I started my IV therapy at Royal Columbian Hospital on Tuesday, so today was my fourth day (I double-checked the math, I think I got it right). On each of the three previous days, every other person getting an IV had a foot issue. Usually the left foot. Left feet seem kind of unlucky.
But today was a new dawn: Someone in the chair ahead of me was getting an IV for the first time (I both did and didn’t want to look) and lo, he had two regular feet. His therapy ended first and as he left, he turned and waved at me, as if we were brothers-in-arms feet. The guy that came in as I was leaving also seemed to have two ordinary feet. Seeing these guys made me feel less odd.
I have had nine (technically 10) treatments, with two more to go. The desire for everything to be OK after that is something I cannot yet put into words.
And now, straight from Discord, a cat reacting to a foot:
No, actually, I’m not even sure I fixed it, but I backed up my data and erased the HD and started clean, figuring if some rogue process was making it run hot, why not start by eliminating ALL processes? This also has the side effect of making it easier to sell if I choose to do so.
The reformat went surprisingly quickly. So far I have installed nothing, it’s just Safari and Photo Booth and whatever else Apple slaps on with the default install. The Mac is off right now, but I’ll check later to see if it is back to running cool. If not, it may be hardware-related or there may be unauthorized dust bunnies inside.
Also, I’m pretty sure the default mouse speed on a fresh macOS installation is calibrated for the original 1984 Macintosh 9″ display, because it is super weirdly slow.
Fun fact: Apple released no videos in 2024 to commemorate the Mac’s 40th anniversary.
Not his month, anyway. I’ts like my brain refuses to focus long enough to get out more than a few sentences.
But perhaps I will bloviate again and at length soon.
Also, the IV has been making my right arm itchy the last few days and I can’t scratch it. I must use sheer force of will to convince myself it does not itch.
Three more days and I am hopefully done on this particular journey.
And I love lists! So here’s a list highlighting various random things on my Health Adventure 2025 (which technically began in 2024):
Having never had an IV before, I’ve now had, as of today, seven IV treatments, with at least four more to go. I can’t say I enjoy them, but I am pretty much used to them now.
The first four were in my left arm, the last three switched to my right.
The switch to the right was a bit bumpy. The nurse tried twice closer to my wrist (more flexible for the time between visits) but thanks to my tiny, impervious veins, she settled on a third closer to the crook of my elbow.
While I had the IV in my left arm, I tried brushing my teeth with my right hand (I am left-handed). This was actually kind of hilarious. I could hold the toothbrush just fine in my right hand, but once it went in my mouth, my brain went haywire and didn’t know what to do. I am glad my left hand is available again.
If you had asked me if having an IV needle stuck in my arm 24/7 and swaddled in medical wrap to protect it between treatments was kind of grossbuckets before this became my reality, I would have said yes. And I still say yes. But you get used to things.
It always kind of hurts a little, though. I once did a full stretch and the arm with the IV needle in it sent me a reminder, something like DO NOT EVER DO THAT AGAIN.
Yesterday, the treatments transferred from Burnaby Hospital to the next-door Royal Columbian Hospital. It’s nice that it now only takes five minutes to go to or exit from treatments.
Every other person getting IV therapy in the same room has had a foot issue, so I’m now thinking of this as The Foot Room where people are sent when they need antibiotics. My foot is fine, but maybe they just don’t have any other rooms.
I have had two prostate exams, which are kind of like someone goosing you, but being extremely serious about it.
I have had blood taken three times. I have gone from being traumatized over getting blood taken to, “Yeah, whatever.”
The beep the machine makes when the IV bag is empty is a sound I will associate with IVs for pretty much forever now.
The staff at both hospitals have been very nice.
My partner Jeff was a veritable angel through the worst parts of it, staying with me for all four hours of my first ER visit last Thursday. Horribly, I have actually had longer ER visits in the past.
I was told today that inflammation is pretty close to back to normal. I was not told what was inflamed. My kidney, I’m guessing, since that’s what they are targeting.
Mentally, I find myself up and down like the proverbial roller coaster. I am a bit down today, but can’t pinpoint exactly why. It could just be a cumulative effect.
It will be very nice to sleep without an IV needle in my arm.
It will be very nice to be healthy again.
It will be very nice to resume running again while avoiding nasty sidewalks that try to trip me.
There have always been good reasons to delete your Facebook account, but my inactivity over the last few years pretty much made the issue go away. If I ain’t using it, what harm is there letting the account go fallow?
This changed in the past few weeks, when Mark Zuckerberg decided to become macho or something (tip: You will never ever be macho, Zuck), pay fealty to God King Trump, and then decided to:
Stop most moderation and fact-checking on Meta sites, such as FB.
Replace moderation with “community notes”.
Kill all DEI initiatives.
In the name of “free speech” allow more slurs, name-calling and such to be permitted, especially and specifically against LGBTQ+ folks.
This is all in addition to the already running:
Endless, perpetual “Suggested For You” that never stops. It’s a useless sludge waterfall, and you are nailed to the bottom of it.
Reels, reels, reels! The “See less of this” when you click the X to close one is a jokey kind of placebo. Like the vampire kids in Salem’s Lot, they’ll be floating outside your window and scratching on the glass again soon enough. And forever.
Terrible, low-rent ads, but now with terrible, low-rent AI-generated crap in them.
A lot more AI sludge in general, including cringe-inducing (at best) AI people you can interact with (or rather, the ones they haven’t pulled yet after the not-insignificant backlash to them).
And not forgetting that FB executives have always been OK with people dying in exchange for increased engagement (revenue).
Today, I requested all of my FB info (mostly bird photos and various doodles). I already made a post letting actual human people know I’m deleting the account and pointing out I am easy to find elsewhere. The next step will be to request the deletion once I have my big ol’ FB info bundle (UPDATE: Shortly after I posted this, I got the info, just under 400MB worth at “medium” quality), then probably wait some period of time, probably 30 days, similar to the Instagram deletion.
It seems obvious now, but corporate controlled social media can probably never work. Mastodon might be a bit clunky, but there’s no billionaire or VC money behind it, just a bunch of federated servers relying on donations from individuals.
UPDATE: My Valentine’s Day gift to myself will be going Facebook-free.
It’s the first birding of 2025. The trails were absolutely thick with joggers. There were some birds, too.
Where: Burnaby Lake Regional Park (Burnaby), Tlahutum Regional Park (Coquitlam) Weather: Partly sunny, 7-8°C
The Outing
Snoozing shorebirds, looking west from the pier.
Piper Spit
We arrived at Burnaby Lake to find it teeming…with runners. Seriously, I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen so many people jogging here. I guess it’s been some time since we had a non-rainy Saturday.
I did not have my camera because I am in the midst of IV treatments for an infection, which means I have a bandaged IV in my left arm, making it very awkward and unadvisable to try holding up a camera. I settled for taking lots of scenery shots instead.
But there were also birds, including both ruby and golden-crowned kinglets, nuthatches and the elusive chestnut-backed chickadees. The light was a tad gloomy, which made the bird shots more challenging, but added lots of mood to the scenery shots.
The Stumps (not my alternative country rock band) and a log at the intersection of the main trail and Conifer Loop were the main gathering spots for songbirds, due to both locations being festooned with seed. This was convenient for us!
At the Spit, the landmass is still quite large but today was mostly empty, save for a few gulls and a wandering group of pigeons. The Shorebird Spot™ was so low it was mostly mud, but a clutch of dowitchers was closer in to be shot, while a larger group dozed farther out.
Overall, a good variety, despite the light, plus a bonus seagull proudly strutting with a golf ball in its mouth.
Tlahutum Regional Park
Coquitlam River desktop wallpaper shot, 2025 edition.
There were mergansers, buffleheads, gadwalls and wigeons in the various waterways here, but as usual, none very close. We checked the community garden, but it is more the community swamp, so we opted to give it a few more weeks/months to dry out a bit before venturing in.
The Millennium Bridge over the rivers had a bunch of dots spray-painted on it, because in just a few days it’s being closed for two weeks to replace the deck. Had this been in progress, our trip to Tlahutum would have been a lot shorter.
I filled in multiple holes on the trail apparently dug up by an over-stimulated dog, as I’ve recently become a Tripping Hazard Expert (THE). It seemed like the right thing to do.
The large pond is currently at its most open and exposed, which aids in getting nice shots, especially when the water is calm and snazzy clouds are reflecting in it. Everything is very brown, though. It’s like an organic Quake level1Yes, I know Quake came out in the 1890s, this is a joke for The Olds.
Overall, a pleasant, if somewhat unusual first outing of the year. I should be handling a camera again, so look out world, incoming fuzzy junco shots!
The Shots
None! No camera. Instead, here is the best bird shot I got with my now ancient (in Tim Cook’s mind) iPhone 12:
A blackbird on a bench on a pier on a lake, in a park.
The Birds (and other critters). Rare, rarely-seen or recently returned birds highlighted in bold.
Literally. For some reason, it runs pretty warm (much warmer than you’d expect for a well-ventilated M1 Mac). I’ve tried a bunch of things, ranging from shutting down every extraneous service or app, rebooted, updated, and worn a black mock turtleneck sweater1In my head, and it looks fabulous.. And still, it gets warm.
Activity Monitor shows no obvious culprits. I am baffled. Maybe the 40,000 vent holes in the back have sucked in a kilogram of dust over the last two years. I’d open the case to check, but…
The end result is, troubleshooting this is now the same sort of whack-a-mole as it is over on the Windows side, so I am now often shutting down the Mac when not using it so it doesn’t melt down on itself.
Sometimes technology is cool and sometimes it’s hot. And sometimes it’s too hot.
Here is a Macintosh LC. It is not my Mac. It may have never gotten hot. But I still love the industrial design some 30+ years later.
EDIT: I looked up the trade-in value on my Mac after writing this post, and that seems to have at least temporarily scared it back down to being not-so-hot. We'll see if it holds. I'm sure the Mac is totally sentient and reads this blog, probably using Apple Intelligence® to provide succinct summaries.
This story begins with an upset tummy, which does not seem particularly ominous.
The sore stomach began three days ago. I was puzzled when it struck partway through the night, disrupting my sleep. I wasn’t sure what to make of it, but I had an inkling in the back of my mind that took the form of the word: Infection.
And here we rewind to early December, or possibly even late November, when in true guy fashion1Spoiler: Guys can be kinda dumb, I began to feel something (an abdominal ache) that I knew from previous experience was likely to be something specific (a bacteria infection centred around my plumbing) and did nothing about it. “I’ll just wait a bit and if it goes away, it’s nothing!” (And if it doesn’t, I’ve given the infection time to grow and spread. You can probably guess how this played out.) By the end of the first week of December, I began experiencing symptoms that were bad and could not be ignored:
High fever
Chills (not the cool kind of chills)
Body aches
Headache
The sweats (not the cool kind of sweat)
I saw my doctor and he ordered blood work. This is where the story takes its next dumb turn. DO NOT BE LIKE ME. HEED MY WARNING.
I dragged my feet on the blood test because the last two times I’d had blood taken, the experience was awful. The second was especially bad, with the tech approaching my arm like it was a dart board, and she was on her fifth beer. So I kept trying to steel myself to just go in. What are the odds I’d have three terrible experiences in a row, years apart?
My doctor prescribed me the “best guess” antibiotics in the meantime, for a prostate infection. At first, the drugs worked. Yay drugs! But over the two-week dosage, the effectiveness waned, until at the end they just plain stopped and all the aforementioned symptoms came back, as strong as ever. Just prior to this, I did muster up the nerve to get the blood work done. And it was fine. Painless, really.
The work revealed that this was more likely a bladder infection, so a week of new antibiotics were prescribed. Again, as if my magicke, the drugs worked. Yay drugs again!
Everything seemed good. I felt normal, healthy. I even went on my first run in four weeks, which may have been an omen, in retrospect. After a week, my hands were healing nicely from my spectacular trip on the sidewalk, but I was otherwise still OK.
We catch up now to three night ago, when midway through my sleep I awoke with a stomach ache, or at least what I took to be a stomach ache (this was almost certainly incorrect, but I’m no anatomy expert). I thought it couldn’t be the infection, because it feels different. Then the smart guy in the back of my brain said, “But what if the infection has spread and moved? It might feel different as it settles into a fresh, new organ.” I made a doctor appointment on Wednesday. Wednesday was bad. My doctor confirmed the infection might have spread. He ordered more blood work, then to see him on Friday.
Thursday (yesterday) felt like an extended and unpleasant dream. Per my Garmin Forerunner 255, I walked 190 steps. All of them to and from the bed. I ate about 500 calories of food, most of it soup. I burned, then froze, then sometimes did both at the same time, which is both unique and maddening. I felt horrible. I no longer wanted to feel horrible. I had met my quota, I felt.
My partner had been insisting I go to the ER instead of the lab for the blood work. My doctor also said I should go to the ER if the symptoms got worse. So we did, after I peeled myself out of the (unsexy) sweat-soaked sheets this morning.
We went to Burnaby Hospital, rather than Royal Columbian, which is literally next door to us. I did not know this in advance, so I felt a bit like I was kidnapped. But apparently RC is a trauma hospital and prioritzes people who are, like dying, so you can wait a very long time if you are not facing imminent death (the very long waits have been true for me in the past).
The visit took about four hours, but it was actually more efficient than it sounds, because a lot of that time was waiting for test results.
They took two vials of blood. It was pain-free again. They made me pee into a bottle. They had me lay on a bed and periodically someone would come by and inform me of various steps and things. I was feeling a little less gray, but very thirsty. They would not let me drink yet.
I had my first CT scan. It wasn’t as intimidating as I thought. A male robotic voice would tell me to breathe in, then hold my breath and exhale. The bed slid me under the scanner about three times. It took a few minutes. The one freaky part–which they warned about in advance–is when they inject dye into your IV. This makes your entire body go weirdly warm for a few seconds, and also makes it feel like you’ve just loosed your bladder big time (this does not actually happen).
Oh, I should mention–they started to administer antibiotics by IV before the CT scan. Because the handy machine attached to the IV drip had not reached INFUSION COMPLETE yet, they chose to have me wheel the whole thing down the hall for the CT scan. Also, I had to put on a gown, with the IV attached. It took three of us to get it on without having IV medicine spray everywhere.
Fun fact: The doctor who attended me called me James, which happens a lot. All of my names are interchangeable, and I guess James is the most popular.
After the scan, the IV concluded, but wait, there was a second bag. I’d never had an IV before, but the experience was not horrible as I’d expected, even when they turned on the pump to get the drip moving along.
I have four more daily treatments of this. The best part (?) is they keep the IV in, so you don’t have to get newly-stabbed each time. Problem: The bandaging to keep the IV safe and cozy is a tad bulky. I’m also left-handed.
It’s not muscle.
I may see if they can switch to my right arm, even if it means an additional stabbing. Or maybe not. Maybe I’ll become ambidextrous as a result, and a whole new world will open up for me.
During these four hours of fluid removal and insertion, I got the results: the infection had moved up the urinary tract and cozied itself in one of my kidneys. This is not good. The five daily IV treatments are the usual, but they will reassess during the process, so I might need more. At this point I am willing to learn to love country music if it makes me healthy again.
And that was my Thursday morning. Tonight, as I type this, the fever is gone, my tummy feels normal and I have a bit of a residual pressure headache. I’m sure my watch will read my stress as off the charts, but I feel significantly improved from 24 hours ago. I don’t expect to sleep well tonight, but I do expect to sleep decently.
FINAL WARNING TO GUYS (and really, everyone): If your body show signs of something wrong, go to the doctor right away. Do not wait. Do not make excuses. Do not be macho. Do not be me (not that I am macho).
My view for most of the morning. The doctor who attended can be seen in the background.I think you can tell I’m having a good ol’ time here. Also, I look kind of chunky. It’s the posture, I swear.
