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Oahu, Day Two: Work & Diagnoses
Jun. 16th, 2020 03:09 pmSo this morning began the master plan: working in the morning and walking to see Kimberly afterward. And I'd already become leery of this plan when I learned that Kimberly's doctor made his rounds between 10-12, which was pretty much the latter half of my planned working day, but I thought I'd give it a one-day try. And that's exactly how long the plan lasted.
I was slightly leery of my workplace because my hotel-room desk got swapped out for a table when I moved up to the room with the kitchenette and the queen bed. I mean, it was a perfectly nice work space, it's just that tables tend to be slightly high for typing in my experience, and that was true here. I tried sitting on a pillow at first, but that was hurting my knee(!), so I ended up just sitting up very straight.
Good for my posture, I guess.
The work went well. I've been diving back into the Learning Bitcoin from the Command line course with a TODO I wrote up last week. It turned out that was pretty good to have because I could just get to the work rather than staring around like a dummy because I was in a strange environment.
It was a productive half-day. I got the Learning Bitcoin course synced up with Bitcoin Standup, which has some Debian scripts for creating a full node that had been derived from the scripts I wrote for the course. Well, we've now just got that one source instead of having to support two different things. Yay.
Next up I get to start walking through the whole course to make sure it all works and all of our output is right, since it's been a few years since I wrote it, and many versions of Bitcoin Core. That's probably at least a day of work. And I was going to start it tomorrow morning, but then I heard from Kimberly about this morning's doctor visit, and that got dropped on the floor.
One thing I thought while working and occasionally staring out the window: "At least in Europe the hotels clean their windows." Meaning that they don't here.
I have nice pictures I took out my hotel windows in Berlin, Barcelona, and Prague. The window here is at least as dirty as our Living Room window at home ... and that one's got paint specks all over it.
So Kimberly is having abnormalities in her EEG. We knew that, and they saw it again. But the EEGs are apparently of a "benign variant". To be precise, the doctor suggested they might be Rhythmic Mid-temporal Theta of Drowsiness (RMTDs), though a friend noted that Subclinical Rhythmic EEG Discharge of Adults (SREDA) is more common for adults.
Who knows.
Here at the Emu they're saying that because they're "benign variants" they're either not seizures or are non-epileptic seizures. (Some of these phrases like "seizure" and "epilepsy" seem to have a surprising inconsistency of use). But they're definitely "abnormalities" (and from the examples that I've seen, on line, not Kimberly's, they're quite abnormal, with electricity spiking all over).
Given that they're clearly causing problems for Kimberly, that really seems like a distinction without a difference.
But I guess the difference is that means that can't treat them with anti-epileptic drugs. Which is all kinds of great.
And "benign" my ass, because they're not.
One suggestion I've heard: that just means that doctor doesn't know what to do with them.
So, with that news, the Emu will be discharging Kimberly tomorrow, after they've had a full 48 hours, just to be sure.
They said we could just catch a flight home tomorrow, but the last Hawaiian flight is at 3.30 or something, because we're on a very limited flight schedule still, and I'd already paid for one more night of the hotel room, so we just decided to keep that and fly out Thursday.
Maybe we'll find somewhere nice to get food on Wednesday, and maybe I'll get to swim on Wednesday night or Thursday morning, we'll see.
We're going to get home mid-afternoon on Thursday.
I want to be a little cautious with all the COVID on this island (and the really poor public-health measures concerning it and causing it), so my dad is going to drop Julie back off in the parking lot for me, and I'll pick her up when I get there. And we'll probably steer clear of them for a week, just to be sure everyone's safe.
This car shell game is very bizarre.
And that's obviously the end of my work here on Oahu, because tomorrow morning I'll be going out to see the Doctor and try and ask some more questions, and then Kimberly will be returning with me to the hotel room tomorrow night, and then on Thursday I'll putter around, maybe walk down to Waikiki, and then we'll fly back.
Chris was entirely understanding. I'll get him another day of work on Friday, and we'll at least have managed 1.5 days for the week, just not the planned 2.
So I hung out with Kimberly throughout the afternoon. She tried to sleep, but there was a constant traffic of nurses and other staff, giving her pills, asking her questions, and checking her blood pressure (five times! no one likes Kimberly's low blood pressure!).
There was even a bit of Keystone fun when Kimberly's EKG kept get BING-BING-BINGing, alledgedly because it had a low battery. Even though it was running off of power from the wall.
Staff would come in, get it stop BINGing, and it'd start again as they walked out.
Again. And Again.
They did such high tech things as rebooting it, unplugging it and plugging it back in, and moving it to another socket. I think they finally figured out that the problem was that their computer program said it was running on a portable device rather than a wired device.
I heard at least two coded calls for the ER while Kimberly slept and I edited my current Designers & Dragons history.
I think we were at a big-city hospital in a way that even Berkely wasn't.
Had a nice talk with E. on the way home from the hospital. Good to have friends reaching out when times are hard.
It turns out that it's hard to differentiate the homeless and smokers on the streets of Honolulu. They're both sitting around kind of listlessly without their masks on.
(But if you look closely, the smoker is typically holding the butt of a cigarette.)
I enjoyed walking the streets of Honolulu more this evening than I did yesterday afternoon. Cooler, less sticky, fewer people wandering the streets, and I had one less suitcase to drag.
Somehow the streets looked a little nicer too. Maybe it was that I walked nicer streets, but maybe I was past the culture shock. Things just looked like a down-market Walnut Creek today (with more mid-sized skyscrapers).
I missed my hotel by a few blocks while talking with E. I ended up sitting down next to the Ala Moana Center. Kind of nice seeing commerce going on in a way I haven't since the plague started (not that I was going to go in on a bet, though the Target was tempting, as getting a new pair of pants was on my TODO list for our aborted Berkeley trip, as all of mine have rips and tears from hiking).
I enjoyed the cool air, sitting far from the people of the center until E. and I signed off and I walked the few blocks back home.
Back at the hotel.
Had a little bit of additional work to do that's done and now I can do whatever I want until morning, when it's back to the hospital to try and extract expertise and info from the doctor before he turfs us.
I was slightly leery of my workplace because my hotel-room desk got swapped out for a table when I moved up to the room with the kitchenette and the queen bed. I mean, it was a perfectly nice work space, it's just that tables tend to be slightly high for typing in my experience, and that was true here. I tried sitting on a pillow at first, but that was hurting my knee(!), so I ended up just sitting up very straight.
Good for my posture, I guess.
The work went well. I've been diving back into the Learning Bitcoin from the Command line course with a TODO I wrote up last week. It turned out that was pretty good to have because I could just get to the work rather than staring around like a dummy because I was in a strange environment.
It was a productive half-day. I got the Learning Bitcoin course synced up with Bitcoin Standup, which has some Debian scripts for creating a full node that had been derived from the scripts I wrote for the course. Well, we've now just got that one source instead of having to support two different things. Yay.
Next up I get to start walking through the whole course to make sure it all works and all of our output is right, since it's been a few years since I wrote it, and many versions of Bitcoin Core. That's probably at least a day of work. And I was going to start it tomorrow morning, but then I heard from Kimberly about this morning's doctor visit, and that got dropped on the floor.
One thing I thought while working and occasionally staring out the window: "At least in Europe the hotels clean their windows." Meaning that they don't here.
I have nice pictures I took out my hotel windows in Berlin, Barcelona, and Prague. The window here is at least as dirty as our Living Room window at home ... and that one's got paint specks all over it.
So Kimberly is having abnormalities in her EEG. We knew that, and they saw it again. But the EEGs are apparently of a "benign variant". To be precise, the doctor suggested they might be Rhythmic Mid-temporal Theta of Drowsiness (RMTDs), though a friend noted that Subclinical Rhythmic EEG Discharge of Adults (SREDA) is more common for adults.
Who knows.
Here at the Emu they're saying that because they're "benign variants" they're either not seizures or are non-epileptic seizures. (Some of these phrases like "seizure" and "epilepsy" seem to have a surprising inconsistency of use). But they're definitely "abnormalities" (and from the examples that I've seen, on line, not Kimberly's, they're quite abnormal, with electricity spiking all over).
Given that they're clearly causing problems for Kimberly, that really seems like a distinction without a difference.
But I guess the difference is that means that can't treat them with anti-epileptic drugs. Which is all kinds of great.
And "benign" my ass, because they're not.
One suggestion I've heard: that just means that doctor doesn't know what to do with them.
So, with that news, the Emu will be discharging Kimberly tomorrow, after they've had a full 48 hours, just to be sure.
They said we could just catch a flight home tomorrow, but the last Hawaiian flight is at 3.30 or something, because we're on a very limited flight schedule still, and I'd already paid for one more night of the hotel room, so we just decided to keep that and fly out Thursday.
Maybe we'll find somewhere nice to get food on Wednesday, and maybe I'll get to swim on Wednesday night or Thursday morning, we'll see.
We're going to get home mid-afternoon on Thursday.
I want to be a little cautious with all the COVID on this island (and the really poor public-health measures concerning it and causing it), so my dad is going to drop Julie back off in the parking lot for me, and I'll pick her up when I get there. And we'll probably steer clear of them for a week, just to be sure everyone's safe.
This car shell game is very bizarre.
And that's obviously the end of my work here on Oahu, because tomorrow morning I'll be going out to see the Doctor and try and ask some more questions, and then Kimberly will be returning with me to the hotel room tomorrow night, and then on Thursday I'll putter around, maybe walk down to Waikiki, and then we'll fly back.
Chris was entirely understanding. I'll get him another day of work on Friday, and we'll at least have managed 1.5 days for the week, just not the planned 2.
So I hung out with Kimberly throughout the afternoon. She tried to sleep, but there was a constant traffic of nurses and other staff, giving her pills, asking her questions, and checking her blood pressure (five times! no one likes Kimberly's low blood pressure!).
There was even a bit of Keystone fun when Kimberly's EKG kept get BING-BING-BINGing, alledgedly because it had a low battery. Even though it was running off of power from the wall.
Staff would come in, get it stop BINGing, and it'd start again as they walked out.
Again. And Again.
They did such high tech things as rebooting it, unplugging it and plugging it back in, and moving it to another socket. I think they finally figured out that the problem was that their computer program said it was running on a portable device rather than a wired device.
I heard at least two coded calls for the ER while Kimberly slept and I edited my current Designers & Dragons history.
I think we were at a big-city hospital in a way that even Berkely wasn't.
Had a nice talk with E. on the way home from the hospital. Good to have friends reaching out when times are hard.
It turns out that it's hard to differentiate the homeless and smokers on the streets of Honolulu. They're both sitting around kind of listlessly without their masks on.
(But if you look closely, the smoker is typically holding the butt of a cigarette.)
I enjoyed walking the streets of Honolulu more this evening than I did yesterday afternoon. Cooler, less sticky, fewer people wandering the streets, and I had one less suitcase to drag.
Somehow the streets looked a little nicer too. Maybe it was that I walked nicer streets, but maybe I was past the culture shock. Things just looked like a down-market Walnut Creek today (with more mid-sized skyscrapers).
I missed my hotel by a few blocks while talking with E. I ended up sitting down next to the Ala Moana Center. Kind of nice seeing commerce going on in a way I haven't since the plague started (not that I was going to go in on a bet, though the Target was tempting, as getting a new pair of pants was on my TODO list for our aborted Berkeley trip, as all of mine have rips and tears from hiking).
I enjoyed the cool air, sitting far from the people of the center until E. and I signed off and I walked the few blocks back home.
Back at the hotel.
Had a little bit of additional work to do that's done and now I can do whatever I want until morning, when it's back to the hospital to try and extract expertise and info from the doctor before he turfs us.