6 days after my eye surgery
It has been 6 days after my surgery. My doctor told me on Monday that I had to lay down or sleep on my left side for the next 10 days. I can only get up for 10-15 minutes for some activities after every two hours of laying down in the day time. It is really suffering to be able to lay only on my left side. Every night, I will have to find new posture for sleeping. It seems like every posture is only good for once only.
The reason to lay on my left is to allow the air bubble in my right eye ball to push my retinal onto the wall of upper right corner of my eye ball.
I had both procedures called pneumatic retinopexy and scleral buckle.
Have my haircut
LA gives me a haircut this evening. It is short and cooling and easier for personal upkeep. Before the haircut, my hair was quite long, oily and my scalp was really itchy. It was difficult to wash my hair. I was afraid of water getting into my eye and got infection. After the haircut, I feel more comfortable.
Home Sweet Home
Finally arrived at home. There is nowhere else more comfortable than home. That’s how my eye looks like after the surgery.
A day after my eye surgery
One day after my surgery, I feel better and am able to get up bed. Two nurses came with a wheel chair in the evening to take me to the clinic so my doctor can examine me.
I have an “interface port” (IV Catheter in medical terms) installed on my left hand.
After the examination, my doctor says I can go home tonight or tomorrow. I decide to discharge tonight and I call LA immediately after leaving the clinic.
Eye surgery
The morning of Sunday, I was awaken by the nurses who came to change the bed linens. I could not eat and drink since midnight because I was scheduled for surgery at 0930. It was 0700 and a long wait.
About 0800, LA, Dietrich, YC and his wife came. They had not taken any breakfast but brought we some breakfast so that I could eat after my surgery. They waited for a while but I asked them to have their breakfast. Not long after they left, a nurse came with an eye drop to dilate my right eye. A while later, two nurses came in with a wheeled bed. It’s time.
I had already changed into disposable brief and a surgical gown but it was too short. I was given a longer one to change before they wheeled me to the OT.
When I arrived at the entrance, I started to shiver. I felt cold and I asked for more blanket. I was not nervous but I was damn worried because more than half of my vision had gone!
A moment later, Dr. Chan, my anesthetist, came by and inserted an IV catheter on my left hand. It was painful.
After some minutes of waiting, I was wheeled into OT. It was even colder there. They gave me another blanket. I had 3 blankets! I could only see the lighting apparatus and the ceiling. I could hear people walking here and there preparing instruments.
Another minutes later, a nurse told me Dr. Chan was going to start sedating me. I felt a tuck at my IV catheter. I felt my left arm starting from my hand was getting colder like ice. I asked, “Do I suppose to feel my arm like ic……….”
The next thing I knew was a nurse gave me a strong pat on my shoulder and called my name at my ward. I was too drowsy to open my left eye but I could feel something on my right eye and I just murmured “ump” to reply the nurse. They came to check on me a couple of times but I was still too drowsy to give a proper response.
Until in the afternoon, around 1530, when LA, Dietrich, YC and his wife came again and called me. I was so eager to meet them. It gave me power to get up and to respond.
Ouch! I could not open my left eye either. When I tried to open my left eye, I felt pain in my right eye which was covered with thick gauzes. I was told to sleep on my left side so I offered my right hand to them. It was so warm when they grabbed my hand.
LA fed me my “breakfast” then I chatted with them for a while until they left. They came back in the evening with Dmitry, CK (sister-in-law’s husband) and Choon (another sister-in-law’s husband). LA told me my brother and sister came by at noon but I was still drowsy sleeping away.
At night, after LA and the rest left, Sensei Pathma (my karate sensei) and his wife came. I was half asleep but I could feel someone touching my foot and called me sensei. I responded and both of us chatted for quite a while until almost midnight. I went back to sleep after they both left.
The vitreoretinal specialist and night before surgery
YC asked me to call Dr. Lim if I could admit to the hospital at 2000. YC said it was not possible that the op will be done right away as it was not life threatening. He was right.
I waited at YC house for LA and the kids to arrive. They arrived around 1900. We had quick dinner and shower and off we went to the Hospital. By that time, the horse shoe shape had covered more than quarter of the lower left corner of my vision.
I was admitted to the Hospital around 2015 and waited until 2100 for Dr. Lim to examine my eye. His presentation had reassured our decision that he was the right doctor despite of good comments from YC’s friends. He took half hour to explain in great details about my condition and my surgery procedures. He advised me to sleep on my right side. This might help to prevent or slow down the retinal from further detachment. The detachment was on the upper right of my right eye. I could have think of that. Our eye sees things in opposite sides. Bottom to the top. Left to the right. I was too worry to think about this basic science I learned from my high school. What an idiot am I?
The nurse wheeled me back to my ward. LA settled down with me and I kissed and said good night to LA, Dmitry and YC. They told me not to worry and rest well and they would be here in the morning.
I felt calm and I guessed I had accepted the faith. I slept on my right through out the whole night.
Retinal detachment
When I woke up in the morning, the horse shoe had became darker and bigger. It had already covered almost quarter of my right vision.
I quickly made a call to my doctor’s clinic and get the earliest appointment at 0930. We rushed down town and arrived at the clinic at 0925 but we waited until 1230 to see the doctor!
The nurse dilated my right eye and after a while the doctor examined my eye. He confirmed I had retinal detachment. He referred me to Dr. Lim, a vitreoretinal specialist in Kuala Lumpur and arranged with him for an urgent surgery.
After paying the doctor, we made our way home and we began to called our relatives and family to inform them about my condition and urgency for an op. We arrived home by 1330. The house stirred into actions. Phones started to ring.
IS (my brother-in-law) was here in Melaka and we asked him to help. He sent me and my mother-in-law together with Dominik to YC’s (another brother-in-law) home in PJ. LA would and the other 2 kids would be in the other car and they pushed off later. LA needed time to pack for the kids.
Horse shoe in my vision
After I had a drink with a friend near my house, I noticed a small horse shoe shape in the lower left of my right vision. The horse shoe image was not dark and permanent. It went away when I blinked.
I knew my condition had progressed and rushed home quickly to call my doctor. Unfortunately, his clinic had already closed.
The horse shoe shape became darker and eminent a night. I told LA and decided not to wait until Monday appointment. We quickly made plans so that LA could send me to the clinic the next morning.
Suspecting internal bleeding
When I woke up this morning, I noticed a veil or curtain vision on my right eye. The image on my right eye is a little darker and yellowish. We were rushing to bring 3 dinos to the clinics for health screening.
On the way out, I suddenly noticed some dark floaters with smeared tailed. I began to worry. This seemed like some kind of hemorrhaging in the eye ball. After my children health examination, I quickly check the Internet and began to worry. I still had no clue what had happened to my eye.
I immediately called up an eye specialist in town and scheduled an urgent appointment. When I was at the clinic at 1430, and waited for almost half hour, the doctor finally examined my eye. He could not see much until he dilated my eyes. Again, it took another half hour to dilate my eye.
The doctor confirmed that I was having retinal tear and the tear was running across one of the blood vessel. He suggested to perform Laser 532 surgery.
Laser 532 is a green doubled frequency YAG laser with 532 nm wavelength. It is used to seal off retinal tear by creating a scar to prevent further progression.
The laser was very bright and I could hardly open both eye (my left eye was closed due to the reflex of the right eye). The doctor had to increased the power of the laser so that it could penetrate the blood clog. When he did that, I felt pain at each pulses of the laser firing. He could not stand the complaining of my pain and he stopped the surgery and scheduled for the next appointment on next coming Monday.
Because my eye was dilated, I could not drive. I called LA to arrange with my cousin BS give her a lift to the clinic. She drove me home.
When reached home, I immediately Googled “retinal tear”. OMG! This was serious. My fear began to set in after reading about retinal tear and retinal detachment and the surgery procedures to repair the retinal.
Floaters and flashes
While I was having a drink and chat with my friend at Roibo Cafe, I noticed there was sudden increase of floaters in my right vision. It happened around 1730. After a while, I saw flashes around the rim of my eye glass. It did not last long. I thought I was too tired and these might go away if I retired early that night. The chat went on until 1900.
Then my friend and I went to buy a birthday cake for my wife. That time was around 1930 and the floaters seemed to decrease.
When I reached home, I noticed some blurry vision (caused by floaters) after my bath. Still, unsuspecting any danger, I waited for LA to settle with the kids and celebrated her birthday.
We retired early that night. I retired around 2245.
Neutral stand point
Many people like to take the neutral stand when getting into the middle of a confrontation between two persons or organizations. They often like to say or do something that’s right without siding any parties. Fair enough.
But, little do they know that, they are taking side, right or wrong.
Like in karate, when an attack is directed to you, the moment you have decided to block or counter, you have already taking side. Either defensive or offensive, is to strike your opponent. The difference is where and how you strike. For instance, if you decide only to block a tsuki, you will have to strike your opponent’s arm. A neutral stand is to walk away from such attack or prevention before it happens.
Life is not easy. It’s complicated. It’s a paradox. How?
If you witness a murder, can you be neutral? Can you let this to consume your conscience? If you testify, you are taking the side of law. If you ignore and walk away, you are harboring criminals. There can be no neutral stand. There is always good or evil, you decide. A paradox, isn’t it?
A neutral stand point according to my paradoxical perspective is not to make any decision. The moment you make a decision, you have sided.
Atomic commit
I wasn’t quite sure what atomic commit meant even after my friends and co-workers explained to me. Atomic commit is a feature of Subversion. In Subversion book, it says:
A collection of modifications either goes into the repository completely, or not at all. This allows developers to construct and commit changes as logical chunks, and prevents problems that can occur when only a portion of a set of changes is successfully sent to the repository.
The text is very clear. But I could not imagine how it works until today.
I had a network failure a moment ago while I was committing some work back to my Subversion server. The power to the router was cut because something fell and knocked its power adapter out of the socket.
I quickly checked if my local and server copies are synced. Luckily, nothing happened. The copy on the server was not touched. Neither the copy on local. I was able to commit my local copy again to the server. Thanks to Subversion. If I were still using CVS, disaster could have been knocking on my head!
So what is atomic commit? If you have modified the contents of some files in, say 10 folders. When you do CVS commit to CVS server, the network is suddenly disconnected. What will happen if the commit is 50% completed? CVS does not support atomic commit. It upload single individual file after another from folder to folder. You have just committed 5 folders to the CVS server. The other 5 folders will not be committed. This will render the server and local copy out of sync. Huge trouble!
With Subversion, atomic commit will perform diff at local, then transmit all diff data and metadata to the server. The server will not commit the diff and metadata into its repositories if complete change sets is not received by the server. Therefore, when the above scenario happens, there will be no commit at both server and local. Hence, your local copy will not out of sync with server copy.
Pluto is fully operational
Finally, I’ve installed the two last components I required to work with, Xcode 2.4 and gnat 4.2 (Ada compiler). The Mac Mini comes with Xcode 2.2.1 so I have to download 958MB of file to install Xcode 2.4.
Pluto is fully armed and ready for real actions.
Dominik at One Month
My wife took these photos with a compact digital camera this morning after Nik’s bath.
Rsync
RsyncX is a Mac OS X GUI tool for running rsync. It is easy to use and is able to generate scripts for network backup purposes. When a backup involves works, it will most likely not be done. RsyncX can schedule and automate the entire backup tasks so that users need not to bother about the backup anymore.
I am quite new with rsync. The scripts generated by RsyncX can help me to understand how rsync works. It is a great application.
I’ve setup RsyncX for backup of Users folders on Pluto to Nix. I usually name my computers after planetary/celestial objects. I decided to name my Mac Mini after Pluto because it has a moon called Nix (sounds like Nik). Nix is one of the two small moons of Pluto. Nix describes the 30GB (small) capacity of the HD I took out from my G3 iBook. Furthermore, Pluto is smaller than the moon of earth, hence well described the size of Mac Mini.
Here’s Uranus and Nix.
Ultimate Warrior
There was a full contact championship in Kuala Lumpur last weekend. The event was called Ultimate Warrior. It’s a mixed martial arts full contact sparring championship organized by the Ministry of Youth and Sports of Malaysia.
My friend told me those losers could even receive RM500 cash prize if they lost in 1st round. Quite a number of participants. What the heck? Are these “warriors” lured by the cash prizes? It is like fighting in underground rink seen in the movies. Fighters usually got paid with huge awards. Where is the dignity of a martial artists? Is this right?
Phototherapy at home
Disclaimer: This is a follow up of the other post on August 29, “Icterus and phototherapy”. This is not a medical advice. Try it at your (and your baby) own risks. We will not be responsible for any health damage or fatality. Please seek medical advice.
Our sons, Dmitry and Dominik, developed baby jaundice after a few days of their arrival. Dietrich was lucky not having a jaundice at all. I think Dietrich has developed his liver well in the womb. He was actually overdue by 1 week. This could be the reason why Dietrich did not develop jaundice.
To help the baby with jaundice to break down the bilirubin build up in the body, it requires lights with spectrum about 75%UVA (400 – 315 nm) and 25% UVB (315 – 280 nm). A normal fluorescent lamp used for home lighting lacks of these spectrum.
Normal fluorescent light spectrum
The Sylvania 215W cool white fluorescent tube (very high output) provides some UV spectrum for this purpose. It may be hard to find this tube but anything close to it will be sufficient (cool white for aquatic plants). The intensity of the UV emitted is not high. It shall be able to aid the breaking down of the bilirubin slowly. To accelerate the break down, place the baby near window or door where there are scattering UV. A morning sun bath will also help.
It will be better if use three tubes. One UVA, one UVB and one cool white. The UVA and UVB tubes will provide full UV spectrum at higher intensity. I haven’t tries this combination. Common sense tells us that too much UV will harm the skin, especially the tender skin of a baby. Please exercise more care when using UVA and UVB tubes.
Please exercise great cautions and observe closely the progression of the jaundice. If it is getting more yellow and towards the feet and palms, please seek medical advice immediately. Observe the color of the stool closely. The color should turn greenish yellow. This indicates the bilirubin has been broken down and discharged out of the body. Give plenty of water to avoid dehydration. Cover the eyes with something. UV and bright lights are harmful to baby’s developing retina.
Again, this is only our experience and research about using right spectrum for the purpose. It is not to replace professional medical assistance. Use at your (and your baby) own risks. We will not be responsible for any health damage or fatality.
Good luck!
A pet for my Mac Mini
My new Mac Mini has finally had a memory upgrade (2GB!). I found an interesting Widget called Chi Pet. It is a kind of plant that grows on a tortoise. Nice graphics that convinced me to adopt one for my Mac Mini. It will grow every 2 or 3 days. Let’s see how it looks like after 2 or 3 days.
Memory upgrade
I collected 2 pieces of 1GB DDR2 SDRAM from vendor this Tuesday at PJ. I decided to spend a few more days to research HOWTO open the Mac Mini to perform the memory upgrade. One of the common and recommended (by Apple) method is to use a putty knife while the other less common but effective method is to use network cables to hook onto the clips of Mac Mini.
I tried the second method this evening but found it hard to catch the clip with the wire. I finally managed to hook onto the clip but did not manage to pull the clip to a “snap”. And there is a danger to cut the hand with the wire because it is slippery.
I decided to get a putty knife. After my dinner and a quick bath, out I went to a nearby shopping complex to buy a putty knife. It cost me RM1.70.
I took less than 5 minutes to open the Mac Mini with only two insertion. After opening up the casing, I found that the internal was different from the older Mac Mini (PPC version). The memory bay was not at the side. It was hidden under the drive cage. I managed to identify four (4) screws that hold the drive cage to the chassis. I unscrewed it but did not manage to flip the drive cage out. Fortunately, I was able to hold up the drive cage at the other end and allowed my finders to slip in to unsnap the memory latches and took out the two pieces factory fitted memory. I put in the new 2 x 1GB SDRAM, put back and tighten the screws on the drive cage and then put the Mac Mini back into her casing. I used some caution when snapping the Mac Mini into the casing. It was quite easy though.
The entire process took only 47 minutes.
Born Again
Although she sports a Core Duo 1.66GHz, with the default 512MB memory, she worked like a wheeze and sometimes, large applications like Acrobat Pro, iTunes 7 and Safari stopped responding.
I powered on and the boot up was faster. I quickly launched a few applications, like iTunes 7, Skype, Safari, Firefox, Mail, GimpShop, Acrobat Pro and NeoOffice. I could see increased speed and performance. Now my Mac Mini worked like a breeze.
Shitty karate sportsmanship
There was a tournament organized by KARAMET at MMU on last Sunday. I went there together with a student of mine.
Many KARAMET “friends” were surprised to see me there. The tournamnet was a closed event only for KARAMET members and there was no publicity. I am sure they will guess how the hell I come to know about this tournament.
Sadly, I could see some unhappy (besides surprise and doubtful) expression on most faces. Raymond was the only person who came to say hi and to chat with me for a while. Thanks Raymond.
How about the others? Some walked pass my side and pretended never see me. Can you imagine passing next to a 6′3″ guy and not seeing him?
What shitty sportsmanship do they have?
This was a crappy and unfair tournament. A 14 year old (possibly 15 year old now) girl participated in women kumite below 48kg and fought with girls of 20/21 years of age. Although this girl had an experience fighting in National Junior Championship this April, it did not seem applicable in a women category where her opponents were older than her. This was not proper as far as sports was concerned.
This had already happened in the same tournament last August when I was still with KARAMET. The same girl had lost in girl individual kata but Chua (the MMU instructor) put her back into women senior individual kata and she bagged a gold. My students asked me how could she compete in another event because her name was not in that event. And they asked me why they were not informed so that they could participate too. I was stunned by the questions. I told them not to be greedy. I was happy that my students were able to see such shitty things in adults’ management. It was shameful to have such practice, especially in karate-do. Where are rightness and justice, I ask? Today, I am happy I am out of such shitty things.
The tournament was organized by a karate-do association of the central district of Melaka and sponsored by a government agency of Melaka. How could they not inviting other dojo/club? I see no difference between KARAMET and MAKA because both management are practicing monocracy and tyranny. It is disappointing to see how these organizations manipulate and capitalize on the ignorance of government agencies. Perhaps it is time to educate the government agencies about real karate-do and the way the public fund should be utilized for the benefits of all without discrimination and autocracy.
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