Alin's Site

Great, you know about my left breast? The “boob”, the one thats abnormally large. Well it has a huge golf ball sized lump in it so we are making an urgent ultrasound appointment at the breast center, hoping it’s not cancer!

I spent a lot of my nights the last two nights not sleeping and working on stuff and it’s been really draining for me, so starting tonight people can WAIT until the next day or forget about it, my sleep comes first. I don’t mean to come off as rude to anyone but I have had it with this computer ruining my sleep and E-Mails coming in asking me to do things.

My new contact hours are as follows

Weekdays (M-F) 8:30A-12:30A (max 2:00A)
Weekends (Sat-Sun) 9:30A-12:30A (max 2:00A)

Sorry about the shorter hours people. But please know all messages here on the blog will be answered on the next day and same goes for E-Mails.

So tonight I’m gonna grab my Littmann and wrap it around my neck and relax with the smooth warmth on my cheek and lips around 12:30ish, I am burnt…

How I really sleep, my cervical support pillow and Littmann

But in other news as of now we have THREE Littmann’s on my ventilator, two of which are Cardiology III’s and one Lightweight, and you bet I tried ALL of them on my neck! Very heavy and warm in comparison to my old photo shoot I did. You also see me in this photo shoot in some positions that look like I am about to fall asleep, and Indeed I am! You also see in the set the exact position(s) I sleep in with my Littmann, it feels so good on my neck and lips, very, very, relaxing. and very warm on my neck. Click the photo above to see more

Me with my littmann on my neck

Today I got something very special via FedEx Ground 2 day Express. A Littmann Cardiology III (3) Stethoscope. Why you might ask? Most of you know that I am a certified respiratory therapist (by testing, not degree… yet) and well any CRT aught to have a great stethoscope to listen to lungs and hearts with. So I waited for a few weeks expecting nothing from AARC, the place that administers the test and PING there goes my E-Mail big time discount coupon for Littmann Cardiology III Stethoscopes, you think I took it or left it. I obviously took it by the horns, or should I say earpieces. And snagged myself a shiny black one on the cheap with my name engraved on it, it’s a beautiful stethoscope and as you saw in my post about me stealing my nurses and sleeping with it, you bet I am going to sleep with mine daily. Only reason I ain’t asleep yet right now, I would have been by midnight or so, is because of all the video and photo editing! Click photo above to view photos video is below

Holy crap, yesterday has been a living nightmare. If our house was a hospital we would be calling a code black which is natural disaster, we went through several power outages that lasted approximately 1 second each, but were very annoying and upsetting to the network equipment. During the worst of the storm yesterday we had triggered EPO switches (Emergency Power Off) throughout the house to save electronics from damages. We didn’t know that even though the worst was over we would STILL get these bloody outages.

It was only until 10 minutes ago at 12:02 AM That my dad informed me that WINGS Palatine Resale shop has burned down completely and according to insurance adjusters and ABC7 news the building is a total loss and that only the building is covered by insurance.

I thought dad was fibbing until I read the news at ABC and saw the below two videos, then I totally went holy crap, this actually happened.

And now I bring you two videos, please note if you are squeamish about seeing really big fires, then don’t watch them… You have been warned…

It’s a slow road to recovery from the major CO2 issue that cropped up this week, we decided to not go to the hospital and get blood drawings that would probably just come back normal at this point. My vent settings have been changed for the final time to 500 tidal volume breath rate of 20-25 depending on CO2 numbers. Right now as I write this post I am at 41 and I think I caused it by being off of the vent for about 4-5 hours today, I think I am going to need to limit myself to 1-2 hours off the vent and maybe try doing different periods, so like a morning off period, afternoon off period and evening off period. my ETCO2 numbers are a wide range today from 34 to a peak of 44 on the vent and an average of 40. Not too shabby, again, it’s gonna be a slow recovery from whatever happened. We are still going to closely monitor the situation and if need be go to the hospital for testing, but right now what is the point when the test will just come back normal?

Server goes nuts!

Your probably looking at the graphs above and thinking, what are they for. Well thats my web server’s processor usage. See the bar that turned red? that never happens in normal situations, so now your probably wondering, what happened then!!! One word, caching? Wondering what that means, well everything on this blog runs on PHP which runs a script to generate whatever you are looking at, that script uses CPU power of the server which adds “clicks” to those meters, so how do we avoid running PHP scripts all the time? we cache, caching makes copies of the pages that are standard already executed blah blah blah that do not require a new script run each time it is opened. What this means for you is a faster blog browsing experience. What it means for me is a lot more than just that! It means my server won’t be under as much load and can handle a huge amount of visitors in the event that does happen. So it’s a win win, thankfully Siteground did not file an abuse ticket against my account because I notified them that I was doing this caching.

Siteground has great policies and I again recommend them strongly if you are looking for a good web host with awesome tech support!

Me on my ventilator

Well my CO2 issue is a little bit better, we talked to the doctor yesterday and he gave me the freedom to change any of my vent settings to get the CO2 under control but also told me I need to stay on the vent as much as possible till this CO2 issue subsides. Tidal volume changes don’t feel good to me but I like fast breath rates so I cranked it up to 30 bpm and I am sitting here with an average CO2 of 37 with peaks up to 41ish which is OK! I have been exhausted by whatever is causing this, probably some sort of illness or my respiratory disorder. Either way I fell asleep around noon and woke up just recently… I never sleep during the day unless I am really sick or super exhausted. All these CO2 issues are tiring and making me sick! So everyone pray that it fixes soon!

I think that this could have been my fault for being off the vent so much and only on an HME versus the humidified trach collar.

In other news the Photos page has most of its major bugs fixed and the View all albums link has been moved to a more acceptable location, there is still a cosmetic bug though but it is now considered RC1 (Release Candidate stage 1) which is higher than beta, it means that it’s good enough to function but still needs polish on the edges.

Whenever you click on Photos now you will be taken to a redirect page and then redirected to http://www.alinssite.info/pics/ which is a new BETA photo gallery page, it uses the flickr API to pull photos. Remember how it said NO FRAMES and such and made you go directly to flickr? Well this is a better alternative however it is a BETA right now and DOES have a few COSMETIC bugs in the main page. The main cosmetic bug is the fact that the “View all sets” button is semi-hidden for some users. I hope to get this fixed once I roll out the final

In other news I have finally got my ICU monitor back, didn’t hear about it, lookie here. Anywho we have noticed that my EtCO2 levels are wildly out of control, off the ventilator I hit as high as 53mmhg when the normal ranges are 35-45mmhg and on the ventilator right now I am ranging from 40-50 which is bad, we can probably expect another pulmonary appointment out of this, but maybe not. I am going to give it a few days of close monitoring and no more being off the vent for me.

More news to follow on this issue. We are still code yellow though may change to code red if a doctor appointment is made with urgent priority. My pulmonary doc has been called and will call back.

Well yesterday was a day of lots of good deliveries, I had my respiratory, my enteral food supplies and even more important i got my new iPod Touch 3G and threw 4.0 software on it, it’s awesome!

In even better news I finally got my ICU Monitor back which is a very good thing, oh and did I ever mention I get too used to having the blood pressure set to go off every 5 minutes to the point its too comfortable for me to want to unhook unless I need to. I was the same way when I was in the hospital for 42 days, I told them not to change the timing as I went from ICU to stepdown and they let it remain same.

Never seen the monitor? Heres a link!

Today was moms anniversary, HAPPY ANNIVERSARY MOM

Me with the nutty girls

Me and Kelly walked from our house to Cafe 14 which is mom and her friends pretty much “staked out” lunch spot, we spotted a few cool things (literally) on the way and also some disturbing things. First the disturbing, Mar Ray Costume Shop that has been in business longer than I have lived here has CLOSED and gotten DEMOLISHED! Right after it at some place called Lamps, Shades ‘N Things has a problem with lawn watering, they used a hose with holes in it to “sprinkle” the lawn and plants, well apparently its giving the whole sidewalk a big time hose down and me and kelly got hosed. Thanks Lamps, Shades ‘N Things. Do us all a favor, us wheelchair users use those sidewalks. TURN IT OFF! I yelled out.

Moms van arrived at 11:23, a lot later than we arrived at 10:58 haha!

Frannie gave mom a scarf for her anniversary and mom loves it!

On our return back the sprinkler hose was off, hallelujah!

Click above for pictures of the event today! (LINK ADDED)

iPod sold in 3 minutes

In other random news take a look at above! I sold my old iPod touch so I could get a newer better third generation one and I sold it in 3 measly minutes! Jailbroken big deal, its first generation!!! Wow, someone really wanted it for something! I will post an unboxing video of my new iPod, it’s a refurb but big deal!

News that I can’t release much information about due to confidentiality reasons, I went to my psychiatrist today to get some medication refills sorted out that my regular doctor wouldn’t deal with, namely my anti-anxiety and anti-epileptic. I also had a psychological evaluation done and as many of you know I am subject to slight depressive episodes and sometimes very severe acute ones which I just had a severe one over the weekend. It was a real mess! So I have been prescribed a a low dose of Prozac to stabilize my mood and avoid depression issues. It is working well so far!

Here we go, It’s not all too accurate since Alinssite was recently switched to 100% WordPress based systems, this month will be more accurate so wait for June’s report to come out in July

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DisabledPlanet.net the forum has seen a recent spike in activity. Even moreso this month so we might expect to see a bigger spike this month on the year chart!

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