ProfessorTomoe

Let's see if we can consolidate some of the "what are you eating/drinking/breathing" threads into this one. I am currently ingesting Crystal Light tea. Just had some hummus & pita chips beforehand. I'm considering getting a glass of Bulgarian buttermilk (I was shocked that my local Albertson's actually had the Bulgarian style! Nom.).

As with the thread from the previous incarnation of the board, I begin this one with a request that the information within remain confidential. This is a thread for those seeking support as they deal with very sensitive situations involving either their own or a loved one's health. Please let this be a thread where such information can be shared with a level of trust. Now, back to the topic at hand. I picked up my second filling of Brintellix yesterday—all $141 of it, for a month's supply. I find it odd that it is an antidepressant, yet the price is so high that it is depressing just to purchase it. As for its effects, I'm still getting used to them. I haven't been able to sleep for more than three hours at a time for a couple of weeks now. When I do wake up in the middle of the night, I'm not groggy. In fact, I feel for at least a short time that I've had a decent night's sleep. That sensation only lasts a few hours, though. I don't crash out—I just sort of fade to the point where I need to sleep again. Very weird. I've also lost weight. Not a lot, but every pound counts, and it's been a slow and steady drop. Some of this might be related to the small dose of metformin that I'm on (my A1C hit 6.5 again, causing my primary doctor to freak out). I seriously don't know. Whatever the reason, it made my cardiologist happy at my appointment yesterday. Speaking of cardiologists, mine determined that I am status quo as far as my PVCs are concerned. He hasn't seen them in the short 30-second EKGs he runs at every appointment, but the memory of my Holter monitor results from several years ago is enough to keep him on his toes. Still, he saw no reason to increase my lisinopril or to add a beta blocker to my shoebox full of medicines. I hope this thread will be as useful as the last one was. Thanks for any support you can provide.

Made this earlier today out of another meme I had on hand:

I did that. Either my alarms weren't going off, I wasn't hearing them, or I'd turn them off and forget that I'd done so. Go figure.

And there's always little Baby Swiss to be found running around.

"Everything" Ritz Crackers, topped with Bleu Cheese. Or Blue Cheese. Either way, om nom nom. I love bl(eu/ue) cheese in almost any form, save Gorgonzola (too sweet). My preferred varieties are, in order: Stilton Roquefort Bleu d'Auvergne Maytag Blue (a distant 4th) (Insert other blues that aren't Gorgonzola here) This said, it's become hard to get a really, really good hunk of Stilton around here. They all seem to come tinged with ammonia, a sign of being "past their prime" as far as I know. Roquefort, when you can ever find the stuff (if ever - I don't know if the Roquefort tax/ban is still in effect or not) is usually easier to get in good shape, but a lot more expensive pound for pound. That said, it's been a while since I've really gone cheese hunting. I used to do it all the time when I could get out and drive for myself, but alas, my prescription use of Dilaudid on a daily basis has made me a walking DUI (are you kidding? 40mg of the stuff a day??? I'd light up the drug tests like a neon lamp), and has sorely curtailed my cheese spelunking efforts. Mrs. Prof dislikes expensive cheese, primarily for the use of the word "expensive" in that last clause. Nowadays, I can only get what our usual stores (Walmart, Albertson's, Costco) carry in their limited cheese sections. Sigh. So, the next time you're having a piece of Bleu d'Auvergne, take a bite for me, will you? I would appreciate the thought.

Watching The Daily Show, a rerun from the last day of the RNC. Pretty biting stuff. In reality, I'm only watching it as a test of a Paramount+ install on my new Fire Stick 4K. I've migrated Paramount+, peacock, Disney+, Prime Video, FloMarching, and last but hardly least, YouTubeTV, to the Fire Stick 4K. It's running sweetly on a v6 WiFi connection, better I might say than the base Samsung TV ran with a wired 10/100 connection (the max wired speed it supported). I've also installed pluto tv, and quickly found the Sailor Moon channel, to the chagrin of the rest of the household. I am chaos personified.

Believe me, when you're in pain that severe, you want a farking schedule. Mine was 1mg of Dilaudid, every 6 hours. Still probably not as strong as what I'm taking at home, but it helped somewhat. (gulps down 16mg of Dilaudid pills for breakfast)

Side effect from hospital care: I keep expecting someone to bring my pain medicine IV injection to me, and keep forgetting that I've got to take my pills myself now. Fortunately, there's enough carryover that I'm not suffering excess pain or Dilaudid withdrawal from forgetting to take the stuff. I just have to take it when I remember it.

I was released from the hospital Saturday afternoon. The bone biopsy went long enough without growing anything to keep the Infectious Diseases doctor happy, so he and the hospitalist put their heads together and decided to discharge me around 4:30 PM. I've got to take a couple of antibiotics (Augmentin, Doxycycline) twice a day as a "just in case" measure for the next ten days, and I need to make a couple of follow-up appointments with my podiatrist and my primary care doctor during the week, but other than that I'm done with the hospital for now.

He took significant hiatuses (hiati?). They were usually worth it.

Oh, I HATE Mondays...

My surgery seems to have gone well, at first glance. There was a little bit of confusion pre-op, since the anesthesiologist didn't have the whole procedure on her charts - she only had the bone biopsy part. My doctor added the tendon stretching part to her paperwork, and all was well. They didn't make me move out of my bed, even. They did it right there, with minimal fuss and muss. Total time from start to wake-up was about 1 hour 40 minutes. Post-op pain is more-or-less under control, thanks to Dilaudid doses. They gave me 4mg in recovery, and I just got another 1mg 6 hours later. There was a brief mixup where my podiatrist tried to put me on a diabetic diet (I'M NOT DIABETIC, DAMN IT), but I spoke to the hospitalist and we fixed that right away. Phew. All I'm waiting for now are the biopsy results. I probably won't get those until Monday. Augh.

Bob Newhart is dead at 94. https://variety.com/2024/tv/news/bob-newhart-dead-comedian-1236077300/

The hives went away after a couple of days. Phew. Now I'm going into the hospital for the rest of the week, for a completely different reason. I've had a bleeding ulcer on the bottom of my right foot for about a year now. The podiatrist thinks it might be related to the geometry of my big toe bones. They don't line up straight. So, I get to have an MRI done (under anesthesia, due to my torn rotator cuff) to first look for hidden infection. If he finds any, he'll go in and get it. If none, he'll go in and fix the geometry of my bones. Let's hope there are no complications this time.

Richard Simmons is dead at 76. https://www.fox4news.com/news/richard-simmons-dead

A new old comic has been posted to the GoComics collection. It's called Eyebeam, and it's straight out of my college days (and post-college, since it went on for a good deal afterward). The entire run is online from start to finish. I highly recommend it for its avant-garde art style, stream of consciousness wit, and memorable characters. Remember to vote for Hank. The run takes a little patience to get into, but I guarantee it's worth it, especially if you keep in mind that this comes from the same college campus era (and area) that spawned Michael Dell. https://www.gocomics.com/eyebeam/1978/10/05

The NVMe saga has apparently come to a happy conclusion. The screws arrived today, and they were indeed different from the ones I got from Amazon. My son installed the 4TB NVMe drive using them, and we then took a few moments to do a slight bit of case dusting before reassembling the laptop. A few hushed prayers and crossed fingers later, we booted up the system, ran Disk Management to set up the drive, and voila! The drive worked. For anyone interested, it is indeed running at PCI-E 3.0 speeds, according to the Crystal Disk Info/Benchmark suite. It reads a tad slower than my Samsung C: drive, but writes just a bit faster. Crystal reports it's built to the NVMe 2.0 standard, whereas the Samsung 970 EVO is merely NVMe 1.3 compliant. Go figure. It's also running cooler than the Samsung, probably due to the graphene heatsink ribbon on top of it. Regardless of the differences, at the moment, I'm happy.

A new system drive for my Sager notebook is on its way, and will be here sometime during the day today. It's a TEAMGROUP MP44 PCI-E 4.0 4TB NVMe drive, ordered from Amazon for $253.29 including tax. Needless to say, I'm looking forward to its arrival with more than a bit of anticipation, and with just a touch of trepidation. The trepidation is due to the fact that the MP44 is a PCI-E 4.0 drive, while the interface on the Sager laptop runs at only PCI-E 3.0 speeds. I take some comfort in the knowledge that PCI-E 4.0 is backwards compatible with 3.0, and with knowing that some Facebook friends have done this same upgrade successfully. Still, I'm a bit on edge because of the ever-so-slight probability that the upgrade may fail. There's not much I can do to prevent it - it'll either work, or it won't. So, I'm going to back up the old Samsung 970 EVO 1TB with a disk cloning utility (R-Drive Image is my poison of choice), get a spot on my kitchen table cleared of laundry and cat food, haul my son out of his reverie in his room, and get started on the upgrade. I think I should probably take a Lorazepam or two before I start.

Shelly Duvall dies at 75. https://www.fox4news.com/news/shelley-duval-actress-dies

I have hives. At least, I hope that's what they are. I've got clusters of itchy, red, raised welts all over my groin, my armpits, and down my sides. The last time I had a skin rash this wide-ranging, it turned into Henoch-Schönlein purpura. It hospitalized me, formed terrible, crusty blisters, and took months to clear up. If you want to see just how scared I am of this crap turning into another HSP attack, go visit this gallery page of my web site (WARNING - NSFW - NOT FOR THE FAINT OF HEART!) and look at what happened to me in just a couple of days' time back in December of 2020. You'd be scared shitless, too.

While I was waiting for Mrs. Prof to scan the score pages, I listened to a recording of the 1st Movement of Bruckner's Symphony No. 2. The movement clocks in at around 21 minutes in length. I've arranged around 8 of those minutes so far, so of particular interest to me were the remaining 13 minutes of the movement. Bruckner takes you on a journey and a half to get to the end, but Good Lord, is the payoff worth it!!! That last minute is so worth the trip it took to get there. It's incredibly powerful. So, I now have pages 23 through 40 scanned and in my posession (don't ask me for a page total count, Mrs. Prof has the score and I'm not getting it back from her), which means I'm ready to work on the intervening minutes. Lots and lots of exposition. Oh, well. I've got the last minute to keep me going. And then there's Movements 2, 3, and 4... BTW, if you want to play along as I document this journey, here's a link to the recording I'm using as a reference. I bought a copy from Amazon. I suggest you do the same if you like it enough.

I'd like to use this thread as a way to highlight new releases of my music. Anyone else who has any music coming out is welcome to do the same. For starters, I've just released a song called "Ant Farm Melee" to my Bandcamp account. You can read all about it on my latest blog post. Please grab a copy of the song today!

I'm awake again. Waiting for Mrs. Prof to scan more pages from the study score so I can continue arranging. You see, the study score I bought is too small for me to work with, so she scans pages from it to PDF format, which I can zoom in on. Since her first batch, she normally does this while I'm working on previously scanned pages. It just so happens that I outpaced her while she was asleep this time.

Oh, don't get me wrong - this wasn't a creative brick wall, not by any means. This was a more-or-less physical brick wall. I hit it and my body and mind couldn't go any further.