Good News and Bad News

The GOOD news is that little James was taken off the ventilator, started breathing with a bit of help, and has been holding his own.

The chest X-Rays still indicate he has pneumonia, but his lungs are slooooowly clearing up.

He apparently will NOT need a permanent tracheotomy, which would deprive him of his ability to make the sounds that he uses to interact with his family.

My wife just left to see him, and says they're planning on taking him off the "special" oxygen they're giving him through the little plastic "nose tubes" like you see on TV, and giving him "normal" oxygen.

From doing some Wikipedia reading, I think what they're going to do is reduce the flow rate, rather than change to source/concentration of the oxygen.

So for now, he remains is "Closely Guarded" condition, still in the ICU, but has surprised every one, including the doctors.

Now for the "bad" news........

While the MRSA wound on my tummy (around the belt line....OUCH!) is healing very nicely, and the one on my leg is just a fading red splotch, my finger aint doin so good.

At my follow up yesterday, my Doctor (great guy!) express concern that by not draining, the infection could conceivably get into my bloodstream, with disastrous results.

Namely, it can settle on your heart valves, and that would be a Very Bad Thing.

So, he got out this really neat little "pocket cauterizer", which looked somewhat like a large flashlight, and explained the operation to me.

Since your finger nails have no nerve endings, he was going to *carefully* burn through to the nail bed in an attempt to get the abscess to continue draining. The original incision made when I went to the walk-in clinic has healed/sealed back up, and it did that before the antibiotics had fully knocked out and stomped on the MRSA infection that started this whole thing.

Hmmmmm....didn't work.

So, he then proceeded to "block" the nerves in my finger with Lidocaine injections (NOT pleasant) so that he could make another incision to allow the abscess to properly drain.

He couldn't numb the finger out enough to where he was positive it wouldn't cause me considerable discomfort while he worked on it.

We had an "interesting" conversation about all the nerves and tendons in the hand and fingers while I was gritting my teeth and doing my best to flatten a tennis ball in my left hand while he made injections in my right index finger, and I learned quite a bit about the mechanics of the hand while waiting for the Lidocaine to take effect.

After 45 minutes, and with an unacceptable amount of sensation remaining in my finger, he decided that he wasn't going to be able to properly perform the procedure, as he didn't want to inject any more anesthetic than he already had.

SO....we went to "Plan B".

He extended the length of time I'll be taking the antibiotics, and we'll wait a few days to see if the infection gets stomped down enough so that the normal blood flow can flush out the dead cells. If things don't look any better on Monday afternoon when I have my next follow-up visit, he'll refer me to a hand surgeon who has much more experience with blocking the nerves, and tinkering with fingers.

And I'm still not cleared to return to work.........

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Update From Hospital

They took my wife's grandson off the ventilator today, and after using the rubber bag respirator to get him "jump started", he began breathing normally, which surprised everybody, especially the Doctors.

HOWEVER....his O2 uptake isn't what it should be (my wife didn't remember the number, but it "wasn't good"), and the hospital Chaplain and the grief counseling staff were there before the Doctors disconnected the ventilator. They spent about an hour or so with the family discussing what would/could happen, and making sure the family's decision was "fully informed, and freely made" before they gave the Doctor the OK to shut the ventilator off.

My wife doesn't think they poor little guy will be coming home, and she said when she saw the "DNR" placard hanging on the bed, and "DNR" stamped on his chart, she just broke down and cried.

The Minister that married us was there with my wife (I'm not allowed in the ICU because of the MRSA infection I have), and helped her maintain some composure, for which I thanked her.

It truly is in God's hands now.......

Very Sad News from the Hospital

My wife just called from the hospital where her grandson is.

He can't breathe on his own.

The recent seizures and lack of Oxygen he's suffered from the breathing problems have most likely destroyed the part of his brain that controls breathing, or that controls the muscles used in breathing.

They made the decision this morning to terminate his life support, and do their best to keep him comfortable until he passes.

My poor wife is greatly distressed, and the only comfort I've been able to give her is to tell her that her dear little grandson is truly an innocent, and will be safely home with God very soon.

The loss of a child is truly a terrible thing, but soon little James will be able to run and play and do all the other little boy things he was denied during his short time here on Earth

Thank you all for your prayers and support.

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CCI 22 production videos

Amazing videos.

Go watch them here.

Off Work for Another Week.....

Got back from the Doctor's visit this morning, and although I'm healing nicely, he insisted I stay off work until the 8th, following another follow-up visit this coming Friday.

As long as the two abscess' I have are still draining, I'm still "contagious", and he doesn't want to risk my spreading this MRSA bacteria around.

It would NOT be good to have our minimal workforce decimated by this stuff!

And my sweet, loving wife has been washing all my clothes separately, with a good dose of bleach tossed in.

I wouldn't normally mind being off work, but with my right index finger all wrapped up, I can't solder!

Oh, well......it still doesn't stop me from messing around with my radios to listen and chat with other Hams.

On a side note......little James (my wife's grandson) seems to be getting better. They keep doing something to drain his lungs (a ghastly procedure, from what I've read), and while his lungs are clearing, he's still not out of the woods.

Dear wife will spend Sunday watching him with her oldest son.

CQ WPX Contest This Weekend

I was just cruising around 20 Meters after dinner looking for some slow-scan TV, and all of a sudden I noticed the band get packed with wall-to-wall signals.

Turns it's the CQ Magazine "WPX" contest this weekend.

The object of the contest is to contact as many different "prefixes" as you can, and exchange a signal report and contact number.

A "prefix" refers to the first part of a callsign, which is where the station is located.

For example, I live in the FCC 6th Call District, so every callsign in Kaliforniastan has a number 6 in it.

A typical callsign would be W6XYZ. Or it could be K6XYZ, or WA6XYZ, and so on. The "W6", "K6", and "WA6" are the prefixes to the callsign, and each would count as a separte prefix.

Foreign callsigns, like "PY" for Brazil, "VK" for Australia, and "ZL" for New Zealand, also have unique prefixes, but also have an additional "multiplier" factored in to their point value in the process of determining your total score.

Contests like this are a good way to make contacts with new countries, but since it's so brief "Roger ZL2ABC, copy 5-9 #444. Please copy my 5-9 #675", and very artificial, many people almost don't consider it contacting whatever area of the world you just "worked".

I'm kind of benign about contests. I operate in them once in a while, but mostly go to the 17 Meter band where contests aren't allowed. I'd much rather TALK to somebody on the radio, as in having a real conversation with them, then just give them a signal report, and move on to the next one.

Sadly, it seems the art of conversation is becoming rare on the Amateur Radio frequencies, as some people just don't want to do anything other than swap reports and say "73".

And that's a shame, given our reputation as "Communicators".

GROAN.....It's Still Pouring.....

WELL....the finger is doing much better, but I spent a couple of hours at the doctor's yesterday getting and abscess checked out.

The lab results came back from the swab they took of the finger, and sure enough, it's an MRSA bacteria.

Since the Keflex the walk-in clinic doctor prescribed me is totally ineffective against this particular strain, my regular doctor told me to stop taking it, and prescribed two new antibiotics for me to take.

Lacking lab results, I'm sure the doctor at the walk-in ordered what he thought was an appropriate antibiotic.

I'm now taking Clindamycin and Trimethoprim, which from what I've read is a pretty potent combination.

As far as the abscess goes, it started out looking like a pimple, right on my belt line, and got very irritated. Within 48 hours of having my finger checked out, it was huge, painful, and draining on its own.

The draining on its own was a Good Thing, as my doctor didn't have to open it up, but holy smokes.....it feels like a red hot poker jabbing me!

At times like this I realize how fortunate I am to have good quality medical care, a decent job, and a loving wife to "take care" of me.

No, I'm not playing it up, but she does make sure I follow doctor's orders!

And my doctor told me to stay home from work, get plenty of rest, drink LOTS of water, and come back Monday morning to see how things are progressing.

So, I'm off until Tuesday. With this bum finger and sore-at-the-waistband, though, I can't do any of the tinkering I'd normally do in my off-time, and that's a bummer.

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Heard Back from the CMP!

Well, just as with Old_NFO, they're saying 30~60 days minimum, but at least the order was accepted, and I'm "in the system"!

Time to order some of their ammo so I'll have something to feed "Duke" with.

We have received and verified your recent order. There is nothing that we will be able to tell you about the order until we have input all orders received ahead of yours into the system. Your order will now advance to our sales area and from there to our shipping area.  Please note, that unless otherwise listed, our order to ship time is at least 30-60  days. You will receive other emails as the order progresses.

Your customer # is XXXXXX. The order will not show as pending on the estore until the Sales Department processes and assigns an order number to it. If you have any problems logging onto the estore, please let us know.

Thank you for your order and your support of our program.

When It Rains.....It POURS!

Well, as if it's not enough that my darling wife and I are concerned about her grandson, I have a small medical issue of my own that just popped up out of nowhere.

Thursday night my right index finger started to get sore, and since I use lots of hand tools, all the time, I just wrote it off to getting old.

All day Friday at work I was soaking it in ice water, as it had started to swell, and it looked like blood was pooling under the nail.

Now I've smacked my fingers before with hammers, and gotten various wood and metal splinters embedded, but even though this looked similar, I've suffered no 'mechanical' hand trauma.

Saturday morning when I work up, my finger looked like a big purple sausage stuck on my hand.

Oh, boy......my wife took one look at it, about passed out, and said "Get Thee To The Clinic!", or something similar.

Thankfully they weren't busy, and the doctor saw me in about 10 minutes.

After poking around, feeling it, and squeezing it (ouch, Ouch, and OUCH!) he said I had some sort of bacterial infection, and he'd have to "Open it up and drain it", which just about made me pass out on the spot.

I gotta tell you right now, I'm a coward when it comes to pain, ESPECIALLY when it concerns my hands, and the sight of my own blood just about turns out my lights.

He said "Well, you can come back in two days on Monday to have your own doctor do it, but I guarantee it will be much worse, and delaying it is not good".

Groan.......

I gave him the go ahead and he went to get some stuff.

He swabbed it down with Betadine/Povidone, numbed it out with Ethyl Chloride, which is a type of freeze-mist for skin, lanced it, and squeezed it three times to get the gunk out. He also collected a sample for the lab to examine so they could find out what kind of bugs caused it.

He prescribed Keflex  to knock out the remaining infection, and Vicodin "as required" for the pain.

And they gave me a tetanus shot, as my records showed me as not having one since 2004.

It sure feels better, the swelling has gone way down, and it's no longer a purple sausage hanging on my hand.

I won't be using my trigger finger for a while, but I don't really need to when I assist my friend with the NRA classes.

We also went to see Bill Engvall at the Terrace Theater last night. He did a whole bunch of new material about getting old and cranky, along with some "Here's your sign" jokes, and his story about flying with the US Air Force Thunderbirds.

Laughter *is* the best medicine, and for a few hours last night we were able to just put the world on stand by, and have a good time.

Family Medical Emergency

Sorry for not posting, but this week has been pretty rough on my wife.

Her 9-year old grandson is in the ICU, and not expected to come home.

When he was about 6 months old, he started going into convulsions, and having seizures. They ran test after test, and all they were able to figure out was that it wasn't epilepsy or chemical exposure.

At the time, the Doctors said that in 95% of cases like this, they never do find out.

So, his development came to a halt, and over the intervening time he's developed a host of other medical problems.

He's had to be fed with a tube almost all of his life, and because
 he couldn't run around like other children, his skeletal and muscle development have been extremely abnormal.

Last week his parents noticed he wasn't breathing normally, and by the time they got him to the ER, he was gasping for breath.

Turns out he had a collapsed lung, and a massive respiratory infection, most likely caused by aspirating some of his food into his lungs.

They put him on a ventilator, and into a medically-induced coma, as he was thrashing around so much trying to pull out the breathing tube that they were afraid he'd severely injure himself.

Earlier this week they drained his lungs, and took him off the ventilator to see how he was breathing.

His oxygen uptake dropped to 30% as soon as the ventilator was switched off, so they put him back on it.

Thursday they drained his lungs again, and took him off the ventilator to see how he was doing. He didn't start breathing on his own, so they used the bag/valve unit to get his breathing started.

His oxygen uptake dropped to 5% this time, so they immediately put him back on the ventilator.

My wife went to see the little guy this morning, and they'd moved him into an isolation room. With all the antibiotics they've given him, his immune system is compromised, and they're afraid he'll get something really bad from all the microbes floating around in the hospital.

This afternoon we got word his kidneys are starting to shut down, and his blood chemistry is all out of balance, and they're not sure what, if anything, more than can do for him.

At this point I think it's out of the doctor's hands, and in God's hands.
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New Printer!

Well, my trusty, 9-year old little Brother HL-1440 monochrome laser printer suffered a cerebral hemorrhage this morning when my step-son's girlfriend tried to print a huge document.

One of the sheets of paper in the tray was wrinkled, and when it fed, it caused a massive paper jam.

It jammed so badly that the rear paper exit door popped open!

After farting around with it for about an hour, and having other things planned for today, I bit the bullet and bought an HP LaserJet Pro 200 Color Laser printer.

Now since one of the things I had planned today was to clean up the Radio Room, and since I had to literally tear apart the shelf unit that has my (poor, dead) laser printer, Canon Color scanner, and a good portion of the test gear I keep in the shack, it was a nice way to kill two birds with one round.

I was a bit leery of buying this printer at first, since the Linux Printing page (now "OpenPrinting") didn't rate it very high, claiming some of the functions didn't work properly.

And in fact, I had already run down to Best Buy and purchased the replacement Brother sells for my little HL-1440, an HL-2270DW, which the Linux Printing page states "Works PERFECTLY".

While stumbling around the Best Buy, I had noticed the HP printer, and the fact it was on-sale, my wife's two favorite words.

After I got back home with the new Brother, I thought about it, and remembered HP is generally pretty good with Linux support.

Sure enough, I Googled for "linux hp laserjet pro 200", and it took me directly to the HP Open Source support pages for their printers. After reading a bit, I saw that they have far newer drivers for this printer than OpenPrinting does, so I took the Brother back, and exchanged it for the HP.

I think the main reason that OpenPrinting kind of slammed this model printer, is that the driver you get directly from HP uses a closed-source "Binary Blob" similar to how NVidia supports their video cards under Linux, and this greatly disturbs Open Source people.

So, back to Best Buy to exchange it.

While I support Open Source, I don't have a problem with a manufacturer using some proprietary, closed-source code in their drivers, as long as the product works "As Advertised".

I preconfigured the printer for the IP address I used on my network for the Brother, and headed over to the HP support page.

The HP driver downloaded from Source Forge, and when I ran it, I was impressed with how thoroughly it asked questions, checked the system, found and downloaded the required dependencies, built the software, and installed.

Good job, HP!

Oh....and since this printer has built-in networking, I was also able to retire the D-Link print server module I had plugged into the printer port on the Brother, and eliminate a piece of hardware.

Now to configure my wife's PC, and the future daughter-in-law's laptop, and I can call it a night.

And I got the Radio Room cleaned up, too!