New Experiments, updates

I'm trying a new experiment. When I had my reconstruction, after I'd been returned to my room, they brought in a heater and made my room incredibly, uncomfortably warm. This was to help the blood vessels do their job in returning (or starting) blood flow into the reconstruction area. Over the course of the last 5 months, a couple of times the RDNS nurses have mentioned that whenever my dressings are changed, it cools the wound down, and it apparently takes several hours for it to get back up to the required temperature for healing to take place. I think I may have mentioned that I have either cracked my ribs again or the formerly broken ribs are now extremely sensitive to weather changes. Anyway, they hurt, and one of the things that helps make it feel better is keeping a heat pack on the area. The area where it hurts is just above where the wound is, so I'm thinking maybe the heat is helping both the ribs and the wound. I think after 5 months with this thing, if someone told me that standing on my head and singing Waltzing Matilda would make it heal faster - I'd try it!

My DDIL (Dearest Daughter in Law) will be having an ultrasound on the 23rd of the month and needs to decide whether or not to find out the sex of my grandchild. Oh, what a tough quandary. I didn't know the sex of my first child or my third, but middle son was a show off on not one, but two or three ultrasounds... and no one asked if I wanted to know or not, they just blurted out the news. So I've had it both ways. I think there's something special about not knowing, but in some ways it helped me to know a bit about who was kicking me from the inside... at least he had a real name!

I'm a bit wishy washy over which type of baby I'd like for my first grandchild. Happy and healthy would be the best kind! I'd just love a little girl to spoil, but a boy to spoil would be good too. The one thing that amazes me is this means my maiden name will live on in the USA for another generation. I've never had much thought about these things, but it's such a cool thing to realise. Like wow, a part of me, and all my family for generations behind me will be part of this new human being.

Rod needed more memory for his computer for some of the things he's studying right now, so we ordered him a couple gig... turns out the bios on his motherboard won't let him use it. So he gave it to me - and I've spent the last several days trying to work out why my CPU runs so high all the time. I've managed to get it down using some Tweaking Ubuntu sites I've found, but it still isn't right. I also lost my webcam for a day because Rod, who never seems to screw any computer component in, added a screw to my video capture card. It caused the opposite side of the card to not make contact with the board, so for a day or so my web cams weren't working. We managed to get it sorted in the end though, and he even apologized. I said I'm sure I send him around in far more circles and for far more time than what I spent trying to get it going. It's true, too.

So in the meantime, he's been working on getting settled with a newer motherboard and dealing with a corrupt partition, losing half his data (maybe), and of course in the midst of all this trying to actually study and do his homework. Ultimately the set up that he'll have is using Linux as his base system, and use VMware for Windows and any other linux flavours that he needs to work with for his classes.

I recently bought a new clock for in the bedroom. It's small, but the numbers display on it are huge, which is good, because I can see it without my glasses on. It has 8 alarm settings, but unfortunately the instructions don't really say how to disable the alarms without having to reset them completely when you want them again. So I'm just letting it tell me it's 8am every day and if nothing else, the early mornings help to keep my diet a bit more on track. As in breakfast in the morning etc. Both yesterday and today I've managed to miss seeing the frost on the trees by probably only minutes as the branches all had droplets of water but no frost. The grass was frosty though. Very pretty.

This weekend, I'm having a bit of a break from having the RDNS nurses. My skin has reacted again to the Alion dressing adhesive, so at the moment we're using a type of foam over the wound and using opsite tape to keep it in place. If you've ever had an IV, the clear plastic they use over top is what opsite is. It's a bit stretchable and for now at least my skin doesn't react to it. So by using the foam and opsite, it's giving my skin a rest from the adhesive in the Alion, and also allows 2 full days between changes. This in turn helps it stay warm and hopefully helps promote healing as well. It also means not having to worry about being up and dressed for the weekend nurse visit, but here I am up anyway.