Category: What’s New?

This is a demo blog for the newly installed version of Movable Type, version 3.121. Yeeehah!

Thanks!!

My Tita Yeyit and Tita Ising will arrive from Manila today and stay with us for two months.

I hope to show them around to places they have not been to yet!

Pardon me for being unable to update the site as frequently as possible for the past few weeks. But I have an excuse: I was busy rehabilitating my right knee, which underwent arthroscopic surgery on July 7.

The rehab was not grueling, but it was enough to remove my usual daily activities. The first two weeks were difficult to bear. The muscles and underlying tissues around the operated area were still painful, and moving them—laterally—rang up the pain notes in my nervous system.

The exercise set was simple and designed to regain mobility in the affected area in the least possible time. But the frequency—five times daily—was too time-consuming, so I had no other recourse except to deal with them during most of my waking hours.

While lying on my back, I did knee-joint presses and simple leg raises. Again, the hip raises require both knees to be flexed. Another routine involved bending the lousy knee as far back as possible while my legs were dangling on the bed’s edge.

While seated, I had to bend my hips towards the knee with the awful leg straight up and the excellent leg flexed. A challenging routine involved both knees bent, my back against the wall, and then moving the hip joints up and down. It was painful.

Some exercises required using a rubber tube (for resistance) attached to the ankle of the good leg. The excellent leg propped me up and involved moving the affected leg in all four directions as far as possible. One exercise involved trying to walk as straight as possible on a 3″ wide by 8″ long piece of wood.

Finally, there was the one that required me to move up and down a flight of three-step stairs—backward.

They all stressed movements on the muscles around the lousy knee to drain any fluids accumulated in the knee joint areas. When used up after a rigorous exercise, the myofibrils (tiny fibers that comprise the muscle) tend to ‘soak up’ any fluids around them. Much like the same way we crave water when we’re exhausted.

—links:
www.healthatoz.com
www.kaiserpermanente.org
www.arthroscopy.com

The symptom was innocuous: a sudden fever after I ate a bad piece of “bao’ – “siopao” as we call it back in Manila. My body reacted by trying to throw it out of my system when I took a brief shower. I was sure that I didn’t get rid of all of it. The fever swung to highs and lows as I tried to battle it by taking only Tylenol every four hours.

On the 4th day, I felt way much better and tried to work myself back to my normal routine by doing some yard work and light household chores. It was not back-breaking work, but it was all the bacteria needed to strike back at me at the end of the day.

The following morning, not only I had the fever back, but I also had severe pain in the top portion of my right knee. There was no swelling, but merely touching the area elicited sharp pain, and walking was extremely painful.

After the sixth day, I gave up all hopes of self-medication as the fever shot up to record highs, and walking was now excruciatingly painful. We called the hospital and immediately got an appointment for the following day.

At the hospital, blood, urine, and synovial fluid samples were taken, as well as x-rays of my chest and the right knee. The fluid drained from my right knee didn’t look too good, and I was wheeled directly to the ER. There, further blood and synovial fluid samples were taken, and I was put on IV.

An orthopedic surgeon was brought in and talked to me briefly about my kidney operation of 1981 – when my right kidney was removed due to hydronephrosis and pyelonephritis. He suspected that I had a urinary tract infection and that it had caused the fever and the severe pain in my right knee. He tapped my left -and remaining – kidney to elicit pain, as well as the area above my bladder. I told him that there was no pain in either place.

The surgeon returned to explain to me that he had to perform an emergency arthroscopic surgery on my right knee to get rid of all the “bugs” and infections in there. Worse, he will have to open up the knee (arthrotomy) in case the infection is much more severe than he thought to eliminate the possibility of the infection doing more damage to my still intact knee.

The knee X-rays revealed no ligament or meniscus damage, but having the infection remain in the knee for some time can severely damage those healthy tissues in a short amount of time.

So, that same day, very late at night, I was wheeled into the OR for either a quick arthroscopic surgery or a much longer, open-knee surgery. Inside the OR, I was probably awake for only five minutes and quietly prayed for the best.

It was way past midnight when I woke up to find myself on the recovery room, with my right foot heavily wrapped in elastic bandage and a much thicker foam wrap secured by Velcro straps to immobilize the area from the top knee down to my ankle. There was also a MediVac (drain) coming out of my right knee via a rubber tube.

After the second day at the hospital, the drain was removed. The following day, all the straps and bandages were removed. I was glad to find only three slits on my knee (two at the bottom and one on top): ONLY arthroscopic surgery was done, and my knee was not opened-up. Still, without the pain-killing medication (Vicodin), moving the knee -especially sideways – elicited severe pain that rang up my entire CNS (central nervous system).

Throughout this ordeal, a wide array of antibiotics were administered on an 8-hour cycle via IV while the doctors awaited the result of the blood culture and sensitivity (C/S) so that the best antibiotic could be used for the specific bacteria that caused the infection. My right knee was still swollen like an overripe papaya.

On the fourth day, the most effective antibiotic seemed to have been found, and the doctors informed me that a PICC line would have to be inserted so that I could administer the antibiotic at home.

On day five, the PICC (Peripherally Inserted Central Catheter) line was inserted after a 45-minute OPD (outpatient department) procedure. It was a very slender piece of plastic tube inserted through a vein in my right arm (the nurse informed me that this route was shorter) and initially guided by a thin piece of wire.

The tube snaked all the way up to a large vein (subclavian vein) situated very near the heart. The main idea was to deliver the antibiotic rapidly to my bloodstream while diluting it at the same time in that area where plenty of blood rushes by for a longer period of time than drip IV (usually good only for 4 days).

As a standard procedure, an X-ray was taken to ensure the PICC line was in place. Otherwise, the entire procedure would have to be redone. I was also informed that the PICC line would remain in my body for two weeks.

That done, I was out of the hospital after a few more hours of briefing — all related to the arthroscopic surgery on my knee and the PICC line they had embedded in my body as well as how to administer the drugs at home.

For now, I’m simply looking for better days ahead—returning to my daily routine. But this time around, I will simply be more thankful for each and every day that passes.

Simply being healthy is, indeed, a feeling of already being wealthy.

—links:
www.arthroscopy.com
www.thefurrymonkey.co.uk/picc.htm

Blogs are becoming an easy way to have a presence on the web. Most personal sites these days are blogs. TypePad and Blogger are getting into the mainstream. They had normally been called the ICQ of websites.

The former is fee-based, while the latter is free. What sets them apart from the old days of free (or paid) websites? The richness of content and ease of use. Most of the blog content is syndicated (RSS), and links are, most of the time, ads. With blogs, you type away, add your images or photos, click a button, and, ergo, instant but professional-looking website – uh, er – blog!

Blogs are great if you love to write and put your ideas on the web. Unlike regular websites, blogs lack the snazzy extra features that give one total control of what to put on the site.

However, what it lacked in features was its ease of use, which casual web users loved the most and lured them to sign up for its services.

Since I host this site on my own web server, I decided to give the most popular one – Movable Type from SixApart – a peek.

From what I had read before, I needed the latest versions of Movable Type, MySQL, and the database hooks—these were quickly downloaded and installed on the server (Perl is also required, but this is already included in OS X).

After doing a lot of web searches, it took me some time to set it up and get it running, using instructions from maczealots.com. My plan was to incorporate the ‘blogger’ into this website but I backed out on the last-minute.

It was a hardware hog—well, at least for my current setup and use. Rebuilding was quite slow. Since the Mac G4 is also my FTP server and webcam host, I didn’t like the extra strain Movable Type put on the server. Maybe I can incorporate it on this site later on—when I get my hands on a G5!

—notes:

A few months later, after acquiring an Apple iMac G5 and testing other blogging software, I integrated the same blogger—Movable Type—into my website on Oct. 01, 2004.

My other blog: kupitero.blogspot.com

Download the XML FeedReader here

The graphics and overall design were aging. The more I looked at them, the more I remembered my carefree days in Manila in the 1980s and 90s.

I created the original Kupitero’s Keep website in 1998 but launched it in 1999 when I finally got a decent web hosting site—Surfshop.net. Before them, I had tried many freebie hosting sites like GeoCities, Angelfire, etc., and other local ISPs like Epic.net and Tri-Isys.

The tools of the trade were the same ones I used back then: an HTML editor, Adobe Photoshop, an image animator and mapper, and a file transfer program (FTP).

I ported the site to Netscape‘s free hosting—simply called WebSites—after we terminated our contract with Surfshop.net in 2001. The nice thing was that they only put down the site in 2003. Unfortunately, Netscape’s free hosting didn’t last long as well—they stopped most of their free services after they merged with AOL (America Online).

I decided to put up my own web server only after I got broadband access — with download speeds of about 7 Mbps. I learned from the past that hosting your own site via dial-up is like torturing your viewers.

It doesn’t make a lot of sense if you only have a single phone line in the house – all your relatives will give you the ‘look’ for hogging the phone line to make your webserver/website available.

Also, imagine using a dial-up to dial-up link while streaming a large video file. Dial-up was king during the glory days of electronic bulletin board service (EBBS) before the Internet browser. 

In short, forget web serving and hosting if all you’ve got is dial-up.

The makeover I had in mind will make the overall site smaller but retain most of the features of the original site. Faster page loading—for those accessing the site via dial-up—will be my priority, and I have decided that bulky graphic files will have to go.

The components are set: the server, the gateway, and the website. For me, it looks like 1984 again.

I’m just trying to keep in step with the times.

notes:

After drinking countless pots of coffee, I launched this site’s fourth revision on May 10, 2004.

Click here if you would like to view this site’s old home page (some links there are gone, while others will lead you to the new pages within this revamped site).