Month: January 2004

Neurosurgeon

So I go to the neurosurgeon and he asks, what’s wrong with me? So I tell him .. the tingling in my left hand, down my arm, etc … He looks at my MRI … reads the report and says yeah, there’s something there, but it’s small … Does it hurt? No. Make a fist. Push. Pull. You’re strong … Bah! Don’t worry about it … It might even heal itself … He said he has numbness in his thigh that he’s had for years … a little arthritis in the neck over 30? Bah! Happens to everybody … You just live with it … Get outta here … sorry to have made you drive up in the snow and everything … So, $5200 later … it’s nothing … Now we have to see what happens with the Ear, Nose and Throat guy …

Last week I had a sore throat for about 5 or 6 days … I finally got some Amoxicillun and that has taken away my throat pain … went a little hoarse as well … still sorta lose my voice throughout the day, but I suspect I am on the road to recovery …

Got new business cards: http://www.icuhost.net/images/icubizcard.jpg …

Hmm … that may be about it …

iMac

Okay, so the iMac arrived Monday, and here it is Thursday and I finally got it moved to my desk … I also cleared a ton of stuff off of my desk including 3 computers that were stacked on one corner … That’s where the iMac is now, but more toward the front … In using the iMac for a short time I have realized that there are some key differences … Like “Home” and “End” don’t function the way that they do on the PC … Also Control-Arrows don’t work the same either … I would use the Control-Arrows to quickly go through words while editing … but Alt-Arrow serves this purpose now .. The Control-Arrow goes to the beginning or the end of the current line … That was one of the first things I noticed …

The iMac came when in the middle of working on the Out On the Town so again, I didn’t have a chance to dive into it … What I did do however was to set the machine up and turn it on … When I turned it on it played a nifty little tune and presented me with the setup screen … I think at that point I realized that the machine had OS X Panther on it … Kind of a hassle since I had purchased Panther from another seller on eBay because this iMac was only supposedly coming with Jaguar (OSX 10.2) … This iMac also has an AirPort card installed, and I don’t have a wireless network, so I will be removing the card and selling that on eBay … It appears they normally go for about $75 … Anyway, so I went through that process, the machine was booted … Now what?

After a while of clicking around and exploring stuff, it became pretty obvious that there was nothing to look at on an empty system … There weren’t any more songs or anything … So, hmmm … Let’s pop a DVD in there and make sure this thing plays DVDs … There’s no button on the front to open the tray, so I looked around the System Properties thingimajig and couldn’t find anything … Then through loading some other programs I loaded what I think was the DVD Player … Ah! An EJECT icon … I clicked on that … Nothing … After trying that many times, I figured that even though I clicked it 9 times, the tenth time of clicking the mouse harder didn’t make this iMac understand that I meant business, so off to the web I went …

Eventually through some surfing and what not, I found that there is this key on the keyboard that opens the drive tray … *sigh* … What was the first movie played on my iMac? The Blues Brothers starring Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi … I didn’t play the whole movie, just enough to get to the opening song so I could hear the music through the iMac as well … The shape of the iMac’s 17″ screen works out well for the letterbox movie … Full screen, I thought it was very impressive … My own personal movie theater! So next was to pop in an audio CD … The Police Outlandos d’Amour … Roxanne … I “imported” Roxanne and I found that it created a Mac specific file … After doing some reading while on the laptop from work and stuff, I think I can change the import properties so that I will get MP3s instead … It went pretty quick …

So, two things right off the bat … I didn’t need extra software to play DVDs and I didn’t need extra software to RIP a CD track … Both of these activities I had to pay for on the Windows side …

I have downloaded and installed some stuff from the ‘net … Windows Media Player (for displaying web content in wmv format) and an IRC client (Snak) … A couple other things, and I did download Eudora, but I didn’t install it .. I want to see what’s up with iMac’s Mail program before I run Eudora on the Mac … I really wish Trillian were available for the Mac …

Anyway, it appears I have typed much, so I will stop this entry here … but more in the coming days as this experience unfolds …

More Results

So the results come back for the Catscan, and I think I read it aloud to the wife … Says something about swollen lymph nodes in my neck, and I’m not very concerned about it, but you know the wife … She gets this look on her face and says ‘Lymph nodes? That’s pretty bad, isn’t it?’ … Wha? What are you trying to say, honey? ‘Well, nothing …’ You saying I have CANCER in my NECK because they referred to the LYMPH NODES in my neck?!!? So, now I am going to die and I have a week to live … I will cry now, then smoke a cigarette, and then play with all my computers …

After berating her and reading the letter over several times, it said nothing of a “mass” in my neck, nor any words like ‘benign’ or ‘malignant’ which are great cancer words … I also told her that I didn’t think the doctor would send off a letter showing the results with another specialist’s phone number to contact if it were in fact a diagnosis of cancer … You’d think he’d call me in his office and sit me on his lap and tell me … So, I forced her to call the doctor and ask how long I had … If it were more than a week but less than two, I wanted to make some plans … The wife yells at me for buying computers rather than taking the family to Disneyland … So, here was my chance, sympathy and all …

Swollen nodes in the neck, and a referral phone number to an Ear Nose Throat Specialist pointed all the signs towards a pretty serious infection in my head somewhere … I’ll buy that … I have had serious sinus problems for years … I had a doozy of a weird numbing head experience a while back, and I was sent for a Catscan at that time (no dye) and they said it was a serious sinus infection … I took these really big pills for a while, and didn’t feel any different … Way to practice medicine, huh?

So, now I have an MRI and a Catscan under my belt in the last few weeks, and they both have returned different results pointing me to two different specialists. Ugh! … In the meantime, my beck (back/neck) has grown sorer … It feels like I pulled a muscle up my spine or something … Uncomfortable … The numbing in my hand comes and goes … I am generally falling apart, but for the most part (honestly) I don’t feel that bad …

I would probably feel better if I was successful in quitting smoking, but I’m obviously a wuss … I couldn’t do it … I have cut down a lot though, but still go through periods of my past habit … When I am conscious of it, I smoke one cigarette a third at a time making one cigarette last 3 cravings rather than 3 full cigarettes … I have smoked for 23 years … Never before have I stopped … It hasn’t been an on again off again habit … I have remained loyal to cigarettes … National Smoke Out Day – Ha!

The difference this time other than the other times I attempted to quit is that I want to … I still say all the radio ads you hear about their quitting smoking aids are a money back guarantee because they’re bought by people that want to quit … I doubt they’d work on someone who had no intention of quitting … I tried that Zyban stuff … You could still smoke while taking it … One of the side affects is seizures, but I still popped those pills … Didn’t help me one bit .. I felt no different nor did I quit smoking … Turns out that Zyban is actually Welbutrin which is an anti-depressant … Has nothing to do with smoking? Another aid to help you get through the Zyban system … Stupid … I have cut down though, and this puts me on my way to quitting … I guess a gradual stop is better than a jerk?

The iMac arrived … I am working on the paper so I haven’t been able to dive into it … It a real beautiful machine … I wonder if it’s okay to have a smart looking machine to do work on … The desktop graphics alone are impressive … More on the iMac later …

Dye

Okay, so the dye wasn’t what I thought at all … See, I thought they were going to shoot me in my neck … That’s not how it went down at all … The technician chick found a vein on my arm and hooked up some sort of contraption that I couldn’t see that she could shoot the dye in right before they do the Cat Scan … So, I didn’t feel the needle go in or anything … I guess that means that she’s good at it … So, she gets the machine fired up and me put in place … She comes back and says, okay, I’m going to shoot the dye in now … You will feel warm and may have a funny taste in your mouth … This is normal … So, she shoots it in … I don’t feel anything … I’m waiting for something to happen, and nothing … Then suddenly, my nether region … The “jewels” become awfully … hot … and then I feel it spread through my body … Like going from today’s 10 degrees to immediately 95 in direct sunlight … A warming sensation like I have never felt … Wild! While this happens, the scan is done, and poof, I am out of there … Took all of 5 minutes? I was a little woozy afterward, but I also hardly slept the entire day … I think I was very nervous about the 20″ needle that was going to be inserted into my neck that evening … Now I need the Midas Touch neurosurgeon that will tap the back of my neck with his index finger and make it all better …

iMac will come Monday … Gold car is in for inspection … Time to sleep …

Update

So Alex was upset that I didn’t update the bLog here and mention the fact that he visited and helped me clean up some of “the Shop” … In fact, what he did was throw away things I have had a hard time parting with … I admit it … I keep everything … Why? I don’t know … I guess I think that I will eventually use something, or I will refer to it, or something great will happen if I get rid of something that seems to hold some sort of value … Okay Alex, there’s your mention, now get back over here and let’s do more …

Why no update til now? Been very busy (sorta) … Many things on my plate right now … I find that sleep very much gets in the way … I also find that lack of sleep makes waking hours not as productive … We really need to get rid of this sleep thing … There just isn’t time for it … I have also gone off on many tangents that keep me away from doing actual work … There is also this thing where when on the web, one link leads to another link and that leads yet to another link … 4 hours later, what was I looking for? So, along with sleep, I think we should work on piping information subliminally to the brain while we’re doing other things so that we don’t have to go looking things up …

eBay is the devil … No matter what, if you go to eBay, there is something that you’ll want to buy … I have been toying with the idea of getting an iMac … it’s BSD backended with the OS X operating system these days … This will further my separation from Microsoft who I have had nothing but bad things to say … The longer I have been running Microsoft systems, the more I have been exposed to nothing but problems … In the past, the thing that turned me off about the Apples was their proprietary hardware and software, now there is a break in there with the possible ability to run Open Source software on their machines … Once I receive this iMac that I purchased off of eBay and get to know it, I am sure I will share my experiences with it … I hope for great things, but I will certainly be honest if those things aren’t as great as I expect … I have to reiterate though, I am not “anti-Microsoft” … I am just disappointed with the results I have had with Microsoft … I could certainly go into specifics, but I don’t feel like it …

So in passing yesterday, my wife says ‘You know you have to get the dye for this Cat Scan.’ … WHAT?! I didn’t know I had to get the dye for this Cat Scan … Made my last night not very enjoyable, and I think I have a bit of stress over it … People I mentioned it to said that it wasn’t a big deal, so I offered that they go in my place … No one offered … She says that they asked if I was allergic to shellfish … So now they’re going to shoot up my neck with seafood … Just what I was looking forward to do today … Having health problems sucks … In many more ways than one …

That and in the course of the last couple days we find out that the MRI cost $5,000 … I sincerely find that hard to believe … I would buy $500, but this is supposedly what someone told my wife … So, the crappy insurance that we could afford pays $1,000 towards outpatient testing or something, so I am now in debt $4000 … I should put a PayPal Donation link on this site now? I had a CatScan (no dye) before, and it cost $600 … I cannot believe an MRI costs $5,000 … Another thing to keep everyone informed about … (This is a short semi-rant on insurance; I’m SURE this will get even better in the future).

And that’s just some of what’s been going on … *sigh*