afog 114
Flashback III
They kept me in ICU until the 9th or 10th. I seemed to cause great amazement because I was able to wield the suction line to clear the saliva from my mouth this was seen as a sign that I needed to be moved on.
A couple of days previously they had fitted me with a Patient Controlled Analgesic (PCA) unit that gave me a shot of Fentanyl when I pressed the button. Pity it spent more time alarming than dispensing. The pump unit wants one of a very specific set of syringes so that it can meter the dose accurately. Unfortunately the common syringe of the right volume isn't a model that the pump knows about. It took 3 shifts to work that one out and it needed to re-solved every time a new set of nurses needed to change the syringe.
The BiPAP machine continued to cause problems. I had become habituated to the pressure settings but the cold un-humidified air was playing havoc with my throat. A sore throat and an elevated temperature became a continual state.
Currently I'm at home resting. I can get around handily on a pair of elbow crutches with the added assist of some pain killers. I read a bit, watch TV a bit, play on the computer a bit, and exercise a bit. Rob and Leece kindly sprited Maureen and myself off to Plaka by the Sea Wednesday evening for a welcome change of scenery. Our neighbour Eva kindly shuttled me to the doctors yesterday which is just too far to walk yet so close that taxis grumble about the short trip.
Posted on 01 October 2004 at 12:10 AM by Stephen Gunnell
afog 115
Slackness Abounds
Well it has been an acceptably busy week at this end even if I haven't posted anything.
E-mail is now operational under Gentoo so I won't need to keep going back to SuSE to read my mail. I eventually decided to give Fetchmail et al the flick and use Sylpheed's internal MTA facilities to pass stuff to and fro. However I will run up ssmtp which is a minimal outgoing only SMTP agent.
It is almost two weeks since I came home and I had my first out-patient checkup today. The doctor was happy with my progress but wants me to keep using the crutches for at least six weeks more. I also got my first look at the hip X-ray. When I am standing upright, facing left, the upper fracture intersects the hip socket at about two o'clock. Luckily that means it is mostly off the main load bearing surface. The X-ray machine operator also commented that it was a pretty nasty fracture.
The people at work got together and bought me a copy of Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything. This book is a delightful romp through the history of science dealing more with the people than the discoveries. Excellent reading albeit with the occasional technical error that has bypassed the proofreaders.
There are a couple of pages in the book on Thomas Midgley. Midgley is surely a contender for the title of Scientest most likely to have sold his soul to the devil. During the 1920's he discovered that Tetraethyl Lead was an effective anti-knock fuel addative for petrol engines. When concerns were raised about the lead content he proceeded to hold press conferences to demonstrate the safety of the compound. This at a time when he had been seriouslly ill from over-exposure and had to be careful to stay well away from the substance between press conferences.
Then to cap things off Midgely went on to discover and promote chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) starting with Freon-12 in the early 1930s.
Posted on 08 October 2004 at 04:08 AM by Stephen Gunnell
afog 116
Flashback IV
About the time I moved from ICU to the Respiratory HDU I was also allowed to switch to a Swedish Nose for daytime breathing rather than being continually on the respirator. A Swedish Nose looks like a short piece of horisontal tubing clipped to the front of the tracheotomy tube. It contains a couple of pads of a felt like material that capture some of the moisture in your breath as you breath out and then moisten the air and oxygen mixture that you breathe in. This makes breathing a lot more comfortable.
I mentioned last time that I had been given a Fentanyl PCA pump. This was with me for about 5 or 6 days. After about 4 days I started to get some noticable side effects. There are a whole range of physical side effects which I mostly skipped (or they were effectively controlled by other medication) but I got hallucinations. The form these took was quite interesting. Have you ever been awake in a dark room trying to make sense of the shapes you can barely see? My mind seems to go through a process of successively trying to match solutions to the shape until it finds one that it is happy with. Under the influence of Fentanyl my mind became quite unable to reject unsuitable solutions. Since I had lost my glasses in the crash there was a lot of my world that was half formed and not instantly recognisable. And the hallucinations that got generated were quite stable. Every time I looked at the far wall of the ward I marvelled at the way the Bi-PAP machines had been decorated to look like large animal skulls and the array of art neuvo styled goth-puppets draped over the ledges ... not to mention the Samurai doll with yellow hair and a red coat like Inu-Yasha. The CT-Scanner room had a stuffed magpie up in one corner of the room with a lizard in its beak. Alas when my spare glasses arrived all these intruiging artworks proved to be totally non-existant. And shortly after that they took the PCA pump away.
Posted on 10 October 2004 at 08:51 PM by Stephen Gunnell
afog 117
You were obviously having far too much fun with it, that's why they took it away.
Posted on 10 October 2004 at 10:00 PM by Alicia Smith
afog 118
Snooooze
*sigh* fail to be on-line for a few days and everything backs up until it threatens to engulf one in a deluge.
Had my GP checkup last Thursday. He says keep taking the painkillers and come back and see me in four weeks. Went into central Perth yesterday. Walking around getting my bank account sorted and my replacement long-distance glasses ordered was fine, however, sitting in the bus station on the hard wooden seat was not at all fun.
Posted on 18 October 2004 at 10:47 PM by Stephen Gunnell
afog 119
Time passes ...
Okay ... I'm still here. Still hobbling around with the aid of one crutch and a supply of painkillers. I have a new set of distance glasses and I can get around fine on public transport. The downside is a sore elbow and problems concentrating which is part of the reason why I haven't been on-line much.
I bit the bullet a few days ago and took the rear wheel off the trike intending to get it serviced. However, none of the bike shops in reasonable public transport distance wanted to know. In the end I dismantled the hub myself, cleaned out the gunk, re-greased everything in sight, and re-assembled the works. I just hope I have spread enough grease in the right places. I cant road test it until I can ditch the crutch.
Posted on 27 October 2004 at 04:22 AM by Stephen Gunnell
afog 120
Flashback V
Once I was moved up to the Respiratory HDU everything hinged on the state of the pelvis fracture. When I left ICU I was under orders not to be sat up at more than 45 degrees. This sounds simple but the angle at which I was actually permitted to sit varied widely from nurse to nurse. Eventually one afternoon I was suddenly sent down to have a CT-Scan. Next morning the word came down that I was to be allowed to sit up. Yes! From there things moved quickly. All it takes is one visit to the shower to vastly improve ones outlook on life. Within a couple of days the Speech Therapist came by to see if I could swallow semi-solids. They do this by feeding you a spoonfull or two of red gell. If you can't control the swallow and the gell gets in the lungs then the colour is highly visible and the material won't cause any problems. The gell is successively diluted in about three stages down to cordial consistancy. If you can handly the thinnest dilution you are cleared for non-solid hospital meals.
Posted on 27 October 2004 at 11:40 PM by Stephen Gunnell
afog 121
On yer bike ...
Put the rear wheel back on the bike ... everything seems to be turning smoothly and the gears all appear to work only the ratchet seems a little noisy when I'm coasting or back peddling. I think we can call that one a success.
At the same time I rigged up the mount for the GPS on top of the left kingpin extention tube. When the 12V system is in place the GPS will be powered off of an aux power takeoff.
After all that work I had to ride the trike up and down the driveway for twenty minutes until I felt the the gears were sufficiently tested. I was very happy that my legs seemed to be working correctly as well.
Posted on 31 October 2004 at 03:01 AM by Stephen Gunnell