Wednesday, March 09, 2005

setback

Had to take Stanley back to Bridgeport Hospital to see his surgeon today. When he woke up, he found that his incision was oozing liquid and pus, plus he was in agony with every breath. So began the merry-go-round of phone calls and doctor tag.

Dr. Robinson examined S and found that there was an infection at the bottom of his incision. Dr. R drained the pus (unbelievable amount of blood and crap coming out of that hole, ye gods). So, scrips for a strong antibiotic and some pain meds, and instructions to come back on Friday for followup and to call if there is a problem tomorrow.

Feck. And we were just so pleased the other day with how well the incision seemed to be healing over. At any rate, Dr. Kiwi said the sternum is healing very well, and the new valve is sounding very good. The infection was a setback, but not a major setback, apparently.

The pity is we had to postphone a meeting we were very much looking forward to. Hopefully, we can go tomorrow—will try to as long as S feels he can at least sit there and listen.

S is still astonished at how much the operation took the wind out of his sails. I miss him at work—it was so strange sending out some sketches without first putting our heads together to fine tune them. He tried to look at one of them at one point, but he just cannot concentrate any longer than five minutes or thereabouts.

Now to try to get his pain meds. The doc prescribed them for him, but didn’t put the dosage down so Walgreens had to call him. Unfortunately, Dr. R had gone back into surgery by that time and who knows how long it will take to get the answer. At least I could get his antibiotics filled.

Feck.

posted by lee on 03/09/05 at 10:09 PM

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Tuesday, March 08, 2005

this is a solution?

Well, I did get a reply from Jeremiah and the Moz. support team. It’s here:

We have a proposed solution for your issue. This does not mean your ticket is closed. Providing additional information will change the status of your ticket to “Reopened.”

Solution: Dear Lee,

Thanks for contacting the MozSource support service for Firefox, Thunderbird and other Mozilla apps. We hope that the instructions and comments below will help you resolve the problem you are experiencing. We suggest printing these instructions for reference as it will make these processes easier to follow. If you are requested by a support technician to provide more information, please visit http://support.mozsource.com and log into your account to reopen your support ticket and leave the requested details.

There have been a few issues when installing Firefox 1.0.1 over your previous Firefox 1.0 install. I will list some steps to go through that may help out with the issue as there may be other causes for the problem as well.

Export your Bookmarks from your current profile:

Launch Firefox
Click the “Bookmarks” menu
Click “Manage Bookmarks”
Click the “File” menu
Click “Export”
Select a location to save the file to from the “Save in:” field
Click “Save”
Your bookmarks have been exported to the selected location
Rename the Firefox’s profile storage folder:

Exit Firefox
Click “Start”
Click “Run”
Type %USERPROFILE%\Application Data
Click “OK”
Double click the “Mozilla” folder
Right click the “Firefox” folder
Click “Rename”
Rename the “Firefox” folder to “Firefox.bak”
Close any open Windows until you are back to the desktop
To Uninstall and Reinstall Firefox:

First go to : http://www.mozilla.org and download the installer to your desktop.
Next open up your Control Panel and double click on “Add/Remove Programs” and find “Mozilla Firefox”
Highlight and uninstall it
Open “My Computer” and double click the “C:” drive.
Double click the “Program Files” folder
Right click on the “Mozilla Firefox” folder and delete it if it exists
Reboot your computer.
After rebooting just double click on the Firefox installer downloaded in step # 1 to reinstall Firefox
Firefox has now been uninstalled and reinstalled
Import your bookmarks into the new profile:

Launch Firefox
Click the “Bookmarks” menu
Click “Manage Bookmarks”
Click the “File” menu
Click “Import”
Select “From File”
Click “Next”
Locate the file you exported previously
Single click the file you exported previously
Click “Open”
Your bookmarks have now been imported


If you have Windows XP SP2 installed and are using the firewall in it, you can allow Firefox as an exception by doing the following:


Click “Start”
Click “Control Panel”
Double Click “Windows Firewall”
Click the “Exceptions” tab
Click “Add Program”
Select “Mozilla Firefox” from the list
Click “Ok”
Click “Ok” on the Windows Firewall Screen
Restart the computer and try again
Other firewall softwares should also be configured to allow Firefox as an exception. This ensures that connections to and from Firefox will not be filtered out. Some registry change may have caused the restriction in access. This may have been caused during the install of the new version. Properly configuring the firewall may correct that if the settings for the firewall were changed due to the install.

Thank you,

Jeremiah, on behalf of the MozSource Support Team

Why does it have to be so complicated? I’m not so worried about my bookmarks, but about all the cookies I have carefully set everywhere so I don’t have to keep looking up passwords and resetting stuff like Weather Underground. I wrote back and asked them to let me know how I can save the cookies. IF I can, I’ll try their solution. Or rather, I’ll have Stanley try it and see how it works because he doesn’t rely on cookies the way I do.

Speaking of Stanley:
He’s been having a horrible couple of days. A lot of coughing, which means even more pain. I’m a bit worried about it, hoping he hasn’t developed pneumonia or something. I don’t remember my dad caughing this much or this long. Soooo, tomorrow either S or I will call Dr. Horn and find out what we should do. The Extra Strength Tylenol isn’t cutting it with the pain. I just want him to get some decent sleep. He’s going to try the bed in the guest room tonight, which has a much better mattress than our bed does plus it’s more conducive to sleeping upright. Hope that works. (And I’ll at least be able to get some sleep too. Maybe.) He is just so exhausted it’s painful to look at him, and there is nothing I can do for him except try not to make him laugh. (Isn’t that a bitch, trying NOT to make someone laugh?)

posted by lee on 03/08/05 at 02:43 AM

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Friday, March 04, 2005

they broke firefox

I faithfully updated my copy of Firefox when the browser notified me that there was a security update. What a mistake! The hyperlinking (clicking on links, bookmarks) is so screwed up it’s unbelievable. So far, the screwed up hyperlinking has cost me $5 when I had to click submit twice to pay for getting Firefox technical support.

The problem is this: when clicking on a link or a bookmark or typing an URL into the address bar, 95% of the time the link or address won’t work on the first try. If you click again, or reload again, it will work. The extra maddening feature is that this is not a problem 100% of the time.

DO NOT DOWNLOAD VERSION 1.0.1 of FIREFOX. Danger Will Robinson ... just wait until they fix the problem or until they publish a fix for the fix that doesn’t require dancing through hoops such as getting a fixed DNS which doesn’t work anyway ... (Yeah, I’m REALLY aggravated about this. Mozilla did a Microsoft.)

posted by lee on 03/04/05 at 07:27 PM

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Thursday, March 03, 2005

it’s march already?

Been frantically trying to catch up with work I missed whilst Stanley was getting fixed up, plus keep up with new stuff coming in and, of course, I need about five days where nothing happens. I’ll have two (the weekend), which will have to do. Life is much too short to make myself too crazy. I keep slipping into always-working mode and I have to stop that.

Stanley’s spiffy new bovine aortic valve seems to be doing fine. We went to see Dr. Robinson for a post-op checkup on Wednesday and he said (imagine a New Zealand accent), “Everything is looking good, I’m done with you now.” He removed the chest tube holes stitches and sent us on our way. Jane, Dr. R.‘s office manager, said, “Goodbye, good luck, and I hope I never see you again.” She is very nice, but I will be very happy never to see her again (at least in that context!)

Dad asked, “Does this mean Stanley can now be bossy?” What’s worse, he’s PROUD of that pun. (Pretty good, actually. Ok, Alice?)

We did go to QWEST today instead of the cardioligist’s office to get the coumadin level check. It took maybe 15 minutes.  And his level was 2.8, which is fine, so he stays at the 2.5 mg does of warfarin. Dr. Robinson told him he could stop taking the high blood pressure medication after we told him that Stanley had been kind of dizzy. I told Dr. R. that it seemed odd to me that blood pressure meds had been prescribed for Stanley when his main problem post op was that his blood pressure was too LOW, not high by any means. Stanley’s looking forward to getting off the warfarin altogether, and off the Zocor. He’ll be off the anti-arrthymia meds in a few days. But he still needs the pain meds—S takes a minimal dose because he says it makes him fuzzy, but watching him writhing in pain when he coughs is no fun. Dr. R. says he still has some fluid in his lungs—hope it dries out pretty soon.

What else ... oh yes, the bill so far for the repair job. The hospital portion of the bill came in—we not sure exactly what it’s for, but think it’s for the OR, the ICU, and the surgical unit stay—came to $73,000. With the surgeon’s bill and all the pre-op stuff, so far the tally is $104,000. Un-effing-believable. I have this deep-seated fear that Oxford will deny part of the claim and we’ll have to pay more than the $5,000 deductible—which is probably unwarranted because Oxford has been great all along. They even called Stanley after he got home to find out how he was doing and find out if he needed some home health care (he didn’t).

Seems like every year something happens that costs us about $5,000. Stanley’s van getting smashed and having to buy a new one one year, getting a valve jop and bypass this year, various appliances all giving up the ghost last year ... so we decided we’re going to try to put money aside for a $5,000 Shit Happens fund. As if we ever have an extra $5K sitting around doing nothing. Heh.

Jeopardy is on—I like the tournament of champions. Makes me feel smarter when I get one right.

posted by lee on 03/03/05 at 10:44 PM

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