Sunday a.m. update on J

Got a bit more sleep last night – 5 hours rather than 2. However, the neurosurgeon didn’t visit yesterday so she wasn’t able to get any sleeping medication.

Awake since 5am, vomiting since 6 though she has managed to keep breakfast down. She can’t, however, move around because if she does the dizziness is insane. On the flip side her eyesight is a little better.



Sunday p.m. update on J

She had a much better afternoon than morning – not only managed to keep food down, but was feeling better within herself, too.

The neurosurgeon has handed her off to the neurologist as primary physician because there’s nothing surgical that needs happening as far as he can determine. This is good news in itself – the more I’ve learnt about the side-effects of headcracking surgery, the less I like it. A piece of good meta-information is that the swelling is showing that the radiation in February is doing its job. It’s just being a real bitch about showing it.

In terms of coming home, since the Epilem takes up to 5 days to start doing its thing, she’s hoping that there’ll be sufficient improvement in her symptoms to be able to come home on Wednesday. We have our fingers/toes/knees/etc crossed that this happens.

On my side of the fence, I’ve managed to keep the kids fed without resorting to takeaways, they’re sleeping reasonably well and not playing up too badly. Thanks to Tim and Sarah yesterday I was able to get the lawn mowed and the driveway swept. Rachel took care of them for a few hours on Friday so I could have a nap, and my mum is coming tomorrow and Tuesday which will be a great help. Thankyou to everybody who has offered to help – pretty sure we will be taking you up on those offers over the next few weeks! I’ve also got the kids booked in to daycare for Thursday/Friday starting this week; not sure how we’ll need to keep that up, but it will keep going for as long as J needs it.



Evening update

The neurologist said that she pretty much has to stay in hospital until the symptoms ease…. which might not be for a month. Today was a much worse day than yesterday (only having 2 hours sleep probably the cause), so tonight she’s asking for something to put her to sleep. Hopefully it’ll work.



Saturday a.m. update on J

The neurologist confirmed that she’s got significant edema (oedema?) around the tumour. Ugh. He’s prescribed another drug (Epilem?) to help with that, but the primary side effect is to make her very drowsy. This matches up with the migraine drug which makes her twitchy. She’s got to take this new drug until the symptoms disappear, which could be a month or maybe even longer.

Last night J only got 2 hours sleep, threw up her migraine drug and is back to double vision and general blurriness.

So she isn’t coming home today.



This evening’s update on J

This evening’s update is that the ophthalmologist reckons her optic nerve is ok – just irritated – so her eyesight should go back to normal. How long that will take we just don’t know. The anti-migraine meds are starting to work, and they’ve also put her on some anti-convulsive drug too.

She’s not home, though. At least another night in Club Wes. Hmmph.



Today’s update on J

The ENT neurosurgeon swung past, ran some tests and reckons that

  • She’s got massive Nystagmus going on

  • The pain she had at the back of her head around Easter was in fact a massive migraine, and

  • What she’s going through now is still part of that migraine (either a continuation thereof, or a side effect).

He’s going to confer with another neurosurgeon about course(s) of action, and in the meantime has written up some migraine meds for her.

The ophthalmologist appt is tomorrow at 11:30, not sure how that’s going to go. We might be lucky – she might be able to come home tomorrow arvo.

All our fingers/toes are crossed.





2nd-best supported platform

From last night’s conversation in #darktable:

Apr 17 03:38:27 <pmjdebruijn> it’s good to be able to support a platform out of the box, no patches required Apr 17 03:40:09 <dumbbell> I agree

Apr 17 03:48:04 <pmjdebruijn> it’s funny Apr 17 03:48:20 <pmjdebruijn> it seems Solaris is our second best supported platform at the moment due to McBofh’s great work

Apr 17 03:48:37 <pmjdebruijn> i’m glad freebsd is up to there too now Apr 17 03:52:41 <dumbbell> I’m glad too

And it’s great to find Open-Source advanced softwares like darktabke; I don’t want to reboot under Windows for any non-game-related activities

I’d go a bit further than <dumbbell> – I don’t want to boot into Windows for anything if I can avoid it.

Update: The underlying reason why it’s so easy for me to get Darktableto run on Solaris is because the codebase is very portable. I don’t like the style that it’s written in (understandable when you consider that I breathe the Solaris ON C style guide), but that’s irrelevant. I’ve needed to make very few changes – a total of 24 lines – to get it to build on Solaris, and most of those were to provide subtly different #pragma invocations for OpenMP.

Also, once you’ve got a build and packaging system figured out, it’s pretty easy to crank the handle and turn out a new build.



How to annoy me: spam

Seen at the footer of some spam I received earlier today:

You are receiving this email as you were added to our comprehensive database on account of your contribution in the PM domain. This e-mail has been sent to you to exhort you to achieve success in project management certification exam. If you no longer wish to receive e-mails from our side, you may Unsubscribe from this list

No, I haven’t contributed in the “PM domain”. Additionally, not only do I no longer wish to receive emails from “Caroline@prince2trainingacademy.com”, I NEVER wanted to receive emails from you in the first place.

SPAMMER. FAIL.