIs are interesting.  They're very noisy - Mr. technician said they were around 120db, around airplane engine loud.  So I had earplugs and 2 inch thich (ish) pads around each ear.

I spent most the time either trying to code in my head, or analyzing the patters of the beats in the noise.

We did lumbar back, then brain, then he added an IV (a real IV this time) for contrast, and did brain with contrast, then lumbar with contrast.

We got the imaging data on CD for fun for later.

Adventures in Medicine, Part 8 - the neurologist

We visit the neurologist, a little later with appointments as they are.

We were 10 minutes late.  Google maps led us astray - we were surfing through the medical complex across the street.  We called them, and fortunately they held our slot, because somebody else's follow-up showed up 15 minutes early.

We go in.  He tests arm, leg, hand, foot, finger, and toe strength.  He tests reflexes.  He asks about my symptoms, and comes up with a theory:

I've spent the last 30 years of my life training my bladder muscles to hold it in, that now they are too tight and hard to relax.  So now I need to untrain them, by keeping hydrated, getting plenty of sleep, and peeing every hour.

He schedules a brain and lumbar-spine MRI anyway, for the next Monday, Jan 30th just to be sure.

We schedule a followup for about 6 weeks later, not expecting complications.

Adventures in Medicine, Part 7 - the CMG

The CMG Duhn duhn duhn

Most interesting visit so far.  I show up well hydrated, and show up not having had my flow-max for 3 days, and I'm instructed to pee in a cup with a little spinning nozzle that measured the urine flow. (The lady left the room for this.)  Guess what happened?  I couldn't go.  Not at all.  So she put in a catheter to drain the 700ml that my body wanted to hold on to, and then hooked 2 sensors inside, one up the front, and the other up the back, to measure pressure, and then attached an iv-like thing (I guess you could call it an ip, because it's not going inside a vein), and proceeded to fill the bladder about 1ml per second.

I was instructed to tell her when these 4 cases happened:
1) It felt like, if I were on a road trip, I would have to start looking for a gas station
2) It felt like we would have to pull over pretty quickly to a gas station.
3) It felt like we would have to pull over and use a bush.
4) It felt like I would absolutely explode.

It took about 400ml or so to reach #3.  After that, bladder muscles contracted and such, and I held it in, but I never managed to reach #4 even after 900ml (Yes, in medicine, they use cc instead of ml, but they're the same thing).  She wanted me to try the pee-in-the-spinning-cup thing again, and again, I couldn't go.

The follow-up the next day
Dr. says that given that I couldn't pee at all when I'm that full is most likely a neurological problem.  Even with a large/tight prostate, the contracting bladder should be able to produce some flow.

We schedule a trip to the neurologist.

Adventures in medicine, Part 4, 5, 6

So, it's a little fuzzy in this period, as in whether/how many follow-up talking-only appointments there were.

Part 4
The ultrasound

This part was actually interesting.  I was to be there well hydrated, and I was, and they watched things, checked for flow from the kidneys to the bladder, etc.  Then they had me empty myself.  According to her measurements, I had 450ml before that, and 300ml after.  So it clearly didn't empty.  She also showed me all of my other internal organs in that area, and it was fascinating to see them in my own body for once.

Part 5
The follow-up and the scope

So, Dr. was happy that there weren't any kidney infections, what with all the latent urine sitting around perpetually.  We scheduled a scope for the next week, now around the 5th of December.  We do a scope, where he takes a little camera thingy on the tip of a long tube, and shoves it up my ***** and looks around.  He doesn't find anything.  At this point, he says that it's one of the following:

1) A blockage between the bladder and the ***** (maybe some time, I'll be comfortable saying that word online).
2) A neurological problem.

He prescribes a drug called Flowmax (sp?).  The generic is called Tamsulosin.  It's supposed to treat #1, particularly in the case of an enlarged prostate.

Part 6
The next follow-up

4 weeks later-ish, now at the end of December, we have the next follow-up.  At this point, my wife starts coming.  I was telling her that I was okay going by myself, but she was dissatisfied with my ability to answer her questions :)   At this point, I tell him that I've been all right, but with the Tamsulosin having run out a few days before, and me wanting to wait for this appointment to see what happened while I was off it for a few days, I mention it's been harder to pee without it. 

He wants to schedule a Cystometrogram (CMG) for a few weeks later, because they do them on Mondays and the next Monday was New Year's when they were closed.