Correct Diagnosis... and treatment!

First, my humblest apologies for yesterday's post. And for the squeamish, a disclaimer: Skip this one, too! Old people go into way too much detail in the descriptions of their maladies. But heck, I'm now old, dadgum it. And I've suffered through listening to so many other old people bore me with details of their physical infirmities and gross conditions, by golly I'm gonna do it, too, just like all other old people do. So there... Went to doctor. Doctor looked closely, shook his head and called in a second doctor. Joint diagnosis agreed to by both doctors: not shingles. Nope. Sebaceous cysts. Deep ones, too... horribly infected, swollen, etc. Two doctors agree to work together to perform in-office surgery... get this! ...without anesthetic! They did at least try to stick me with a needle "to numb the area" first, but the needle accidentally punctured something it shouldn't have, because even with the dire diagnosis, they apparently severely UNDERestimated the extent of the problem. So immediately upon the unforeseen misjudgment, they made a hasty decision to dispense with the anesthetic injection, and just go ahead and immediately proceed to cut stuff out and clean around without waiting any further. Of course, the worst part of the decision, speaking from my vantage point lying on my pot belly on the paper-covered hard table, was this: they didn't bother to solicit my opinion about their decision. Given my mental and physical states at the time, I positively, most definitely, would have flatly vetoed the decision in favor of one requiring reinstatement of the original plan to fully anesthetize the area first. This particular large area of my physical anatomy was already causing unbelievable pain -- even before the needle-sticking, the cutting, the physical "cleaning", and finally the suturing... all of which was performed in traditional style but without the assistance of even an aspirin for anesthetic. Go figure. Talk about an experience that builds character! The only mitigating factor was the speed with which the procedure was conducted. From the moment of the first needle stick (followed immediately by the observation "oh, darn, look what you just did..." from one doctor to the other one, eliciting the reply, "well, shoot, I didn't mean to do that. Here, hold the towel under it while I go get the mop") until the application of the final strip of adhesive tape on the bandage after it was all over, the entire cumulative elapsed time could not have been more than seven or eight minutes or maybe even less. From my vantage point on the table, however, it seemed like the length of the Mesozoic Era. Anyway, I now sport a nice deep excavation in my anatomical structure. I am in possession of paperwork authorizing me to procure a supply of expensive antibiotic pills, as well as a generous supply of controlled-substance opiate-based pain reliever. Sadly, due to the timing of the doctor visit (closing time), I was unable to actually acquire said pain-reliever before the pharmacies closed. Not being in any shape to drive to Walmart or other 24-hour pharmacy, I'll have to wait until morning. (The location of the anatomical anomaly is such that any leg movement (e.g., operating the pedals of an automobile) places a completely unacceptable pressure on the skin and muscles which were involved in the surgical project. It is difficult to properly execute driving maneuvers while you are engaged in the screaming meemee's due to excruciating pain.) Hopefully, the accurate diagnosis, followed by the albeit-impromptu activities by the medical professionals will result in a much shorter recuperation period compared to the one expected with shingles. Oh, and thanks to Dubby for the fantastic home-made battered-fried chicken dinner tonight! It was great: NO bones! What they are doing with genetically-engineered foods these days is fantastic!

Shingles... again.

A couple of years ago, I was in Belgium and got this unbelievably painful "burn" on my side...I couldn't figure out what I had bumped up against that would burn me so bad, right about where my elbow hit my side, just above my waist. It was a burn about as big around as my fist, and was blistered... it was painful even to wear a shirt or garment top. After a day or two and watching it get bigger and bigger until it was all up and down my side, I broke down and went to the Belgian doctor. He took one look at it and said, "you've got shingles". "Shingles?!" I exclaimed. "I thought that was an old man's disease!" He looked me straight in the eye and said, "It is." He prescribed some kind of brand new experimental medicine for me, and told me I could get it at the Apoteek (the pharmacy) located down on the corner. As I was putting my shirt back on, he began to write up the bill. "Can I see your Belgian identity card? I need that for the records," he asked. The previous times we'd spent months in Belgium, we came on a formal education visa and had official Belgian identity cards, which the government requires everyone to carry. But this time, I was there for a shorter stay, and was covered under the tourist visa and didn't have Belgian identification card. "Sorry, I don't have one. Here is my passport," I offered. Under the tourist visa, your passport serves as your identity card and must be carried with you at all times. "Oh, no! You don't have an identity card? Oh, no, oh, no. Please don't shoot the messenger. I'm going to have to charge you full price for an office visit. I'm very sorry, there is nothing I can do, I have to charge you full price. You don't get the ... how you say... socialized medicine charge that you get with an identity card. You pay full price. I'm sorry. You have to pay me cash for the entire amount. I'm very sorry. I'm so sorry." Dreading having to pay that much, even if insurance might reimburse me later, I groaned, "How much?" He shuddered, cringed, and said, "twenty euro." About $26 at the current exchange rate. Wow. My co-pay at home is $40! So I pay, and take the prescription across the street to the apoteek. I hand him the prescription,. and his eyes bulge. "Oh, you must have shingles. Well, there is little to help you, but this medicine is the latest try... it's still kind of experimental, but maybe it will help. It is certainly the best thing we have found so far. May I see your Belgian identity card for the billing purposes?" No identity card. Here's the passport. "Oh, no. An American, with no identity card? Oh, no, no, no. Oh, please, I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry, but this prescription is so expensive, and now you have to pay full price. I wish there was something I could do, but I can't, the law says I have to charge you full price.... and your doctor is prescribing a 30-day supply. I'm so sorry..." How much? "Thirty euro." About $40. For the whole bottle! The medicine doesn't seem to help much. At the end of two weeks, my trip is over and I come home, and I go to my doctor. "You've got shingles," he says. "Shingles? I thought only old people get that," I said. "Yep," he replied, with a straight face. Although he then added, "although anyone can get it, usually we see it most in old people..." Like you. He didn't say it, but I knew he was thinking it. I showed him the prescription from Belgium. "Yep, that's exactly what I would prescribe. It's the latest thing we have. Keep taking it." Just for fun, as I leave, I walk next door to the Weyers Cave Pharmacy. "Just out of curiosity, how much is this prescription?" The pharmacist looks at the name on the bottle, then looks in her book, and as she searches, she asked, "how much did you pay for that?" "About forty dollars," I replied. "Well, you could have gotten it cheaper here. Our price is only $34... per pill." PER PILL? "No, no, I paid $40 for the whole bottle. A thirty day supply. You mean it costs $34 per pill? Almost a thousand dollars for a bottle?" "Yes, but you only pay your co-pay, which is $60 for a 30-day supply. The insurance company pays the rest. Surely you got the price wrong. It would never sell for $40 for that whole bottle. Where did you buy it?" "Belgium." She gives me a blank stare. I leave. I continue in pain for about two more weeks, after which the pain subsides, my wounds heal, and I'm back to normal in about four more weeks. I forget all about it. Well, that was about two years ago. Fast forward to just two weeks ago. Two Fridays ago, I started being bugged by something sticking me, right on the side of my hip. It felt like a splinter or thorn or something had become imbedded in the top of my pants pocket and was sticking me like a needle. I checked, and found... nothing. Nothing in my pocket. I check my skin. No marks, no punctures, no sign of anything. Off and on over the next few days, I kept suffering from this intolerable sticking sensation that felt exactly like a hot needle sticking into my flesh. Same place each time. No sign of anything, no punctures, no marks...and it only lasted a couple of minutes, but was occurring with increasing frequency. By last weekend, I was getting "stuck" several times a day, no matter what I wore. This area is about ten inches lower than where my shingles blisters were last time, so I didn't associate the two. Then, yesterday, bang... I've got blisters. Big red spot. Shingles. Classic. Man, it hurts. I can't even stand to sit down, because the side of the chair (the arms, for example) touch it. It hurts to walk. It hurts to stand still. It hurts to sit. It really hurts to lie down. I've got a red spot the size of a silver dollar, with a tiny blister in its middle. No, it isn't a brown-recluse spider bite... I got one of those on our Kentucky vacation a few years ago so I know what that looks like (verified by the doctor), and although this looks similar, it's definitely not that. This is classic shingles. So the question is: do I go to the doctor? They still can't really do anything to cure it, so why bother? If they would give me some Percocet or Codeine or morphine, stuff that would make me high... er--happy--, well, okay, maybe. But they probably won't. So why spend money when the money won't buy anything? I'll just keep on "toughing it out" like I did last time, and in a couple of weeks, it'll go away. Won't it? Yes, I had chicken pox when I was kid. (As well as red measles, German measles, mumps, and something else I can't remember right now.) I don't remember the chicken pox hurting, I remember them itching. This is supposed to be like chicken pox, but it doesn't itch... it BURNS. It's like a red-hot needle sticking in you. Only now, it's like a two-inch diameter red-hot needle. I can see where the idea for the voodoo doll and zombie pins came from.

First snowflakes...

We drove to Hburg tonight (See Dubby's blog, including a picture of our matching JMUniversity of Antwerp hoodies). You've heard of deer in the headlights? Well, tonight we had snowflakes in the headlights. Yep, the first flurries of the season. It's not quite cold enough for snow to accumulate (it's near 40 degrees), but the flurries are flying.

Meteorological Seminar

We enjoyed our first real frost of the season last night. There was ice on the cars this morning. Yesterday I helped provide radio communication for the Bike Virginia century ride. About 400 bicyclists were riding a 100-mile route all over the back-roads of the Shenandoah Valley, enjoying the wonderful fall foliage. We ham radio operators provide communications and mobile radio support along the route and between the base and the remote aid stations. During the 10-hour event, I transported six bikers who "sagged out" and got too tired to make it back to the base. I also transported an injured teenager who lost control coming down a long hill too fast, and ended up with road rash. His knees were torn up pretty good, along with his elbows, the edges of his hands, and even his chin where he slid his face along the road before he came to a stop. I took him back to the base, where a medic treated him. I don't know if he ended up at the hospital, but we did have one accident which definitely put a rider in the hospital... I wasn't the ham who handled that one, however. Today was even more interesting. I attended an all-day seminar at the National Weather Service's brand-spanking new weather forecast office in Sterling, Virginia. This facility is on 280 acres at the north end of Dulles Airport, about 20 miles west of Washington D.C. Part of the program was a grand tour of the new facility. As you'd expect, all of the data-gathering, data analysis, and prediction modeling is done on computers. The system would make mathematician and computer science nerds drool. Having spent quite a bit of time in the Jacksonville Weather-Watchers club, the youth amateur meteorological club for high-schoolers, back in the '60's and 70's, and having taken courses in Meteorology in college (as part of my pre-forestry curriculum, before I changed majors to business), I actually understood a lot of what they were talking about. But the analysis and modeling left me in the dust. These models would make calculus and advanced statistics seem like kids play. The facility has an impressive array of communications capabilities, too. Of course, my favorite was seeing the SkyWarn amateur radio station in the main weather measurement room. This is where all my ham-radio-relayed severe weather reports come in to when our local SkyWarn chapter is activated. One of the technical sessions was on the radiosonde equipment. Here is an array of the various radiosondes they send up under the weather balloons. We also got to watch the prep and release of a weather balloon with its instrument package, and then followed the trajectory with the microwave links. Instead of azimuth-distance ranging like they used back in my day, today the radiosondes are equipped with GPS receivers which transpond their location, including altitude, via radio. This serves as independent verification and dynamic recalibration of the barometric pressure sensor, adding an order of magnitude to the precision of the measurements. The orange thing is a parachute. When the balloon gets somewhere above 100,000 feet, the expansion of the helium inside causes it to burst. The parachute allows the radiosonde to fall gently, so that in case it is found, it can be mailed back to the weather service, refurbished, and used again. Because they have GPS receivers in them, they cost about $300 each. About 25% of them are found and returned. The site has some cool weather radar systems, including the latest differential multi-band doppler, phased-array experimental radar, dual-pulse orthogonal polarization systems, and composite reflectivity experimental equipment. Fascinating. Being a radio geek, I understand this stuff a whole lot better than I do the math modeling. The site also has some really cool antenna arrays to pick up the the myriad satellite data being collected. For example, the IFlows system monitors the dozens of remote stream gauges and rain gauges in the Shenandoah Valley and surrounding mountains, and all that data is relayed via satellite. Here's the VHF ham radio antenna. And, of course, the HF ham radio antenna. The Sterling facility also houses the national weather instrument research center which tests and calibrates weather instruments. As a result, the 280-acre site is just loaded with all kinds of weather instruments, including some exotic new experimental stuff. Click on the picture below, taken of the control room of the radiosonde research center. Notice at the top of the equipment console: they "have all their ducks in a row". Someone asked about them, and they said that those rubber duckies are like the observation center's weather rock. If the ducks are floating, then there's been a flood. One of the research center's missions is the testing of new technologies. Here are several new experimental types of rain gauges, being readied for testing. The research center has all kinds of special environmental chambers, where they can control temperature (up to 200-degrees Farenheit, down to 160-degrees below zero), atmospheric pressure (from almost total vacuum up to 600 times sea-level pressure), humidity, salinity (for the sea buoy weather instruments), solar radiation, and all kinds of other environmental characteristics. They are basically the "Consumer Reports" testing facility to test the radiosondes and buoy-based and land-based weather instruments and telemetry transmitters to make sure they'll hold up out in the weather, and stay calibrated and give accurate measurements under adverse conditions. The spikes in the chamber below are radio-absorbant tiles to prevent radio echoes... the radiosondes use the microwave bands, which of course bounce off objects (that's the way radar works), so the test chamber is lined with the tiles to prevent the bouncing or escape of the radiowaves. Here is their small wind-tunnel. Below is the large wind-tunnel. The large wind tunnel uses propellers from a WWII fighter plane, ten feet in diameter. The noise is deafening when it's running. The researcher turned it on, and turned it up, and the instrument inside the chamber was tested in winds of 145 miles per hour, which is near the top range of a Category 4 hurricane. Here is the actual readout of the wind-tunnel airspeed. All in all, it was a very interesting experience.

Mid-October

Mid-October already. Wow. Time flies when you're busy.

Another Opossum... I guess you could say I'm into "catch and release". Rather than take his picture in the cage, I decided to take his picture as I let him go. Boy, he really skedaddled, too. I didn't realize these little things could shinny up a tree so fast. I got only one snap of him and bang, he was gone. The bee, however, hung around long enough to focus on him. This was taken from the top of Reddish Knob, where we ran Net Control for the ham radio communications support for the 100-mile footrace. Yep, that's a 100-MILE footrace! Can you imagine anyone RUNNING for 100 MILES?! It was astounding. That's why we provided communications support at every aid station, approximately every 7 miles. Check out the website on http://www.eco-xsports.com/grindstone.php These people left camp at 8:00 pm Friday, ran all night in the woods, on wilderness trails, up and down mountains, including peaking Elliotts Knob, Reddish Knob, Little Bald Knob, North Mountain, etc.... ran all day Saturday, and some of them took until all night Saturday night. 100 miles! Stopping only to eat and drink at the aid stations, and go to the bathroom when nature calls. If you wanted to run, you had to pay $250 to register, too! These are professional runners, they came from all over the world: Spain, Germany, South Africa, Sweden, etc. 100 miles on foot! Almost 24,000 cumulative feet of elevation change! And they did it, too! Of the 78 who started, only 12 dropped out at any point in the race. Wow. Shift gears a little. Question: How come a tiny branch in Kings Canyon, California, gets a bigger building than our branch? This building houses a branch, their parking lot is half the size of ours, and their attendance, according to the president, averages about 30 people per week... less than a third of our average of 92 last quarter. So how come their building is at least twice as large as ours? This isn't a ward building, it's a one-phase branch building. What gives?

Busy Week

I apologize for going so long without posting. I've been way too busy. Faculty Senate meetings, getting ready for our academic program review external team visit (I'm chairman of the internal APR team), making and giving exams this week, I was elected President of MARA, Inc., at their annual meeting last night, publishing the Monitor, polishing an article to pacify a nit-picking reviewer at a journal, serving on the DAP-students faculty committee (officially, it's the Deficient Academic Progress committee looking at low-performing students, but some of us call it the Dumb-as-a-Post- students committee), getting ready for the Grindstone 100 this weekend, there just aren't enough hours in the day. Big Al has been visiting before his deployment to Djibouti, so it's been nice having him home again... even if he does spar with the Bopnopper a bit to much for my taste. They have been enjoying seeing each other again. Dubby has been enjoying her work at the Frontier Culture Museum, check out the pics of her in her costome on hers and Bopnopper's Blogs. Oh, and be SURE to watch the Video of Lint Monkey juggling firesticks and eating fire in Alaska at Lint Monkey's Blog! Cool!