Birthday surprise

It was my birthday last week.  I hit the grand old age of 42.  Unbeknown to me, my son had given me an extra birthday prezzie.  He gave me Chickenpox.  I thought I had flue and I felt lousy on Thursday, but after a couple of hours of extra sleep and a couple of aspirin, I did not feel too bad.  Indeed, I worked all day Friday.  I did suspect that I might of got the ‘pox, but discounted it on the basis of having taught a few people who had heavy colds.  I was wrong.  The spots which started to appear all over my scalp late on Friday should have given the game away, but I did not think that Chickenpox broke out all over your head first.  Wrong again.  On Saturday, there was no doubt and I felt dog tired and spent most of the day in bed, while the spots erupted all over my face and upper body, with one or two managing to invade my legs too.

At the moment, I am writing this because I cannot get to sleep.  My head is itching, my back and face are itching and so is my tummy.  No sleep tonight I fear.  I’ve tried bathing in lukewarm water and taking a shower, but the itching just keeps on coming back and is driving me slightly mad.   The menthol talc which we got for our son has virtually no effect.  Apparently paracetamol can help to reduce the itching and the doc I called out confirmed this, only we have not got any in the house.  I did have some, but I think it went when my briefcase went walkies the other week.

I would not wish this illness on anyone.  It’s a real annoyance.  Heck I hope the itching dies down soon.

Yours itchily,

Alex ‘Chickenpox from Italy’.

Ideas.

I’m sure someone could establish a rule for this.  What is this?  Well, it’s our capacity to dream things up which, eventually, become reality.  Old Leonardo did it with the helicopter and other things.  H G Wells and other Sci-Fi writers have done it too.  What starts out as pure imagination often becomes reality, although the time it takes for fantasy to become reality can often be hundreds of years.  Although, having said this, I am almost under the impression that we are starting to turn dreams into reality much more quickly nowadays, aided, no doubt by the ability of computers to, in effect, accelerate time.  Manual calculations which would have taken years, can now be completed in seconds.  Thus speeding the rate with which we are able to transform our ideas into reality.

I’ve always found the Star Trek teleportation a fascinating concept, but it seemed no more than pure science fiction.  But now scientists are making the first few tentative steps towards making this particular fantasy reality.  This almost begs the question: ‘Where do scientists get their inspiration?’.  I’m sure more than a few have read quite a lot of science fiction and then started thinking.

If you can imagine something, it will one day become reality .  This is something I would put money on, although I doubt I would be around to collect my winnings.  Unless, that is, eternal life becomes reality, which it will.  One day.

Blue Ray – new tech, but old problems?

It looks as though DVD’s are about to be superseded by these Blue ray high definition data discs.  However, I’m not convinced that they are the bees knees.

Recently we’ve had a few DVDs from our local rental shop which have been, very annoyingly, stopping half way through our chosen films.  We do clean the things before popping them in the player, but the scratches these things seem to accumulate just seem too much for our player to handle.  This may be because the player is not that new, or this could be down to the overall fragility of these plastic discs as media.  I suspect Blue ray discs will be just as fragile, possibly more so seeing as they contain even more data than DVDs.  I know that error correction mechanisms are built into the players, but only thorough use will establish how effective this correction is going to be at overcoming the scratches and scrapes these discs seem to pick up through quite normal handling.

Now, what I would like to see is a solid state chunk of memory that is large enough to hold all my music and films, but that can be read on just about any player.  Such memory would be light, robust, and small.  Oh, and it would need a quite enormous capacity and would need to be able to be rewritten to many times, unlike flash memory which stops working after too many re-writes, from what I understand.   A nice small reader would be good too, something that could double up as a portable music player or that could transfer music to an iPod thingummy as and when required.  When you wanted to buy, or rent a film, or music, you would just take the memory block to a shop pop it into a reader, pay and have the film etc. downloaded to the memory.  Such an operation could also be done wirelessly or via the www.

The only slight problem would be that of back-ups, although I’m sure an enterprising company would allow you to up-load your index and then re-charge a new memory block in the event that the old one was destroyed by a fire or a three year old.

Just an idea.

The big meeting – My son

Well, we had the ‘big meeting’, only it was not that big and it lasted around half an hour including an endoscopic examination of my son’s nose, which revealed that all was OK.

Two specialists and one head of department and a couple of stray doctors were there to observe.  The scans were examined and it was concluded that our little one was too little to operate on and that the mass that had shown up on the scan was most likely just mucus.  I did ask about the possibility of the mass being a tumour, but was told that this was unlikely as the experts who had looked at the scan would have been able to recognize a tumour.  It was decided to keep little one on antibiotics for the indefinite future and to keep scanning every so often to ensure that the mass was not getting bigger.

Am I happy?  Well, sort of.  I’m not too happy about regular antibiotics and, after speaking to an old family friend who is a retired doctor, I’m not sure that the antibiotics are going to have much effect, apart from maybe keeping bugs at bay.  The possibility of inflammation was discounted.  So that was that.  It has to be said that outwardly, our little one seems to be very healthy and is growing at a pace.

The other one who does not seem too convinced is our wee one’s mum.  She has not said much, but I can tell that she is still very worried.  Mums are expert worriers, my own mum is a champion at this, and I know she is not alone.  Until you have children I don’t think you realise just how attached physically and emotionally mums are to their offspring.

I’m remaining optimistic, mainly because of my son’s general excellent health.  We shall see.  Only time will tell.

Big meeting on Monday

I’ve already mentioned this in the past, but the saga of my nearly four year old son’s swollen eye problem continues to drag on.  The actual illness seems to be ethmoid sinusitis.

My son recently underwent a CT scan (TAC scan over here) and this scan revealed that there is still an area of inflammation and that it seemed to be spreading.  An MR (RM in Italy) scan was then carried out and confirmed the results of the TAC, although initial worries about tumours appear to have been dispelled.  However, seeing as this here problem does not want to go away, we have been asked to attend a meeting/examination with the two specialists who are dealing with my son Martin’s case, plus a head of department, next Monday.

A daily dose of antibiotics, for almost twelve months now,  does not seem to have cured the problem.  And no attempt to identify the bugs which have been causing the infection has been carried out.  This worries me.  I’m starting to question whether the specialists know what they are up to.  To regain my confidence in them, I’m going to ask a series of questions on Monday, when I get the opportunity.  I’ve been wandering the www to find out more about ethmoid sinusitis and its treatment and, from what I have gleaned, the next logical step would seem to be some form of surgery.  Functional Endoscopic Sinus Surgery seems to be the thing to do in these cases, so I am expecting it to come up in discussions on Monday.  But I am not sure our little one is old enough.  I have also ascertained that certain potentially serious complications from this surgery can arise, although these complications do appear to occur only rarely. I’m going to ask about surgery and how much experience they have in this field.  I’m not letting someone who has never done this type of operation before touch my son.

Still, I just hope something can be done to cure this annoying problem.  Researching these subjects can be a little traumatising, especially when you come across some quite nasty situations which relate to what your little one has.  Scary.

As for my son’s general condition, he seems perfectly normal and healthy to look at.  And he acts like a boisterous little boy too.  Thinking about this: 20 to thirty years ago it would have been impossible to have carried out the kinds of deep scans they can do now, so understanding the problem would have been very difficult without resorting to surgery.  I do think that nowadays this problem can be dealt with before it turns serious.   Hope so.

Dell 6400 – update 2

I complained about the wifi on my newish Dell laptop in a few past posts.  The wireless signal used to drop so often that it almost became predictable.  Well, I finally got round to checking out the Dell site and I found an update to the Intel wifi management software.  This update has made a big difference.  Now it’s impossible to predict when the wireless signal will drop!