War­ning, pic­tu­res of sur­gery below (not graphic, because I nor­mally squirm at these things).

Come night time Wed­nes­day 2nd May, my day had gone well, revi­sion was on sche­dule, I was trying a new mouth wash and all was sweet and well. The hard grind of revi­sion, pro­ject work and cour­se­work was under way and uni life was as any hec­tic third term nor­mally is. I think I’d just relea­sed my latest fb2k con­fig that day also. At 5 am I was awo­ken with awful sto­mach pains; a horri­ble grip­ping fee­ling as though my diges­tive sack was being used as a stress ball by an over wor­ked under­paid office emplo­yee. I couldn’t sleep through it so I grab­bed some crac­kers and made some quick fb2k upda­tes until I felt duly capa­ble of hea­ding back to the land of nod.

Thurs­day was much the same, only worse. I’d hoped the pain would have left me; maybe it was just me lying awk­wardly or some bad sau­sa­ges from the cham­pions lea­gue BBQ. I set about revi­sion as nor­mal, strug­gling to get anything done, some Ibu­pro­fen hel­ped and I con­ti­nued through until the after­noon thin­king I had past the worst of it. With late after­noon the pain­ki­llers res­cin­ded and I was thrown full-whack back into the tor­ment of having my diges­tive tract deci­ding it wan­ted to leave my body by tur­ning itself into a truncheon and bea­ting its way out from the inside. Gavis­con sto­mach sweets fai­led, as did all the anti-acids and little tricks like drin­king Milk or eating dried foods. With the doc­tors now shut and at a loss for what to do, I tried to simply just rest, sit back and watch a film — I chose one I wouldn’t par­ti­cu­larly care if I enjo­yed or not (My Super Ex-Girlfriend — don’t watch this). By the end of the film my intes­ti­nal baton had grown spi­kes in a step­ped up bid to escape. I was bent dou­ble and in agony with a sto­mach pain that hadn’t cau­sed sick­ness. I called NHS Direct (with my mum’s advice and dili­gence in fin­ding a Skype com­pa­ti­ble num­ber) and they soon advi­sed me to get myself chec­ked out ASAP, just as a pre­cau­tion. With the walk-in cen­tre shut it was off to acci­dent and emergency.

My very kind accom­mo­da­tion war­den drove my friend and I there where we star­ted to wait. One hour later I saw the triage and enjo­yed blood sugar tests, blood pres­sure tests and the usual check-up mumbo jumbo. With inten­sif­ying pain, gro­wing hun­ger and tired­ness the two hour wait to see a doc­tor was horri­ble. Mid-wait my offi­cial accom’ war­den, Adam, tur­ned up and swap­ped shifts, brin­ging cross­word enter­tain­ment, although we never com­ple­ted a sin­gle one. Both war­dens were espe­cially help­ful and I wish to thank them both very much for their efforts and care. At 1am I was called into see the doc­tor, he prod­ded me and asked where the pain was, whether I’d been ill, etc. He did a blood test and issued an abdo­men X-ray. Half an hour later, lying on my back, I was whee­led into the X-ray room and whee­led back out again moments later.

Lying on a bed had its bene­fits and coping with the wait was not as bad, though just as pain­ful. It wasn’t until 4:30 am that someone came to see me and tell me I was hea­ding to the cri­ti­cal deci­sion unit where a sur­geon would later see me. At 5 am they deci­ded to keep me in for the night until next morning’s break­fast, see how I was then after some food and take it from there. With this news both my friend (thanks Ste­ven!) and war­den were relie­ved to be able to go home whilst I tried to get wha­te­ver kip I could. Come 8 am I was up and ready for brek­kie! Whilst the patients around me were being ser­ved up Wee­ta­bix and porridge an impor­tant loo­king fellow asso­cia­ted with the uni­ver­sity (with a num­ber of stu­dents around him) infor­med me that I did indeed have Appen­di­cits and that I would be nee­ding sur­gery some­time during the day.

Whilst in the pro­cess of let­ting whoe­ver I could know what was going on a bubbly anaesthe­tist explai­ned the pro­ce­dure to me and said I would be prep’d for sur­gery within half an hour. And that was that, before I knew it an IV was being put in, pads stuck on and gene­ral anesthe­tic admi­nis­te­red, “You’ll be asleep within 20 seconds”… I remem­ber thin­king, “I don’t feel tired”.

That’s a tra­di­tio­nal appen­dec­tomy, I didn’t get this done (thank good­ness), I was given a modern keyhole lapa­ros­co­pic sur­gery which is “mini­mally inva­sive”, at least this seems to be the case given the size of my wound.

Here’s a video of a keyhole appen­dec­tomy, not mine I might add:

I woke up at about 12:30pm in the reco­very ward, dreamy and bliss­fully enjo­ying my deep sleep and dis­tinct lack of pain. About half an hour later I was fully awake and another cheery nurse whee­led me to my ward. As the anaesthe­tic wore off some pain retur­ned (inc­lu­ding a sore throat because of the tubes they had to give me) but I was much more com­for­ta­ble than before, I was soon happy to see my grandpa, sis­ter and girl­friend shortly follo­wed by Ste­ven and my warden.

My reco­very was (mostly) a smooth one. For the dura­tion of my stay the IV remai­ned attached, through which I was fed and admi­nis­te­red the neces­sary anti­bio­tics. 4-hourly pulse, tem­pe­ra­ture and blood pres­sure tests were given; my tem­pe­ra­ture was high each time ( 37.5) and I was given para­ce­ta­mol to bring it down. The only pro­blem I had was a gro­wingly uncom­for­ta­ble and soon to be pain­ful fee­ling which moun­ted in the hours after sur­gery; in short I was having pro­blems taking a piss. The nurse sug­ges­ted I may need a cathe­ter but before get­ting one did a quick ultra­sound to check if my blad­der was full, her res­ponse upon seeing the result was quite comic and she soon retur­ned tubes in hand. My blad­der was so full it was put­ting enor­mous amounts of pres­sure on my back, wound and abdo­men, which suf­fice to say, hurt a lot. The blad­der can typi­cally hold 0.6 litres, within 15 minu­tes of the cathe­ter being added the bag was up to 1.5 litres, and reached 2 litres before the hour mark. Time for the great Bri­tish pun, “that really takes the piss”. A cathe­ter is quite uncom­for­ta­ble and it dra­ma­ti­cally redu­ces your mobi­lity, even when you’re tied down to an IV, its remo­val was also quite pain­ful. Get­ting it put in wasn’t too bad, but I was pro­bably still seeing the influen­ces of some anaesthetic.

All this took place at the brand new Uni­ver­sity Hos­pi­tal (UHCW) outside of Coventry. It really is a beau­ti­fully new, clean and impres­sive place. I par­ti­cu­larly enjo­yed their bed-entertainment suite, which, for £3.20, gave me 24 hours of free­view digi­tal let­ting me watch the mor­ning foot­ball round-up, some Jee­ves and Wor­ces­ter and quite pain­fully with sti­fled laugh­ter “Have I Got News for You”.

It’s been about a week since my discharge and des­pite having a busy week, catching up with work, etc., I am making a good reco­very.
My stitches are all inter­nal and set to “dis­solve” in the next few days, hope­fully I’ll be right as rain in no time. This is my wound as it stands (oooh skin!) — doesn’t look too bad.

That wound is just on the belt line which has meant this past week I’ve had to wear my trou­sers like all those hip boxer sho­wing kids do these days.

I’m loving Web His­tory but I think there are a cou­ple more things I still want to see from it:

• A side­bar for­mat­ted his­tory page simi­lar to Firefox’s exis­ting his­tory but with all the smart fea­tu­res of Google’s Web History
• A bookmarklet/button to Pause and Un-Pause the Web His­tory with ease
• Web­site thumb­nails: I often for­get the name of a site but can spot it from a thumbnail
• Total num­ber of visits to a par­ti­cu­lar domain/page, trends for these domains/pages.
• Key­words I have used to reach a domain previously.

Alas, I am back from my Eas­ter break, university’s final exams bec­kon me whilst Clint Man­sell and the Kro­nos Quar­tet spur me on. My 12,000 word direc­ted rea­ding assign­ment is almost past me, after sub­mit­ting it I plan to put it up here and pass it around the net a bit. I have spent too much time on it to have only two par­ties read it. In fact I’ll pro­bably put up PDFs of all my uni work once I am done here. It seems a waste to have many hours of work read and mar­ked by only one person.

Any­way, two Satur­days ago I left in the eve­ning by car from this here Red­fern accom­mo­da­tion; lea­ving my neigh­bourly rab­bits, robins and squi­rrels for town and terra­ces. It was the wee­kend before Eas­ter and I was to watch my local team, Bris­tol Rovers FC, per­form in their first cup final for a long time (the Johns­tons Paint trophy) at Cardiff’s millen­nium sta­dium – the last cup final to be pla­yed there. We were against Don­cas­ter; our sup­port tur­ned out 40,000 strong and this was the scene:

After watching the under-teams play their big games and a team warm-up and pyro­tech­nics dis­play the game star­ted. After 5 minu­tes we were 2–0 down and out. It sta­yed that way until half time; with a penalty and fine shot we took it to 2–2 extra time. Sadly our lea­gue 2 sta­mina lead to a mishap and we ended up losing 3–2. Yet it was a most enjo­ya­ble day out and the five­live con­sen­sus agreed that Rovers had per­for­med well – the fans were happy. A three hour traf­fic jam on the way back was howe­ver not so fun.

When asked on Mon­day what we should do I promptly replied, “Abso­lu­tely nothing”. And that’s what I enjo­yed doing – I caught the most atro­cious 80s super-hero movie on Sky Movies – “Howard the Duck” with Marty’s mother from Back to the Future. We pla­yed multi-player super mon­key ball on the Wii and lay about in the sun rea­ding our novels – I’m still making my way though Kerouac’s “On the road”. In the eve­ning we tur­ned geeks and pla­yed 4 pla­yer Lord of the Rings RISK – the incom­plete mordor-less ver­sion. I take great pride in win­ning, given my terri­ble star­ting position.

On Tues­day we went to Bath for the day, it just so hap­pe­ned that the sunshine went away for a day, much to our dis­gust. Though wal­king about the lovely sands­tone spa was inte­res­ting – if any of you rea­ders should come across the fudge-packer in the fudge shop, please berate him for taun­ting me with cho­co­late goo­dies whilst I was still under the self-inflicted res­traints of lent. That night we dec­la­red a RISK rematch whe­rein I came first or second, depen­ding on which rules we used. On this night Liver­pool also beat PSV away from home 3–0 – a fine showing.

Sam left for Surrey, and later Kent, on Wed­nes­day mor­ning without her coat. Left with family, cats, book and Wii I made myself at home, spen­ding a cou­ple of hours on some web­site code and a cou­ple here and there on cour­se­work assign­ments. The foo­tie that night was not so great; both Uni­ted and Chel­sea had poor cham­pions lea­gue sho­wings. Thurs­day through week was much of the same, sun tan­ning, book rea­ding, film watching, work wri­ting, cat pet­ting. I cut grass in gar­dens front and back and watched others plant peas and spray fen­ces with pro­tec­tive brown sludge.

Thurs­day brought about the Mas­ters Golf tour­na­ment at Augusta – what a tough year that pro­ved to be. Not a sin­gle pla­yer made a 4-day par over the x amount of holes. As I have already said, I was sup­por­ting Jus­tin Rose, right up until hole 17 on Sun­day – what an unlucky break that was – it’s a shame but in the end I was quite happy for Zach John­son to take away the prize, his second to last shot on the 18^th was a beauty. This spur in golf inte­rest led to a num­ber of Wii golf rounds on Wii sports – I made a per­so­nal best of 7 under par pla­ying with my Johnny Depp Mii and making a few very nice eagles. I got taught a cou­ple of nice new tricks too, such as using an iron out of the bun­ker and dri­ver when faced with trees.

Thurs­day eve­ning also took me for a meal at Chiquito’s to cele­brate my sister’s 20^th. Those lazy boy rib que­sa­di­llas are truly scrump­tious. As was the New York baked cheesecake.

On Eas­ter Sun­day I wel­co­med back the taste of cho­co­late with Thornton’s, Kit­Kat and Cadbury’s Crème eggs. Now my teeth are rot­ten. I’m also eating crois­sants again much to my delight. After a lovely beef roast coo­ked by my sis­ter I spent the day with my grand­pa­rents, watching England lose to Aus­tra­lia in the cric­ket, stud­ying Chi­nese and eating deli­cious home made trifle.

Mon­day and Tues­day it was back to the gar­den for more fun filled outside lap­top based essay wri­ting. Tues­day eve­ning was gra­ced by Manches­ter United’s 7–1 stom­ping of Roma, truly an inc­re­di­ble per­for­mance. It’s hard enough to put seven past a lower lea­gue team let alone coming from behind against second-place Serie A Roma that were unbea­ten in their pre­vious 20 matches and had con­ce­ded only 5 goals in the cham­pions’ lea­gue tour­na­ment. Just wow. Now 3 teams out of 4 left in the com­pe­ti­tion are English, the top three sides in the Pre­miership no doubt. There could be a messy Chelsea-United show­down come May – figh­ting for the lea­gue title, pla­ying each other in the FA cup and Champion’s Lea­gue finals.

I don’t know if there’s much else to talk about – I spent the after­noon with my Grampy on Wed­nes­day tal­king of the future and the past et al and I came back to War­wick yes­ter­day via the M5 and Tesco. Now I am back home with this as my view:

Making posts with ima­ges is now much easier after I crea­ted my sweet little small and thumb­nail gene­ra­tion script.

It is here at last it seems. In fact it is per­fectly clear that it has arri­ved — news­pa­pers are filled with ads shou­ting about the PS3s that they have in stock — get them now! And, on peru­sing the shop­ping cen­tres late on Satur­day, I noti­ced that every elec­tro­nics store out­let from Game-station to HMV and Curry’s Digi­tal had large pro­tru­ding signs announ­cing “Plays­ta­tion 3 in stock… hurry”. Should I have had £500 to lay down on a sys­tem + game I could have bought one from anywhere. Though, if I wan­ted to buy myself a Wii I would be hard pres­sed to find one; HMV, Game, et al. had all sold out and many sto­res still had wai­ting lists. I’ll take my £300 + Wii over a PS3 and Resis­tance Fall of Man any day, in fact, 4 months later I and my house-mates still avidly play Wii Sports. I do plan to purchase a PS3 (ICO 3, Little Big World), though not for a good 18 months. 

I love it when Blog­ger takes six hours to publish a post that I make via email. It fills me to the brim with joyous green radioac­tive goo, none of that half assed polo­nium busi­ness though. I apo­lo­gise for my pos­ting fre­quency in January – my resi­den­tial cam­pus Inter­net pro­vi­der ban­ned me for 28 days due to “sus­pi­cious use” which pro­bably cons­ti­tu­ted using a wire­less rou­ter to con­nect my Wii and a wee­kend uploa­ding blitz that saw me bac­kup 10GB of digi­tal pho­tos to some web space I have.

With no con­nec­tion to the outside world I found time to com­plete all sorts of life chan­ging things, from my pre­vious posts it is evi­dent I wor­ked on my foo­bar designs; I also com­ple­ted a num­ber of assign­ments and pro­ject work. Life without the Inter­net wasn’t hard, more incon­ve­nient.  Scrubs got me through (until I reached the rather unfunny down­fall that is sea­son 3… but that’s another story).

Any­way, I was going to make this post about something. Yes – the price of cinema tic­kets these days. I wan­ted to see Hot Fuzz on Satur­day in the Odeon but we thought bet­ter of it – no way did we feel that a dis­coun­ted £6 stu­dent tic­ket was worth it, con­si­de­ring within 12 months the film could be purcha­sed for that amount or less. I hate to think what the full price was. A shi­ning exam­ple of the per­fect cinema is the local War­wick Arts Cen­tre cinema — £2.50 for a tic­ket and every sixth film is free. What’s more it shows qua­lity art house films, clas­sic cinema and has com­for­ta­ble homely seats. Even sit­ting in the very front row for the enti­rety of Babel I did not feel uncom­for­ta­ble (the sound­track for which is immense). So ins­tead we deci­ded to watch Woody Allen’s Match Point, a bri­lliant (and very dif­fe­rent to the stan­dard Allen) thri­ller sta­rring my favou­rite Scar­lett Johansson.

My next point is the inter­net movie data­base, more com­monly refe­rred to as IMDB. What on earth have they done with their design? It is cate­go­ri­cally the mes­siest and worst rede­sign since the all-music guide abo­mi­na­tion. Huge over sized middle but­tons, with an indis­tinct side­bar and non-fitting page high­light. Did they not rea­lise that Web2.0 was/is a fad? – IMDB was the last sta­ple & suc­cess­ful “web 1.0″ site. Now sec­tion hea­der ima­ges look small and out of place; the cast list is oddly inward shif­ted; the text is too small; it’s not ins­tantly clear what the infor­ma­tion you are loo­king at rela­tes to; nothing matches up; ratings are in a less impor­tant page zone and when I vote I need to count the stars. Give the main body some colour – make sec­tions more dis­tinc­tive, shade cells in tabled infor­ma­tion, make the side­bar big­ger, put the rating back in the middle of the page… it is that impor­tant. Yikes, I am very glad that the for­mer IMDB layout is still online here.

In other news, I bought Okami for PS2 – a very ori­gi­nal and inte­res­ting video game.