My deepest sympathies of course go to Jack’s wife, family, and friends.

The news was the very last thing I would have expected to log on tonight to read, and it somehow feels unreal, as shocking news often does. I never met Jack, but for a long time now I’ve enjoyed reading Jack’s daily ponderings – or as Jack once said to me, he started out trying to write something interesting and witty every day, but when that didn’t quite work out, he settled for something interesting and witty at least once a week, and preferably more often. Either way, he said the act of forcing himself to sit down and try and write something interesting and witty at least got him into writing mode and did him good.

The world of web accessibility has lost a great ambassador, and Jack’s kindness and enthusiasm has undoubtedly inspired many to improve their knowledge of the web and code, and Jack’s wonderful sense of humour has I don’t doubt brightened many a day. On a personal note I’ve lost probably about half my blog readership (not that it’s been very active of late). When I first linked to one of Jack’s blog posts on The Pickards in a post here, I never expected a response, but on a number of occasions Jack left comments on posts here, but also took the time to email me privately with words of encouragement from time to time too.

Jack was not only a great ambassador for web accessibility, and inspiration to many, but a thoughtful and kind man, and will be missed by many.

Reasons why I’ve been gone for so long and what’s been going on can wait. For now I’ll just end with a piece of advice Jack gave me a while back…

…remember, when life gives you lemons… kick it in the balls and tell it to go away and bring something nicer!

Jack, you will be missed!

There are always going to be cases where someone was negligent, where if things had been done differently injury could have been prevented, or where there’s been criminal behaviour/action, and in such cases it can be right that the injured party’s compensated, but these days there are so many ambulance chasers eager to persuade anyone who’s suffered an injury or bad experience and persuade them it’s their right to be paid for everything in life that goes wrong that you can’t switch on the TV without being bombarded by the message. The TV’s full of adverts for injury claims lawyers telling you they’ll get you cash and it doesn’t cost anyone anything (except of course everyone’s insurance premiums).

On the forum I used to run, a medical support forum, I used to see it too. People can’t accept that sometimes things just happen – there invariably had to be someone to blame, a doctor should have diagnosed it sooner, a doctor shouldn’t have prescribed whatever medication it was that was suspected to have caused the condition, someone should have warned them, etc. etc. Looking for reasons is always part of the process of accepting a diagnosis of a serious condition, but so many these days take it to extremes.

Last Sunday there was a Panorama programme, “The Trauma Industry” (Fri 31 Jul 2009, 1.05, BBC1) looking at post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and the legal process involved in compensation claims. A condition that was first given a name in the aftermath of the Vietnam War (though earlier veterans of the First and Second World Wars had suffered the same symptoms, but it was known as “shell shock” or veterans were diagnosed as having problems with their “nerves”) has now morphed into a condition that results from minor traffic incidents.

TV reporter Allan Little, a war zone correspondent who’s seen war zones first hand and experienced the death of a colleague in a war zone spoke to veretans, doctors, psychologists, lawyers, and some victims of PTSD.

One is a Falklands veteran who was shot in the head during the conflict, and suffers from PTSD. Understandable. I should imagine that recovering from such an injury and trying to return to normal life after something like that is going to have a major impact on anyone.

According to the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) though, the NHS is treating an estimated quarter of a million people a year for PTSD, more than twice the number of people in the British army. That’s a hell of a lot of traumatised people! A PTSD specialist on the programme quite openly said he thought it was “a money spinner.”

The programme featured a number of cases, including a woman who’d been involved in a car accident where the car had been shunted 15ft. From this she’d apparently developed PTSD, and of course was suing for damages. The conclusion of the programme was that the legal process that compensation claims go through can actually hinder someone’s recovery from PTSD. After all, if someone’s suffering from PTSD and are involved in a legal process to get recompense from it, it’s not in their interests to actually recover from it.

As the programme points out, online you can find lists of the symptoms of PTSD in various places…often followed by advertisements for these injury lawyers and advice on how to claim.

Headaches, flashbacks, insomnia…they’re not the sort of symptoms you can disprove. I’d imagine they’re symptoms thousands of people have experienced at times, or after bad experiences – they’re symptoms I’ve had myself (hmmm…maybe I’ve got PTSD…?), but what people who do experience these sort of symptoms need more than anything else is treatment. Again though, if they’re in the middle of a legal case about their symptoms, it’s not in their interests to recover from them.

For everything these days there has to be someone to blame, whether it’s the politicians, doctors, scientists, the public, young people, old people, bankers, foreigners, nationalists, the other political party, voters, those who didn’t vote, etc., etc., and last week the latest group to be blamed was weather forecasters. Yep, weather forecasters!

Earlier in the year the Met office predicted that it was “odds on” for what the media are describing a “BBQ summer.” Of course the forecast heatwave hasn’t materialised (no mention of the fact that if it had, after three days everyone would be complaining that it was too damned hot), so now it’s the weather man’s fault. Thousands have apparently decided to forego a foreign holiday this year and chosen to holiday in Britain on the strength of the Met office forecast (nothing at all to do with the recession then). The BBC news showed waterproof covered after waterproof covered pensioners sitting dejectedly on the sea front, teenagers battling their way along the promenade with umbrellas.

What everyone has failed to notice is that whatever we want it to do, the weather will do what it damned well pleases – it’s something that’s not under our control. I’ve never quite understood the fabled British obsession with the weather anyway – it’s something that happens whether you complain about it or not, and it’s just too big for us to have any influence over.  We live in a country on the edge of a continent next to a rather large expanse of water and have a maritime climite. Unsettled and unpredictable weather comes with the territory. The other rather large thing that everyone failed to notice is that what the Met office said was that it was “odds on” for a good summer, not that it was a certainty. As everyone knows, there are only two certainties in life – death and taxes (and at least a trio of crap songs, one of them by Cliff Richard, battling over the Christmas number one, but I’m not sure if that counts). What the Met Office predicted, which of course the media failed to make a big thing of, focussing instead on the soundbite, was a 65% chance of a good summer…that means that there’s a 35% chance that it won’t be a good summer. They’re good odds, but not great.

No matter how good computer modelling is, which is largely what the weather men use these days in predicting weather, along with data from historical records, it’s an inexact science. A prediction is just that; a prediction. It’s not certain, it’s not guaranteed to happen, and I wouldn’t bet my last tenner on it. Is it the weather man’s fault if the predicted weather doesn’t materialise? No, but as a higher celestial being isn’t handy to blame, someone else has to take the rap, and the weather forecasters are an easy target. Having a maritime climate where the weather’s so unpredictable no-one, unless they’ve got a crystal ball, can say with certainty what the weather can do, and even then there can be a complete difference in weather in a very small area. I’ve been at work in town and it’s rained heavily during the day, yet at home, only a couple of miles away, nothing.

If you get wet though because it rains and you haven’t got an umbrella, someone (the weather man) has to take the blame. Not having the forethought to have taken an umbrella with you even though it was overcast and cold doesn’t come into it.

PTSD, the recession, whatever, someone has to take the blame. No-one can accept these days that life’s tough and sometimes shit happens and you just have to accept it and move on. Life sucks. Deal with it.

The post office keep telling us that their services are improving, but I’ve yet to see any evidence of that. If anything it’s going the other way.

A few years ago deliveries used to arrive early in the morning, invariably before work, but those days are long gone. Normally the “normal” post arrives between midday and 1pm these days, so you’d think if you’re in between those times you’d be safe to assume that you would receive even things too big for the letterbox or that need signing for when they arrived. Not so.

Waiting in for a delivery is fraught with dangers. Larger packets and parcels come separately by van rather than with the postman on foot. They can arrive any time between 7:30am (many a time I’ve found myself rushing to the door half dressed, or woken by the doorbell) and 7:30pm, as can the “normal” post. Normally the postman on foot arrives around lunch time, but we’d had deliveries as late as 4pm, and even once around 7:30pm!

They’re an impatient bunch too. On the front door we have a sticker that reads “please allow me time to answer the door” with the wheelchair symbol at the side of it. Though I don’t use a wheelchair, if I’m upstairs, my stairlift isn’t the fastest mode of transport to get downstairs, and even if I’m downstairs, if I’m sitting in my reclining chair with my feet up, I have to wait for the leg rest to lower before I can get out of the chair. One knock though and they’re off, and many a time I’ve arrived at the front door to find them half way up the drive or gone. It gets to the point that if you’re waiting in for a delivery, you worry that you might miss them if you nip to the loo! Similarly, having a bath or a shower or getting changed is problematic, and you find yourself every activity with waiting for the delivery in mind until it’s safely arrived.

Some delivery people also have a bit of a hard time reading delivery instructions. Recently I waited in all day one Friday for a delivery which never arrived. Eventually it arrived on the following Monday. The delivery guy claimed it hadn’t actually been delivered to their depot by the company until Friday evening, while the company claimed it had been sent to them on the Thursday evening. Of course the company weren’t contactable over the weekend, so I had to wait until the Monday anyway to sort it out. Then there’s the courier who can’t tell the difference between morning and afternoon.

When ordering online with Next you can specify whether you want delivery before or after 1pm, which is rather handy because at least then you’re only hanging around half a day waiting. The courier though has a bit of a problem with following these instructions, and invariably the package arrives whenever they feel like delivering it despite which option you’ve chosen.

Having said that, the speed at which some retailers deliver can be amazing. I once ordered something from Next one evening around 11pm, thinking it would be a couple of days before it arrived, but it arrived by 10am the next morning! Mr Amazon can be quite speedy as well, particularly if you use their “Prime” service, though I’ve known things using their standard free service to arrive at the same time as standard free delivery items.

In general though I think far too few companies and delivery companies offer the option of specifying a time-slot for delivery, or at least giving you an idea of when they’re going to be delivering. Having things delivered to an alternative address isn’t always an option. In the past I’ve tried to have things delivered to work if I’ve known a delivery’s going to arrive on a day I’m at work, but that doesn’t always go according to plan either. Working in a fairly large organisation, all the post’s dealt with centrally and then distributed out to the different departments, so you have to wait for it to be distributed to the department before you can get it. Even having things delivered to the main reception isn’t without problems. It used to be the case that if a parcel arrived for an individually named employee, you’d get a phone call from reception when the parcel arrived and you’d go and collect it from the main reception. No more though. Anything that comes via the reception gets sent off to the department, with the result that a couple of years ago it took me two hours to track down a parcel that had got lost between the main reception and the department. Then there’s the problem that my manager for some unfathomable reason insists on having all the team’s mail delivered to her and then she doles it out. When it’s going to arrive depends on when she manages to wander down to our office, and whether she’s in meetings or out somewhere or having a day off. It’s not unknown for things to land on your desk three days after they’ve actually arrived in the building!

There’s also the problem of which delivery address you can use. On eBay now with most sellers they’ll only deliver to the registered PayPal address. Recently when I was away staying with relatives and I needed an Amazon order to get to me urgently, I could only specify a new delivery address if I added a new credit card to my payment methods, which was apparently a “security measure.” As it happened, I did have another credit card I could add on to my account, but had I had only owned one credit card I’d have been stumped. If you get an item Special Delivery or Royal Mail Tracked and you’re not in when they try to deliver, you can’t then have it delivered to alternative address. *sigh*

Companies should dig out their major contracts and read the clauses on ‘force majeure’ to prepare for arguments that a swine flu pandemic could render contracts meaningless, a legal expert has said.

Commercial contracts carry ‘force majeure’ clauses which say that major unforseeable events outside of either party’s control can relieve companies of their contractual obligations.

Technology law expert David McIlwaine of Pinsent Masons, the law firm behind OUT-LAW.COM, said that if swine flu becomes a major problem in the UK then companies might start to try to invoke force majeure clauses.

“If suddenly half your workforce is out sick and you are a major IT services company and obliged to deliver certain service levels then you might invoke the clause,” he said. “It becomes even more difficult because probably your customer is operating with staff working from home.”

McIlwaine said that there are no examples of companies going to court to enforce force majeure clauses in relation to plagues or illnesses, but that most cases are settled out of court.

The swine flue illness is already reported to be disrupting business. A Google call centre in Hyderaba in India was shut down last week and 100 workers sent home after one tested positive for the illness.

Personally I think the media (particularly the newspapers – the TV broadcasters seem to be slightly more responsible) are making a mountain out of a mole hill – huge headlines every time someone dies, but they don’t point out another 2000 people have recovered with no problems. Last I heard the total was up to 30 here in the UK, but more people die in a normal seasonal flu outbreak than have died so far (but I guess that doesn’t matter to the media because it’s mainly elderly people). The BBC also keep stressing that you shouldn’t worry because it’s people with underlying health conditions who are most at risk (no advice for those of us with underlying health conditions though), so that’s okay then… *sigh*

As usual everyone goes into panic mode and the slightest sniffle they’re convinced they’ve got it. We’ve already had four people at work who’ve apparently had it (including one who apparently started with it on Sunday but yet came back today looking decidedly perky *rolls eyes*). The supposed victims of swine flu they keep rolling out on the news all seem to be looking decidedly perky for someone who’s supposed to have flu. With ‘normal’ flu, if you have real flu, not just a bad cold (which many people seem to think is ‘flu’) you feel that ill you can hardly move!

The symptoms the government are listing are so vague that most people who are feeling unwell could be classed as having it. Based on the list of symptoms, with “headache”, “weakness and fatigue” and “aching muscles and joints” I could say I’d got it, but they’re symptoms I have most days, and if I decided I’d got flu every time I had those symptoms I’d never work!

The fact that they’re not actually testing for it means no-one’s got any real idea how many people have got it or had it, and I’d say the real number’s a hell of a lot lower than the figures they’re reporting.

This week at work those alcohol gel hand wash dispensers have appeared near all the doors and we’re supposed to use them to clean our hands every time we go out or come in. Hmmmm….like, yep, we’ve got absolutely no work to do and we’ve got time to go off and wash our hands every time we leave the office… *sigh*

Maybe, if as predicted, the second wave of the pandemic (if it comes) will be in a worse form, but at the moment I think it’s all something of an over-reaction. With previous pandemics like the flu outbreaks in the early 20th century there wasn’t anything like the medical care we have these days, or any sort of vaccines (nor did people fly around the world spreading these diseases), and many people lived in none too sanitary conditions anyway and weren’t as well nourished as we are nowadays, so were often more succeptable to all sorts of nasty bugs, and it was common for common conditions we class as “minor” conditions these days to kill people. We have better healthcare, on the whole our living conditions are a lot better these days, and we have fewer complications when we do get ill than our ancestors did. In the 1920s/1930s three of my grandparents’ siblings died from what are now “minor” conditions. The number of people affected by a condition these days isn’t necessarily an indication of the “seriousness” of it, at least here in the ‘west’ where living and healthcare standards are higher.

Anyway, in the meantime I had one of those informational emails this morning – it said…”If you get an email saying you can catch swine flu from tinned pork, just delete it because it’s spam”

Of course there’s always those who think that as long as a page validates and images have an ‘alt’ attribute that their page/site is accessible. I guess in those cases what’s needed is more education and continuing development and learning. No-one knows it all when it comes to accessibility, even the accessibility gurus don’t know it all (and they tend to freely admit that – probably with the exception of useability expert Jakob Nielsen, whose views on useability tend to be rather inflexible), and there’s always more to learn, new techniques, technologies, and opinions on what’s best practice when it comes to accessibility.

The article debunks the usual whining reasons from lazy and/or misinformed developers who don’t get why accessibility is important (you know the kind of thing – accessible design is boring, it’s too expensive, they don’t have disabled visitors anyway, etc. etc.), but most importantly the article gets across that what’s needed is a wholesale shift in the mindset that accessibility’s an optional extra (which of course it isn’t – especially if you’re a business covered by disability legislation).

Probably the most important thing though that the article says, apart from the premise of the entire article of inclusion, is that what we need to get away from (which is what the principle of inclusiveness promotes) is that there is a “them” and “us”. It’s something I’ve long argued is a problem in many areas; that for some reason humans seem intent on separating people into groups and labelling those who don’t share the same characteristics as the majority as “them”. It’s a concept I just don’t get, but that’s another discussion.

Probably my second favourite paragraph in the article is this one:

Once we embrace inclusiveness, it becomes difficult to marginalize others as members of one specific group, such as “users with disabilities.” If we discard “us” and “them” thinking, we stop looking for reasons to avoid accessibility, and we begin to see others’ needs as our own. With inclusion, we don’t dismiss web accessibility requirements, we see them as a chance to create empowerment by embracing our similarities and differences.

As the article says, if you stop looking at groups of people as “other” and concentrate on the similaries we all share, you realise that many of the needs of making a website useable and accessible are common to us all. My favourite line in the article though is this one:

What does your website sound like? Turn off your style sheet and look at what you’ve got. Suddenly the person listening to a website with a screen reader is no longer different from you—your needs are the same.

Good advice, and something we should all probably do with our sites, even if we think we know how to make a site accessible and what accessibility means, because chances are there’ll be quite a few things we’ve missed or simply not considered.

An interesting read.

After probably getting on for two years spent glued to my keyboard staring at the screen, with the only screen I’ve been watching coming with a keyboard attached, over the past couple of months I’ve actually started watching TV again.

I’ve discovered a number of things…

• Unless you’re a teenager/early twenty-something and drunk, most of the stuff on BBC3 really is CRAP! It’s full of banal tripe which is aimed at the lowest denominator, what my friend Carol would call the “underclass”
• Late evening TV is choc-full of what are now apparently termed “rom-coms”. Now quite where this ridiculous name has come from I really don’t know. These days there seems to be an obsession with abbreviating absolutely everything and giving things “cool” new names. Presumably these “cool” new names are aimed at that underclass again, and are, in the case of “rom-coms”, intended to try and disguise the fact that they are infact romantic comedies, and there isn’t an original one amongst them. That said, some of them are amusing (a bit) in a cheesy kind of way.
• There is a seemingly endless supply of episodes of CSI and its various spin-offs…at least it would seem so if you watch evening Channel 5. (Not that I’m complaining, as I do quite like the various permutations of CSI)
• Actually, some of the films are quite good
• Since we’ve now got Freeview since I last watched TV regularly, I’ve discovered that though there is a fair share of crap on TV, and repeats, that many of the repeats do bear repeating, and that the crap is avoidable, and contrary to my father’s regular assertion that “there’s nothing on worth watching”, there’s still a fair bit of quality programme making going on, and there’s quite a bit that is worth watching.

So what have I been watching this week? (hence the title of this post)

Well firstly was BBC1′s Top Gear (Sunday 19th July, 8pm, BBC2). Now I should say before I start that my interest in the inner workings of cars is practically non-existant. Their inner workings were never that interesting to me anyway, but when you can’t actually drive them because you can’t see the road clearly enough/see enough of the road, are too dopey due to oodles of medication, and such things, they kind of lose their appeal. I couldn’t less how many cylinders a “blah blah blah” has got and so on, but Top Gear really is totally fucking hilarious! Three grown men who really should know better rambling on about cars, which one’s better, the mechanical details of individual cars, which one’s the fastest, gearing ratios, and such like. You really wouldn’t think there would be anything amusing about that, but actually, since I last saw Top Gear it really has changed out of all recognition and has morphed into a cross between ‘Carry on Driving’ and a mechanically oriented version of Dick and Dom in “da bungalow” (is that still on?).

Last week’s episode, amongst a celebrity doing a lap in a modestly priced car, the latest news from the motor world, and such like, there was a challenge for the three presenters, Jeremy Clarkson, James May, and Richard Hammond, to each buy a rear wheel drive car, and then undertake various challenges in an attempt to prove that rear wheel drive cars are better than modern front wheel drive cars.

Their challenges including driving across France in their purchases, testing the braking distances of the cars, attempting to drive their cars up a very crunchy gravel driveway and park it outside a house in the early hours of the morning to simulate being a teenager out past curfew time, and taking part in a race on an ice track in the Alps, amongst other things. During the journey and the challenges they managed to drive one of the cars into a drum-kit, ripped the roof off one of the cars, Jeremy Clarkson learned to fix things (apparently a bit of a first), had a piano “accidentally” drop on one of the cars, and one of them ended up driving a Morris Minor, much to the horror and amusement of all, as aparently the Morris Minor’s owner’s club has declared war on the presenters after previous disparaging remarks about

This gives you a nice texture which takes the ‘glare’ off a stark white page (works best with “natural” type themes) which is very quick and easy to do.

How?

• Open your favourite graphics programme (I used PhotoPlus X3 for this, but any graphics app should do it).
• Create a new image of a fairly large size (I used 100px x 65px)
• Flood fill the background with white
• Look on the menu of your graphics programme for the “noise” option (in PhotoPlus X3 which is my current new toy I’m playing with it’s under “Effects”, but it may be elsewhere in other apps).
• Under “Noise” you should find an “add noise” option, which is what you use to create the background image.
• Once you’ve added noise, simply save as a jpg (which gives a file size of just over 1kb, which isn’t bad for a background image). Using a jpeg format as well, you can slightly tweak the effect by playing around with the quality slider for the jpeg when you come to save it. Altering the quality of the final file you can get some interesting effects from the same ‘noise’ pattern at different quality levels
• Use tiled/repeated as the background for your page!

The settings I used for the “add noise” step were…

In PhotoPlus X3…”Coverage” at 10% with a “uniform” distribution.

To get a similar effect in Paint.NET (which is the other graphics app I use regularly) I used:

• Intensity: 40,
• Colour saturation: 0
• Coverage: 70.

Basically have a play around and have a look what it looks like tiled and play about with the settings until you’re happy with the effect.

This is my resulting background image…

Background image produced with Paint.NET

…and:

Background image produced with PhotoPlus X3

As usual my absence can be explained by the continuing medical dramas in my life and me generally feeling crap. My medical adventures over the last few months have involved scans, ultrasounds, x-rays, cystoscopies, urodynamics testing, being hooked up to the mains for neurological tests…as usual with my body that hates me, just when I think nothing else can go wrong with it, something else does.

On the positive side, finally, earlier this year (I think it was around April time) we finally got the go-ahead from the PCT for getting the testing strips for my INR prescribed on the NHS, so finally I was able to start with the self-testing. This has made a huge difference, cutting down the amount of appointments I need and the time I’ve been needing off work for medical appointments, and of course associated sitting around in waiting rooms. Recently I went away for 10 days, and as my INR’s been going haywire recently after I was given some antibiotics before a medical procedure I’ve been needing to test my INR most weeks, I was able to test my INR while I was away without the hassle of having to register with a local doctor and going for blood tests etc. It takes only a few minutes to set up and test my INR, and then I just phone my GP to get my warfarin dosage. I’m getting pretty good though at guessing what the dosage is going to be and how long before re-testing, and mostly I guess right what my GP’s going to say. I did have a bit of a panic before my trip away when I ran out of testing strips and it turned out the prescription I’d got was for the strips for the old version of my testing machine, which aren’t compatible with my machine. When I couldn’t get the right strips from any of the local chemists before I went, fortunately the practice manager at the surgery saved the day, letting me borrow some of the surgery’s test strips until mine arrived.

In the midst of all the medical dramas Bliss had a couple of months of practising getting back into writing mode (not that we’ve made much progress on that front), I had a long and frustrating battle with beauocrasy, and I’ve had the usual battle with managing to keep my hours up at work. Other than that things are pretty much the same except that I’ve started to put my “getting things back on track” plan into action, and I’ve given up the support forum. This means I’ve actually got time now to do things that don’t involve being glued to the keyboard all day every day, and I’ve actually started watching TV again – yay!

Normal service shall now resume.

I’ve never really been much into new year’s resolutions, but this year decided that I shall make a list of my aims and goals for the year. It goes something like this…

1. I aim to spend absolutely no time in hospital this year. None. Zero days. In 2007 I managed a grand total of 1 month in hospital, which is a bit excessive, even for me! 2008 I fared better and spent only 4 days as a resident of one of the NHS’s best establishments. For 2009 I’m aiming to get that down to 0 days, on the grounds that one of these years it’s got to happen! Routine clinic appointments and such like obviously don’t count, but we’re aiming for no time as an inpatient.
2. I shall be aiming to write something here every day.
3. (Bliss will like this one) Possibly doing some form of writing on one of my various creative projects every day is asking a bit much, and some days time commitments, prior engagements, and falling asleep at strange times due to the damned buprenorphine, make committing to creative writing every day a bit of a tall order. Instead I shall say that I will commit to doing some form of creative writing on a weekly basis. As I have a habit of starting off new projects before I’ve finished previous ones, I shall start no more until all my current projects are finished. So that I make some progress on all of them, I’m going to be trying to do some word on each every week. Every year for the past four years I’ve said “This is the year for Fallen Angel” (long term novel project first started when I was in college, rather a long time ago now), but this year, though I’m not committing to finishing it (a couple of shorter projects that require less research will probably get finished first), I shall make significant in-roads into getting it well on the way to getting there.
4. I will make time to read every day. I did make significant progress on this towards the end of 2008 after I drew up a list of “must read” books and went shopping at Amazon, and am pleased to report I actually managed to finish two books in the space of a month, which is a first since IIH struck. Reading’s still pretty hard going at times (it’s a lot easier to read on screen where you can resize text as necessary), but I’m determined to keep up with reading, as not only is it good for the soul, but it’s also a prerequisite for successful writing – read a lot, and write a lot.
5. I shall not ignore emails in my inbox and let them pile up so it takes hours to wade through them all and to reply to them where appropriate, file as necessary, or otherwise dispose of (as I ended up doing yesterday, trying to clear the backlog going back to October!
6. Finally, I’m going to be me. Not the me everyone thinks I ought to be, or thinks I am, but the me I know I am, and that means no more hiding behind stuff and actually getting back to being what I want to be. Again, I made significant in-roads in progress on that in 2008, and I shall continue that in 2009. If everyone else doesn’t like it – tough!

And finally…

Update on my shunt(s)

Well my attempt at chronicalling my recovery from the op kind of ground to a sudden halt. Once I’d initially got over the op I got dug into finishing off a long overdue website for my cousin’s BMX club which was a race against time to get it finished in time for the launch of the club’s brand new racing track. Got there in the end though, and barring a few minor tweaks and the usual maintenance stuff it’s pretty much okay and my cousin’s highly delighted with the end result. I aims to please!

The stitches in my abdominal wound after the op were slightly problematic, in that when the district nurse tried to take them out, she only got as far as one before deciding my stuffing was liable to come out if she took out any more, and left them in a bit longer. They were in for the full 14 days limit before the body decides they’re most definitely a foreign object and protests, but all was well, and it’s healed very well, infact you pretty much can’t see the scar now already unless you know where to look, and it’s only a couple of months since the op!

As usual after shunt revision surgery involving the distal catheter (the one that goes into the abdomen) I’ve had the usual variety of weird abdominal pains that move around and shift (very amusing game guessing where the next one’s going to pop up!) but they’re settling down, and I only get them occasionally now.  At one point a few weeks ago I was getting some very weird and painful pains in my chest/abdomen/shoulder and was worried that I might have another pulmonary embolism, especially as I’d been off warfarin for a week before the op and then my INR had been way lower than it should have been for weeks afterwards (it’s gone the other way now, and it’s now way too high!), but it turned out to be some weird virus that was doing the rounds which my doc said was causing pleuritic type pain with a lot of people.

I saw my surgeon a couple of weeks ago, and he was very happy with my progress. He’d been slightly concerned about the abdominal wound healing well because he’d had to trim it before stitching, presumably because of all the previous scar tissue, but was very pleased with the result. Unless I have any further problems (fingers crossed!) he doesn’t want to see me for another year – yay! Still waiting for the referral/appointment for a new neurologist, not only to monitor me from an IIH point of view, but to investigate the left side weakness I’ve developed, and he’s going to chase that up for me.

My INR’s still going haywire, as it always does after I’ve been off the warfarin for any reason, and takes ages to settle down again. I’m still needing INR checks every week or so, as it’s either going way too low or way too high, and doesn’t seem to want to stay in range for any length of time. *sigh* Still also waiting for a decision as well from the PCT as to whether they’re going to let my GP prescribe the testing strips for the self-testing machine. *sigh* That’s something I really need to chase up in the new year.

Meanwhile I’ve been having other health related problems (you wouldn’t think there was much else left for me to get, and that I’ve already used up all of the conditions known by TLA (three letter acronyms), but no!) and I’m hoping to get a referral to a specialist in the new year. More on that later though.