Wow!

I just received the bill from the hospital for my installation. Becoming a cyborg is really expensive! The computer was almost $55k and the wires were a little over $6k. I now have over $60k of hardware installed in me and the installation itself cost an additional $10k. I'm staring at a bill for over $70k. Thank God we won the battle with insurance!

Out of my element

Setting up the blog to automatically notify subscribers when something new is posted is something I'm comfortable with. Wiring it up via Feedburner so updates and automatically pushed is something I'm comfortable with. Wiring iTunes to take the feed and make it available in their store I am comfortable with. But this converting videos and getting them on Google Video and thumbnailing them and making them available and updating the blog...this I am not comfortable with! I have been working since lunch time trying to get our baby dedication videos burned to a DVD and I have so far been completely unsuccessful! RCC desperately needs a volunteer to take over this aspect of the weekly update. If this is you and you have an idea of how to get the file home each week from the TriCaster please let me know and we'll give it a try. You'll need a Blogger account and I will take care of the rest of your accounts. You should be familiar with ftp as well as Google Video and Blogger for this job. The Feedburner and iTunes parts are already complete.

What will you be doing?

On today, this day after Christmas, what will you be doing? I have been blessed with a great job with a really good employer so I will not be returning to work until 5 January 2009. In the interim, my main goal is to play Littlest Pet Shop, paint fingernails, shoot kids with Nerf, build models, fly helicopters and play Wii games. I am lucky enough to be able to spend over a week at home with my wife and kids playing with all of their new toys. I'll probably end up doing some work for church, but for my paying employer, I will stay away until next year!

Merry Christmas

Christmas is about spending time with the family in our traditions. We saw Grammy and Gramps yesterday and we're getting ready to take off and visit Grandma and Grandpa shortly. Merry Christmas to all of you and I hope your Christmas memories are nice!

Why the wait?

I'm so happy with the SCS and how well it's working for me now. I just look back over the time I was going to my pain management doctor and I'm disappointed it took them so long to make the recommendation for a SCS. Then, during the months I spent fighting with insurance for this, there was a warning each and every month about how it may not work, about how difficult it is to stimulate the thoracic spine properly and all of that. Yet, today, after only six days with the permanent SCS installation, I'm just as happy as I could be. The main pain is surgery related rather than the same ongoing nerve pain. I just wish we could have done this trial months and months ago so we knew it could have helped. It just serves to remind me that the doctors are not the primary advocate for our health...it is completely up to us.

It is done...

Well, I finally had the permanent implant of the spinal cord stimulator. This is because of the successful trial. The leads were placed much better this time and they go up higher in my back which is a good thing. The coverage of my offending nerve seems to be a lot better. Now a couple days to get over the surgical pain and I have 6 weeks to take things really easy so the leads have time for my body to form scar tissue around them...that will help hold them in place without the positionality of the trial. The really interesting part to me is the recharging system. The part that recharges the system is in itself a rechargeable battery, then it has a paddle on it that I place over my implant and it recharges the system, then the recharger is plugged in the wall to recharge it. It seems to me they could have easily skipped a step...who needs a rechargeable battery to recharge a rechargeable battery?

Sick

It hit me yesterday about two minutes before our second Worship Experience started. Really bad cramps in my gut and horrific nausea. I was able to dump my microphone and my notes onto Pastor Dean's lap with an apology and I went straight to the bathroom...where I remained for around 30 minutes. After that great adventure, I went to the car to wait for the family and to cramp up until we left. On the way home, I expressed my concern that if I'm sick (my wife and daughter had both experienced this illness) then I'll miss my surgery on Wednesday. But my wife had a plan. A home remedy from our friends at Young Living Family Farm. Since I didn't have the proper essential oil at home, I was to go to the store and get a garlic bulb. We did that on the way home, then I was told to eat one clove every two hours from then until bedtime. For some folk this may be difficult, but I really love garlic, so I made a garlic cheese bread, hit it in the oven only long enough to melt the cheese, but the garlic was still raw and I proceeded to eat one piece with about 1.5 cloves of garlic on each piece from 1330 until the final chunk at 2130. From the very first piece I felt better. The cramps vanished and I felt mostly better but I ended up dozing on and off the rest of the day while sucking down garlic and breath assures until this morning...when I feel normal. Amazing remedy and it seemed to work for me!

Blogging in fits and starts

My blogging tends to follow how my back is doing. It's frustrating being ruled so well by my back, but that's what it really boils down to. Blogging is a part of my ministry where I am willing to open up and explore more than what is going on, but to take a look at my motivations and my hopes. Unfortunately, when my back hurts more, I find myself curling up like a potato bug...worrying more about what's happening inside and have less and less to do with the outside world. Since they pulled the temporary wires from my back, The Nerve that has been bugging me for so long has fired up again. That's not to say all the pain was gone with the SCS but it was much better. I'm having the final implant placed in me on Wednesday sometime in the afternoon, so I can hold on until then...some days it just gets hard...

First snowstorm and accidents

I got on the freeway with all three kids in the truck trying to get my eldest to drama practice. We have had the first snowstorm of Winter here in Utah and it got bad very quickly. The freeway has not been cleared so the speed was down, then about 1/2 mile from Spanish Fork the freeway stopped. I had enough room to slow down so we were okay, but to my left was an older '80s pickup with a trailer that jacknifed and went by us sliding sideways. As we inched by trying for the Spanish Fork exist there were at least a dozen cars off the road that had been in accidents an spun out and were off the road. The emergency response vehicles had not even arrived yet, but people had stopped to try and help out. Thankfully we made the decision to not continue to drama practice. It just wasn't worth it to chance getting into an accident, so we turned around and went back home. Hopefully it'll clear up before we go to church tomorrow morning.

Not fast enough

Our connection through their own network connection is still too slow. Only 381k/sec upload is really just a tiny bit faster than Cricket was. Grrr

It Works

Well, after playing around with my cybernetic implant all day today I have come to the wonderful conclusion that it works! The nerve that has been causing me most of my grief has been turned down. It still hurts but I think some of the problem is the positionality of the leads. Because they are not the permanently installed leads they move more and I get the sensation in a different place if my head is up or down. I also am experiencing some cramps from the insertion, but I figure that'll get better as I heal. Tomorrow and Monday I'll be able to mess around more with the unit, but it looks like we're going to be a go on Monday and possibly have it permanently implanted on Friday, 12 December. Merry Christmas to the Buckley family!

Feels Weird

The implant, that is. To understand what they did, we need to discuss a bit of back anatomy. The important parts involved are our body's wiring (spinal cord) the electrical tape it is wrapped in (dura) and the wiring loom it runs through (spinal column). What happened to me is they inserted a large bore needle into my wiring loom being very careful not to puncture the electrical tape (bad headache for days if they do that). Then into the needle, they inserted the leads and just pushed it up into the wiring loom more. One good thing is when they were asking me if it was in the right place (yeah, they wore me up for a part of the surgery) I asked him to move it up further. That caused my doctor to feel a small protuberance in my wiring loom that could be pressing on the wiring and causing all the pain. We'll be discussing that further on Monday. Right now because the leads were not inserted into their permanent locations, when I move it changes the efficacy. Sitting with my head to the side I can hit the nerve. Sitting with my head up, I need to turn the intensity up so much that I feel it in my legs. This would not be an issue with the permanent install as that is held in place better, but it's making it difficult to evaluate how it's working. More to come...

The Cyborg

Tomorrow I am to be at the hospital at 0730 to turn into a cyborg. They will be installing a computer and many many leads into my back to try and interrupt my pain signals by sending electrical impulses instead. If this works, I'll feel a tingle rather than the ongoing pain I've experienced...and I get to be a cyborg!