I'm home. I feel great (except occasionally when I don't *g*) Everything is so much more tiring than it was in the hospital so it might be a couple days before I post

But the summary is that everything has gone exactly as predicted and almost everything is improved over pre-op.

Thanks all for the thoughts, wishes, and prayers.

The good: pulling up to the Marriott and having them handle our bags and valet the car after a nice evening out with friends.

The bad: Discovering the sheets of one of the beds were dirty.

Worse: we asked for new sheets, they handed us a stack and ran off.

Teh funny: just as we finally got housekeeping up and they apologise, etc. Leif threw up all over the other bed. Hard to stay upset at that point.

surgery updates will be on Angie's lj, auzure_skies

Angie, Leif and I met with one the two surgeons who will be doing the work. I s'pose it's good and bad that the co-director of the UCSF Spine Centre, Dr. Mummaneni is personally taking on the case. Good that I'll have the best possible care; Bad that I'm apparently interesting enough to warrant it.

Meeting with him was matter of fact. He talked about how he'll approach the surgery (from the back, since the placement of my aortic arch and innominant vein would make coming through the front problematic). It looks like I'll have rods and screws from T1-T6, with a cage replacing the vertebra at least at T3 and possibly at T4. People don't usually do that much movement in their thoracic back so, ongoing, his opinion was that I largely won't notice it.

In hospital-time will depend on whether or not the surgery can be done in one shot. Because of the trickiness of the area, it may not be possible to get it entirely from the back, and he'll do two surgeries rather than one if that can avoid me winding up in a wheelchair. Ideally, there's one surgery, and a week later I'm home and able to take care of myself. The way they take the tumor out in a couple pieces is known as "en bloc spondylectomy", but may not be possible with the way the spinal nerve is being pinched. He described the surgery itself, and the simple version is "remove one or two vertebra, replace them with cages, stabilize the surrounding area". Yay to the Black and Decker surgical division.

He'll be assisted by Dr. Chau for spinal cord monitoring and the rest of the surgery.

The last thing they did as I left the hospital last Saturday was a full body CT scan with contrast, and the radiologists have declared that that they see no additional tumors in the body. I'll visit with an oncologist to do some final tests, but consistently the answer is coming back that this isn't cancer, it's more likely an isolated mutation. Dr. Mummaneni doesn't feel that this is a side effect of sitting at a computer since I was 3 years old, any of the car accidents, or being hit across the back with a flute case in grade 9.

I did ask if I'll set off metal detectors at airports after this, and apparently the titanium used doesn't do that.

So, erm. What are the risks? Honestly, pretty consistently less than doing nothing. Having this thing would eventually result in paralysis anyway, and aside from the usually OMG-they're-cutting-me-open-anything-could-happen type of things that don't keep me from biking to work on a regular basis, all the other options are "And life improves from here". Informed consent means that I have statistics in my head that I'd rather not dwell on and a laundry list of things to panic about when I wake up in the middle of the night but those really are just nerves acting up and stress wanting to come out. Nothing wrong with any of that.

Surgery is booked for March 3rd. We'd hoped to go to Vancouver for Leif's birthday around then, but I've been asked not to fly. Rapid pressure changes apparently will aggravate what's there now.

I feel good about this. I'm back to pretty much 100% after the hospital time last week, and noticed that after the embolism that I'm moving a bit freer than I was before. That's enough to start the optimism going already. We've also twiddled my medicine for every 8 hours rather than 6, which will help me sleep better, and reduced it, which will help me feel better.

Having time-frames and knowing that I'm in good hands is a lovely place to be after all that.

I'm home and doing well. They were able to embolize, so surgery will happen in the next couple of weeks. We're sitting down with the surgeon on Tuesday to learn what the surgery will actually be, recovery times, etc. I'll do another update then.

Thanks for the posts and thoughts, everyone. It's meant a lot to me.

Well, I guess it's time to talk.

I mentioned in my last post some back troubles. These aren't really news - I've had those for a long time. The news is the discovery in early January that there's some sort of growth / lesion / tumour on that spot causing me further problems now.

So I've been for tests. The MRI was a couple weeks ago. The CT scan earlier today. I have an angiogram tomorrow to map it further. The idea in my head was to wait until I had something interesting to tell people. A plan, knowledge, all the rest.

Well, I don't have that yet. But where two days ago, I was thinking that tomorrow was just a day of tests, it seems that as part of the angiogram an embolism is possible - that's where they try to cut off the blood supply to a tumour to make later surgery a bit easier. It carries risks. It carries a night in the ICU and another night in a ward. Surgery would need to follow within two weeks.

So I still have nothing to tell people. I'm used to being one of the ones with the answers handy. I'm obviously a bit nervous, but more in anticipation.

Thoughts and love are appreciated. We get started at 7am pacific.

In Montreal, I discovered the joy of visiting Osteopaths. An Osteopath managed to cure Leif's colic and let us sleep, and unlike a chiropractor, a treatment from Martine at Santenergie on the plateau of Montreal (shameless plug) would actually stay in effect for more than 20 minutes (Sometimes for weeks at a time).

Coming to the US, however, means learning a whole new variety of Osteo. Osteopathy was written into law early on, and has grown up as a full alternative to medical doctors - including the ability to prescribe medication. In practice what happens is that Osteopaths wind up in family practice as just another variant of MDs. The amount of "Osteopath" training that they've had compared to an MD turns out not to be that big anyway.

All hope isn't actually lost, though. There are two groups in the US, the American Academy of Osteopathy (Members recognised by the letters FAAO after their names), an the American Osteopathic Assocation (, AOA). Physicians can be fellowshipped into one or the other of these groups and they have different philosophies.

So there are three types of Osteopaths here:

1) Regular doctors (For all that it matters for the patients coming in)

2) Regular doctors who will practice some forms of Osteopathic Manipulative Medicine, but may not perform all techniques, and whom are more likely to be involved in "Integrative medicine" - helping find overall wholistic solutions to problems that might include manipulation, but might include other naturopathic solutions.

3) Osteopaths who specialise in manipulative medicine.

The downside to #3 is that these are people who've taken full medical degrees, and then had to further it with what an Osteopath would take at home. They're expensive, often don't accept any form of medical insurance, and are generally part of private practices.

With some back troubles I've been having recently, I managed to find a doctor in the #2 category who explained to me how this all works (followed by us figuring out that there's more to it than he can fix. But that's another story for later). He very kindly wrote it out for me on a napkin, so I'm copying it here before I blow my nose it in by accident. =)

I'm doing a course called "Introduction to Web Programming" at the University of Athabasca. It's a generally crappy course, and I hadn't expected to learn anything. But hey, I did. It turns out that Tim Berners-Lee is a Unitarian Universalist. Wild.

My next step in reducing the spam traffic in my life is removing my @gnu.org email address. This is one that has been good for me for 13 years but has largely been useful only as a spam trap. In fairness to the FSF, their spam filters have gotten really quite good in the last 5 years or so, but there's zero signal on that account so I may as well squish it.

I've set my alias in /com/mailer/aliases to :fail: with a 551, but the multi-level relay on monty-python seem to not respect that. I've filed a ticket, so that anyone trying that will get a proper message to say where to follow-on to.

The efforts seems to be making a difference. At the beginning of December, I had just over 11 thousand messages in my last-30-days spam folder. Right now it's 8925.

* ST:TNG Season 5 Episode 5 "Disaster" was just awesome. One day we'll even catch up on modern shows. Probably about the time when Angie's favourite game stops being Nethack, though.

* Leif is now 73cm tall.

* I should update my profile photo.

* I love how a last minute flight during high season from Vancouver to San Francisco is less than $300CAD.

* I'm sorry I haven't replied to emails and LJ comments from folks. I've been trying to actually stay *off* the computer over the winter break.

I've been asked by a few people how we're celebrating NYE now that we have a baby. Angie put it best:

"Leif's asleep! Quick! Let's... Sleep!"

I've had a blessed 2007. So far 2008 is looking pretty good. =) I do resolutions in July rather than January. I don't think anyone should try to start something new in the coldest part of the year. That's the time for sitting inside and eating cookies. Not that it's anything resembling cold here...

Hugs, my friends.

I just threw out a 720k floppy disk this evening. While I don't know for this one in particular, but I remember that the old 5 1/4" Single sided, single density floppies used to have a lifetime warranty. I remember wondering at the ripe of age of 6 or whatever I was whether or not bringing the thing in and saying "It's dead" would get them to tell me that clearly the lifetime had passed.

Especially now - Who knows what happened to Memorex? (Wikipedia tells me it got bought and that they still sell media) I'm sure their customer service department would love to get a call about an SSSD floppy being dead. I probably have one in one of these boxes, I'm such a packrat.

I love UPS, I really do.

Their autoattendant: "Please speak want you want, you can say ..."
me: "Agent"
AA: "I'm sorry, I didn't understand that. You can say ..."
me: "Agent"
AA: "I'm sorry, I didn't understand that. You can say ..."
me: "Do I have to say 'Fucking Agent?'"
AA: "One moment please, I will transfer you to an agent."

I'm on a quest to remove spam from my inbox. I've been killing off GNU mailman lists where the -owners stuff was feeding me spam. Most of my spam now seems to be relayed from @ubuntu.com. Does anyone know if there's a similar solution to what @debian.org has where I can ask it to reply with a bounce saying "Here's my real email address, use that instead pls"?

I suppose I could just set my default email address in LP to something that will do it instead, but I'd rather avoid the WrathOfElmo(tm)

Okay, I really do live in a jar. I finally saw my second and third southpark episode ever a couple of nights ago, the Scientology one and the Mormon one. OMFG, hilarious.

I'm only sad that UUism probably isn't a big enough religion to get on their radar. Which is too bad, because it would probably be fabulous. =)

In Montreal, we participated in a carshare called Communauto. The goal of Communauto is to have a car at least every 500 metres across the island of Montreal. In practice for areas they serve, they usually had more than that. The Saint-Sacrement location had at least a dozen, and there were clusters of 3 or 4 within a couple minutes walking distance of anywhere on the plateau.

Such a thing does exist here, but not in Silicon Valley at all. If you're in the valley at all and wish you didn't need to have a car for little errands, or are thinking about a second car for those times you just want to go somewhere different from your mate, *please* add your name to the notify list for zipcar:

http://www.zipcar.com/notify-me

The problem this solves is the one that a bus or a bike can get one to work easily enough, or into the city, but the bus is never going to be great for the once-a-week grocery shop, or that trip to Ikea. In that case, you pay the use of the car for an hour (or 4 if it's Ikea...), and then return it. I really believe that it's a critical part of making mass-transit work.

Wow! I'd totally forgotten about fog. It didn't happen so much in Toronto, but was the way that I used to be able to tell that autumn was here back in Vancouver. It wasn't anywhere near as thick as I like it, but for the first one, it wasn't bad.

I biked to work this morning for the first time, and there were a lot of cyclists out this morning. Yay!

It's strange being here at UDS-Boston-2007. I realised that this would've been the next time I'd have seen my old coworkers *anyway*. Working remotely meant that I really was glad to go to these, and I still am.

I turned 32 a couple of days ago, which I was pleased to discover is 2^5. According to Wikipedia, it is also a Powerful Number. I like the sound of that. =)

Angie and I watched some CNN show from midnight to 1 last night about "Protecting our Liberties" or some such like that. The host brought on two secessionist people and immediately dove in and asked them whether or not they thought the US should've helped defeat hitler. I wound up digging up the wikipedia article on Godwins Law for Angie so she could decode my ranting.

Just a quick note to family and friends that the fires in California are not near where we are.

I spent most of yesterday working on my Athabasca challenge courses. On top of two completely overlapping all-week meetings this week, I also have three exams and three papers to do. My bad on the scheduling. One of the assignments is done now, with the outline for the second one looking good. I'm hopeful about getting everything at least past draft this weekend.

And hey, while we're at it, lets move houses! Some of last night was unpacking boxes so that we could use stay here. While the corporate housing was a total economic lifesaver, the pillow-top bed was so soft that i would wake several times through the night with pretty severe back pain. We now have pur posturepedic back and i'm much happier this morning!

I also put leif on the toilet for the first time this morning! It's something angie's been doing since we were in montreal, but this is the first time that I caught the signs right and took him over to the toilet. It's nice to save a diaper here and there. I think she's usually putting him on the toilet at least once per day.

Angie and I wrote out written tests today for the California driver's license. We've been issued temporary licenses because we had current out-of-country licenses. We've been talking about possibly finding a drivers-ed instructor for a couple hours of private lessons to make sure that we'll actually pass the road test. After 13 years of driving, am I still likely to be able to pass a road test? Who knows? =)

I've thought before that the road test should be redone every 5 years. If the fees cover the cost of administering the test, then all it can do is make the roads safer and reduce the traffic on the road. Maybe if it were that much hassle, the demand from transit would increase enough that people wanted to use it.

I remember that I got my license so I could take a friend of mine to her prom. I wonder how Alicia's doing? For all the old faces on Facebook, I haven't come across her yet.

Next step: Move into new condo on Friday/Saturday (address is on Facebook, I'll update Orkut and the Debian DB shortly), followed by 3 university exams next week. And there's still a dayjob tucked in and around all of this! =)