Category: What’s New?

Today, my Tita Yeyit and Tita Ising will arrive from Manila and they will stay with us for two months.

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

Pardon me for not being able 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 up 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 that it offered me no other recourse except to deal with them in most of my waking hours.

There were knee-joint presses while lying on my back. Then there were the simple leg raises. Again, while lying on your back, 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 have 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, 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.

And 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 ‘drink 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 on the top portion of my right knee. There was no swelling but, merely touching the area elicited very 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 for 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 hydro nephrosis and pyelonephritis. He suspected that I had 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 were 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 infection in there. Worse, he will have to open up the knee (arthrotomy) in case the infection was much 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 ligaments nor meniscus damage but having the infection remain in the knee for some time, can do severe damage to those healthy tissues in a small amount of time.

So, that same day, very late at night, I was wheeled in to 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).

All throughout this ordeal, a wide array to 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 can be used for the specific bacteria that caused the infection. My right knee was still swollen like an overripe papaya.

On the 4th day, the most effective antibiotic seemed to have been found and the doctors informed me that a PICC line will have to inserted so that I can self-adminsiter the antibiotic at home.

On day five, the PICC (Peripherally Inserted Central Catheter) line was inserted after a 45-minute OPD (out-patient 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) that was 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 make sure the PICC line was in place or the entire procedure will have to be redone. I was also informed that the PICC line will 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 — return to my daily routine. But this time around, I will simply be more thankful for each and every day that will pass.

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 of having a presence on the web. Most of personal sites these days are blogs. TypePad and Blogger are getting into the mainstream. They had normally been called the ICQ of web sites .The former is fee-based while the latter is freebie. What sets them apart from the old days of free (or, paid) website? The richness of content and ease of use. Most of the content on blogs are syndicated (RSS) and links are, most of the time, ads. With blogs, you simply 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 simply love to write and put your ideas on the web. Unlike regular web sites, blogs lack the snazzy extra features that enables one to have total control of what to put on the site. But what it lacked in features, its ease of use is what casual web users loved the most and lured them to sign up for their services.

Since I host this site on my own web server, I decided 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 – they were quickly downloaded and installed (Perl also required but this is already included in OS X) on the server. 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 web cam 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:

After acquiring an Apple iMac G5 a few months later and testing other blogging software, I integrated the same blogger – Movable Type- to my web site in Oct. 01, 2004.

My other blog: kupitero.blogspot.com

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The graphics and overall design were obviously aging. The more I looked at it, the more I remember my carefree days in Manila in the 80s and 90s.

The original Kupitero’s Keep website, I created in 1998 but launched in 1999 when I finally got a decent web hosting site – Surfshop.net. Prior to them, I had tried a lot of freebie site-hosting like GeoCities, Angelfire, etc., as well as, other local ISPs like Epic.net and Tri-Isys.

The tools of the trade were basically the same ones I used back then: an HTML editor, Photoshop, an image animator, an image 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: it was only in 2003 that they put down the site. Unfortunately, Netscape’s freebie 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.

Plus, it didn’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 just to make your webserver/website available.

Also, imagine using 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). Those were the pre-browser Internet days. 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 in size but will 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 had decided that bulky graphic files will have to go.

So, the components are set: the server, the gateway, and the site.  Looks like it’s 1984 again for me.  Just trying to keep in step with the times.

notes:

After drinking countless pots of coffee, I launched the 4th revision of this site on May 10, 2004.

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