Speaker For The Diodes - February 1st, 2008

01:06 am - Quick Repoprt Of Day

A stressful day that ultimately worked out. Got x-rays, got thingie notarized. X-rays came on CD (film printer broken, but they said they've sent CDs to this orthopedist before and he can read them ... gee, last time I was x-rayed it was old-fashioned film-developed-in-wet-chemicals (not that old-fashioned, as it was high-speed film with the booster in the film-holder -- what percentage of a 1970s x-ray is the radiation exposure of a modern x-ray?)). Alas, I can't see the pics on the CD. Seem to be in DICOM format, but free DICOM tools I downloaded won't read them and I can't get the app on the CD to run; found a few tools supposed to convert them to jpg/png/bmp/etc., but get "I can't read that JPG because it's 12-bits deep and thaaat's not staaaaandard" complaint from display tools like Eye-Of-Gnome when I try to convert. So much for sneak preview of what the doc will see.

Hate having appointments scheduled first thing in the morning; not just the stress of getting up and out of the house early enough when I'm not a morning person and my body's unreliable, but also interacting with doctors when I'm even more achy than usual and guaranteed to be fuzzy-brained. But the orthopedist is only at this office one day a month, and the only opening that had was 0900 (which seems odd to me, as most other people seem to like to get appointments out of the way early, leaving the afternoon slots for folks like me -- I hope it's not "everybody show up at nine and wait to be gotten to".). Of course, after the reasonable-weather week we've had (yeah, some rain in there, but all liquid that I noticed) we have a winter storm warning for the morning. No idea what the odds are of that screwing up my plans. Guess I'll find out come morning.

At least a big hunk o' stress is lifted because I managed to do what I needed to do to be ready for the appointment (now I just have to wake up in time -- think seven and a half alarms will do the trick though (one is too quiet to really count)). If the weather gets in the way one way or another, I'll be quite frustrated, but at least it won't feel like it's because I screwed it up. Here's hoping the weather isn't as bad as the folks on the telly made it sound, or that it holds off long enough to not get in my way. I've been wanting to get this thing treated since July, and the fact that it hasn't healed on its own in that time is scaring me.

Had hoped to have already been asleep by now. It seems I'm not (or I'm making surprisingly few typos for posting this in my sleep). Let's see whether I can get my brain to shut down for the night in the next half hour.

05:33 am - QotD

"I sat outside on my porch this morning
 Waiting for the sonic boom to arrive
 But something went wrong 40 miles above
 And our family vanished into the sky
 
 It's been almost 20 years and still I feel the pain
 Of watching Challenger fall into the sea
 And now there's seven more names written on the wall
 They paid the price for our destiny"

-- from "A Ray of Hope", by Gunther Anderson and donnad, February 2003 (a recording is available at that link, as well as the rest of the lyrics and the chord progression)

07:29 am - There's A Coincidence Here That Is Not Amusing Me

Aaaaaand today's off to a roaring start. One the plus side, I didn't need all the alarms I set to wake me up. On the minus side ... I don't suppose anyone's up for coming to my house to empty the roof-leak buckets while I'm at the doctor?

I woke up to the sound of running water. Started to go back to sleep thinking, "Yah, the rain has started and I'm hearing water drip into the buckets," but was just awake enough to notice that it sounded more like pouring than dripping. Uh oh. Got up, and discovered that three of the buckets were already about to overflow. (I wonder what time the rain started?) I emptied those, which meant getting dripped on myself (most of the time I get to wait until the rain has stopped to dump the buckets), then started chasing where leaks had shifted and new leaks formed.

That took long enough to notice that the flow rate is on the order of pints per minute. Those buckets are filling up again awfully quickly. I also noticed a sprinkling in the front room, which had previously been spared. (I can't see where the water is falling from, but there's a spatter of droplets on the floor and I can feel it falling on me if I stand in the corner by the connecting door.)

Oy vey. Last night I was hoping this 'weather event' would arrive late so as to not impede my departure toward the orthopedist. Now that it's here, I'm hoping it moves through really quickly, so that the water isn't coming in so quickly while I'm gone. I grabbed a couple microphone stands from downstairs to rig an awning with plastic sheeting over the part of the floor in the front bedroom (the previously mentioned one warm room in the house, so where I've been sleeping the past couple nights; also where I've got most of my negatives because it's the room the scanner has been in), and the tarp in the back room under most of the buckets can probably contain some significant bucket-overflow. But I'm going to be nervous about not being able to watch the situation and dump buckets out the window unless the rain tapers off a whole lot in the next hour.

But hey, the temperature is above freezing, so at least icy roads shouldn't be a problem. I'm grateful for that.

But I really didn't need this morning to start off so much like that morning five years ago.

10:01 am - SMS Post

[Posted from my cell phone via SMS]

Dr. says DeQuervain's tenosynovitis.

12:47 pm - Ominous

When I returned from the orthopedist, I opened my front door to the sound of something screaming. When I got over the disorienting startlement, I recognized the sound as the "Help! A cat has fallen asleep on my keyboard!" scream. But from a room where I've never seen Perrine walk on keyboards.

Closer inspection revealed that the name server was complaining about the brown water -- I've been thinking of it as "roof tea" -- dripping into its keyboard. Ah, the infamous IT Water Torture. When I unplugged the keyboard (no more screaming computer) and took it to the kitchen to pour out the keyboard, a disconcerting quantity of roof-tea came out. (I rinsed it with clean water and set it aside, upside-down, to drain and dry. Fortunately I rarely use that keyboard -- only to shut the machine down -- usually accessing it via SSH from elsewhere in the house. It's one of the old, very clicky, IBM keyboards, so it'll probably survive.)

Thing is, the name server is on the ground floor. The leaky roof is over the third floor. Ominous.

I don't see that much water on the second floor, though one mandolin got a little wet ... so I'm thinking it must be running down inside the wall between the bedrooms (that wall is in the same place on the second floor as on the third).

In the meantime, sure enough, buckets had overflowed on the third floor (and one had been knocked over by falling plaster). There's a lot of water collected on the tarp -- a few centimeters where the floor is lowest. (I'm glad that I had stuffed things under the edges to raise them up and make a sort of shallow basin.) This made getting to the buckets that needed dumping somewhat less than pleasant, but oh well.

The ceiling on the third floor is lath and plaster, covered with drywall, and then a layer of stucco. But attached to the ceiling in the living room is a large, ornate piece from which the light fixture depends -- a piece that's worth something due to its age. The wet spot over the name server peeks out from behind that. Losing that piece, or having it significantly damaged, would be a bad thing.

I'll be back in a bit to say more about how the trip to the doctor went. Short version: prognosis is good but it could take a while, I can play without risking permanent damage but I should be really serious about using ice-packs, and the nurse has to forward stuff to the finance department to find out whether I can actually get the treatment the doctor prescribed. If I play the feast tomorrow, then on Monday I'll be able to pay for the anti-inflammatory he prescribed. So, hey, anybody going my way?

And since I've got the camera out (my batterey door iz pasted on yey (actually gaff-taped)) here's a shot of the thing I rigged to keep the fine sprinkles of water off the floor in the front bedroom (having run out of buckets):

04:38 pm - The Longer Doctor Update

Taking another break from emptying buckets and driving myself crazy with worry ... I promised y'all more info on the wrist situation.

My two biggest fears regarding my wrist -- a fracture (since a fracture that keeps not healing is a sign of badness) and arthritis -- have been put to rest. The x-ray images are clean: healthy bones, nothing to see here, move along. The problem is with the tendons. The doctor's proposed plan, subject to approval from the finance department (since I can't afford to pay full price and none of this is covered by the state plan) is to start me on an NSAID to get the inflammation down and give things a chance to heal themselves, aided by cortosone delivered via phonopheresis (which is administered by a physical therapist, which is the referral that needs approval from on high), and if that doesn't work then a more aggressive approach in a month. He started out suggesting a cortizone injection. I mentioned that I'd had a very bad reaction to a cortisone injection ten or so years ago. He said that reacting badly to the cortizone itself was unlikely, and that I had probably reacted to one or more other chemicals (preservatives and whatnot) in the solution alongside the cortizone, but he did at that point switch to wanting to use phonopheresis because it's even less likely to generate a bad reaction, and we'll try injection if this doesn't work.

I can continue playing guitar in the meantime, but I am to ice the wrist a whole lot every day. (Argh. Already feeling cold too much of the time, y'know?) And especially ice it before performing (which I'd already been doing). He and I seem to see eye to eye regarding playing the long game here, with full recovery and long-term health being far more important than a quick fix. His comments on that score referring to my being musician gave me the idea that he really understands the ramifications of a patient being a musician. Not all doctors get it.

When I asked whether I could play tomorrow, he said, "What difference does it make? You're going to play whether I say it's all right or not." (Okay, he gets that aspect of musicians, too ...)

I replied, "I'm concerned enough about the long term, that I'll miss a few gigs if I need to to get better." Then he said that I should be okay tomorrow as long as I ice the wrist well.

I like this doctor so far. He was pretty patient in explaining things to me, answered all my questions, explained his reasoning, not just his conclusions, and said some of the same things about the state of the US health care system/industry and the nature of corporations that I have said.

So I need to fill this prescription (and refill a bunch of others while I'm at it) once I have enough cash on hand, and wait for someone to call me to say whether I'll be getting the phonophersis treatments.

The problem with the x-ray CD was probably that my Windows XP installation is screwed up somehow, preventing the program on the CD from loading or installing correctly. It worked on the orthopedist's computer. (I'm still confused about my inability to read the files with other tools; the description of DICOM made it sound like it was supposed to be a universally-readable format rather than each vendor's files needing their own tools ... but maybe I've got some more subtle problem going on with my computers.) Anyhow, he was quite happy to show me what he'd been looking at, where he looked for signs that would have cast doubt on his initial diagnosis and such -- instead of just saying, "your x-rays are clean, there's nothing to see there," he said, "would you like to have a look?" and led me from the examination room to his office to show me.

Now if only I could've gotten to this point a bit earlier instead of six or seven months after the problem started! (I did, of course, Google deQuervain's tenosynovitis after I got a break from flinging buckets of water out the window and improvising a raincoat for two servers downstairs. I'm wondering what counts as 'early' in the line on the Mayo Clinic web site that says, "If started early on, treatment for de Quervain's tenosynovitis is generally successful.".

Perhaps my experience here isn't an adequate response to anti-universal-health-care folks who intone that universal care "will mean long waits for treatment", since I am, after all, already on a state-run plan. But I had longer waits for treatment than my Canadian friends even when I was with regular HMOs that employers paid for. Seven months is a long time to spend wondering whether a treatable injury is turning into something permanent from lack of treatment. I'm relieved to hear today that I should get completely better, but would I have had to wait so long to find out if I were in Canada?

Okay, now to see whether I have anything I can use to make a siphon to get water flowing out the window. I feel like I'm "running out of cope" -- I keep feeling as though it's hours later in the day than it is (woke up way early for me, after far too little sleep, on a grey day that's messing with my sense of time anyhow); I'm tired, I really want to go to sleep, every time I think the rain is tapering off it starts up again, and every time I start to do something else the sound changes and I discover water showing up in a new place when I investigate. I keep getting dripped on, and since it's rain, the drippimg water is cold. So I'm cold, wet, tired, frazzled, and not sure when I'll get to stop moving; my wrist hurts, as do my back and both shoulders. It's kind of like the fifth day of a six-day rainstorm in a leaky tent at Pennsic.

*sigh* But I guess Pennsic at least counts as a sort of training for adventures like today's, eh?

05:40 pm - The Water Is ...

... now deep enough, that when I replace a bucket after emptying it, it floats out of position.

I've decided that the situation on the third floor looks more like a really icky kiddie-pool than a lake.

Wooden shoes feel funny on stairs. (I'm not used to wearing them indoors.) They're nifty at first, then nifty a while longer, then nifty some more, and then you step in a place deeper than the height of the side wall of the shoe and water is inside and they're just a wee bit less nifty. (But on the whole much drier than my feet would've been otherwise anyhow.)

No siphon yet. Can't find the hose I thought I had.

The clouds are doing this dramatic glowering effect and rushing across the sky like they're late to an important meeting where somebody gets fired. I think the sky is mocking me.

And a UPS driver just rang my doorbell and provided the answer to a question I'd been wondering about for a while. The answer is "four".

I probably do need sleep, and for my toes to feel as though there's hope that they may someday feel warm again, if I can think that the sky is mocking me.

But it is nonetheless, a fairly sarcastic sky.

Perrine has been extra-clingy today, since I got home. I wonder whether she knows I'm freaking out. But she did find a moment to strike a sleeping pose evoking an "Oh! Ded of teh cyuute" reaction at one point.

Aha! I finally found the missing grey pouch of quarters! So I can get prescriptions [re]filled on Monday whether I make it to Pirate Feast or not! (I'd rather go than not go, regardless.) If my back settles down enough and I get a second wind, I could even go get the NSAID prescription tonight. (The ones I need to refill are at the pharmacy at the nearby clinic, which closed for the weekend half an hour ago. But I could fill the new one at Rite Aid. In the unlikely event that I manage to muster the energy to tromp out there with frosty toes after the afternoon I've had and not enough sleep.)

The question was, "How many glucometers does one diabetic person need when various entities are jockeying for financial advantage?"

I'll explain the background later. Probably.

Tai-urd. Not just ti'rd; all-out two-full-syllables tired. Must check that fancypants radio-detecting-and-ranging thingumabob to see whether this 'weather event' is finally over. (Oh great, now I've gone and given myself the mental image of a "weather event promoter", pasting up fliers and passing out handbills for the next storm, making sure the local radio stations have blocks of tickets to the blizzard to give away in contests, and so on. As if the "math drill" mental image a day or two ago wasn't silly enough.) I wonder how long after the preciptation stops preciptating it will take for the precipitation that permeated the premises to stop percolating.

I'm not sure I even want to know whether this came out coherent. Probably more entertaining if it's almost coherent, I dunno. Maybe if the writing is collimated but not in phase ... would collimated text be the kind that's justified on both margins? Too much brown rain has fallen on my head. I want another shower. I wonder how much rain made it all the way through the living room and into the basement. No, I don't really wonder. I kindasorta wonder, but I don't want to go look and find out the answer. Afraid of finding out the enlarger is right under the name server.

Please excuse typo of 'cortosone' for 'cortisone' in previous transmission. Will repair later.