You don't Think That You're Getting Out Of Here - Do You ?

Yup. Well. The title kinda says it all. 3.30 we were back in the ward but by 4.00 The Better Half was in severe enough pain to be given 2 ml (I think) of morphine. Unfortunately, morphine just doesn't touch some pains in some people. ... and it took us until 6 pm to get the House Doctor and convince him that we really needed pain relief for The Better Half. 6 pm, pain killer administered, and The Better Half is getting some sleep.

More soon, but definitely no knitting appearances until Tuesday at the nearest.

Now Really Hurry Up !!

"Ok" says the nurse, "we're going for your test" to my Better Half. "What test would be?", ask I innocently, knowing fiull-well that The Better Half would be asking me for the use of a fire axe if the medics stuck her with any more needles! When I arrived this morning her IV was in a different place. Apparently the staff decided to move it in the night - it took 4 people and 2 hours to get it inserted into a vein again. No bad reflection on the staff or anything ... The Better Half just has EV - Evasive Veins !

The nurse rattles off a set of four letters, obviously in the expectation that I would understand just exactly what she meant. Remaining in "innocent" mode I asked her what that meant and whether it was a test or a procedure, as we had been waiting 24 hours for a procedure, not another test. "Procedure and Test are the same thing" she said, carefully avoiding eye-contact. "But what does it mean", I ask; " - the acronym". I get an evasive answer, along the lines of what it is, rather than what it's name is, which is what I asked. Oh well.

A few minutes later we're down on the ground floor and in radiography, which is where it's done, because of some dye used to enable the doctor to see what's going on. 3.15 and The Better Half has vanished, with the various offerings that, assuming all goes well, she may well be sleeping in her own bed tonight. That'll be nice!

For those interested, here's a good site for the gall bladder procedure.

... 15 mins later and she's out again. 3 stones lighter and able to go home tonight. Good for Dr. E. here!!

Hurry up ! ......... and Wait !

So the Gall Bladder was removed. Nice one. However, there are still stones left to get. The Doctors will get them from the "other end". Not a problem, we understand. A short procedure. Easily explained. Could be done tonight, but probably tomorrow morning or midday.

Hmmmmm.

That was Thursday afternoon.

This is Friday night. No procedure. A whole day lying around in bed doing very little indeed. 2 pm we were told "this afternoon" and "this guy is the best in the region for this procedure". By 8 pm that had changed to "leave for the Operating Theatre about 10 pm". At 9.30 that abruptly changed into a cancellation (current procedure likely to take up to 1 am). Schedule for first thing Saturday morning.

Personally, I think a notification when things started getting delayed would have been nice (we had to pry the info out of the system!). Also, if this procedure goes until 1 am, I think that "first thing Saturday" is too early for the surgeon to be well-rested.

We'll see.

The Doctors Strike Back

The latest update from the war front is that we've won the first major battle! The Gall Salient has been excised and removed laparoscopically. However, there are still elements of the enemy (rogue stones wandering around on their own) that need to be cleared up. This will take the use of another unit - The Gastro-Enterologists. They'll be entering the fray either this evening or tomorrow morning.

Stay tuned for further news!

The War Continues !

Welcome to the continuing story of The Better Half vs The Gall Bladder !

• Yesterday afternoon The Gall Bladder struck ! It inflicted large amounts of Excruciating Pain and some waves of nausea. The Better Half survived, although battered and very unhappy. Support rallied at 5 (me), 6 (the hospital doctors), and at 7 (the home teachers).
  
• Last night, the M weapon was used to blunt the atack and Tests were employed to confirm the analysis of the attack.
  
• This morning further tests were made and strategy formulated.
  
• This afternoon the strategy is going into effect. The Better Half has been prepped and is now in the Operating Theatre for the counter-attack (the plucking-out of the offending organ).

Stay tuned for more details as they happen.

Oh! What a Wonderful War

Hi everyone. This one will be real short ! Yesterday seemed to be going "ok". The Better Half was at home, reducing the entropy of the planet, I was slaving over a hot terminal at work, helping the lot of those injured in auto accidents in NJ and other states, and the Offspring was doing his homework and looking forward to Daddy taking him out for dinner.

Such, as I'm sure you know, is a typical plan laid by mouse or man and, as I'm sure you've heard, the best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft a-gley ("To a Mouse", Robert Burns). I got home last night to find The Better Half literally almost screaming in agony! Off to the hospital we go, thinking that she might have been poisoned. That magical word got us fairly rapid attention from the triage nurse, but luckily for naught. The reason for all the sudden agony appears to be gall stones and a blocked gall bladder. The word from this household is "don't get gall stones" ! The Better Half describes the pain as "considerably worse than childbirth".

So, several hours in the ER later, she's moved from the tender care of that department (thank you very much to J. and Dr. F. for all your care - you were great!), and we're now upstairs in the Acute Surgical Care Unit. Many thanks to nurse S. here - just beware of those bears !

I got to bed at about 3.30 this morning and was woken up at 7 to the news that The Better Half was going in to tests at 8. I managed to get out of bed, showered, and in to the hospital by 9 (I don't do mornings at short notice!) to find an empty bed! The Better Half was still in tests.

Since then she's back, had a foot rub and new clean (hand-knit) socks, and we got prayed over by a very nice man from the chaplain's department. Mention here to nurse J., who's being super-nice and helpful.

Slight interruption before closing this blog. We have just had a couple of visits from Dr. S.K., who examined further and confirmed all that Dr. F. opined last night. The Better Half is now on the "stand-by" list for the operating theatres here for today or, if not today, then definitely on the list for tomorrow.

We hope for today, of course, so that she can get to Woolbearers for KnitKnight tomorrow evening!

More later. Remember to be cautious around bears (they don't carry bar-code-readers).

Lots Later

Well, at the end of the last posting I said "a little programming". Well, that turned into rather a lot of programming indeed! In T-SQL and VB.NET, mainly, along with a load of debugging other people's misconceptions about what they should be expecting.

Along the way of programming I discovered a number of useful things, like how to get a list of all the fields names in a database, how to search for code containing a string or strings inside SQL Server, and all sorts of other tid-bits!

Anyway, today I needed to take a table and set a field to a number all through the field. Easy enough, if it's just one number, but what if it's two or more numbers, and you have to distribute them so that record 1 gets number a, record 2 number b, etc. until you run out of numbers and then repeat the sequence over, until the end of the table? Oh yes, and you don't know in advance how many numbers there'll be to distribute!

declare @taPeople Table ( RowID int Primary Key Identity(1, 1),
PersonID int)
-- ----------------------------------------------------
-- Find out how many are needed
-- ----------------------------------------------------
select @intNrIDs = count(*)
from tblIDList
where CompanyID = @intCompany and
-- ----------------------------------------------------
-- Fill the table var. with the IDs we want to use,
-- and the Identity fied will number them for me
-- ----------------------------------------------------
insert into @taPeople
select PersonID
from tblPeople
where CompanyID = @intCompany
-- ----------------------------------------------------
-- Arrange for tblData also to have a contiguous
-- monotonic-increasing key (i.e. identity (1, 1))
-- ----------------------------------------------------
update dbo.tblData
set PersonID = (select PersonID
from @taPeople
where RowID = (DataRowID % @intNrIDs ) + 1) where CompanyID = @intCompany
-- ----------------------------------------------------

Well, I thought it kinda neat, 'cos it lets me do non-random distribution of data across all the records of a table - not a thing usually easily done without a cursor.


Yarn Stuff
Back to the subject that's been consuming this blog for the last few episodes - wool !

As always, we wnt to The GrindHouse Cafe in Haddonfield today (Tuesday) and I programmed and Tola and the other 25 or so ladies all knitted and chatted. One young lady in particular is Jessie, and she's just starting out knitting. So, here's a picture of Jessie and her very first piece of knitting ( a geek would call it a small enthalpy-enhanced area of the Universe, with great future prospects. I call it rather cool to watch someone fighting over what she terms "the first thing she's ever made". ). Anyhow, Jessie, Jenna, and Ali are great company and seriously intelligent (being med students!). The other two can knit well and are dragging Jessie into it too, which is a nice thing to do.

Next, we visited Loop and Nangelini on Philly's South Street last Friday. Loop because there was a book signing there, and Nangelini's because we were there and we like Nancy. In fact, the Loop visit turned into a double-header, because there was another book-signing next door, at Spool.

At Loop, The Better Half wanted a signed book. I might have lost her then, but the signature duly materialised. As you can imagine, the signature of a cartoon artist is seriously attractive.