health – Page 9 – dangermouse.net

Tonsil recovery day 4

I slept reasonably well last night, perhaps thanks to the painkillers I took before bed. So I felt a bit more rested and alert today than I have the past two days.

However it’s Monday, and my wife was back at work – only she had to work from home because of the current COVID lockdown here in Sydney. She had equipment here from previous work-at-home stints, but when plugged in her phone/switchboard didn’t work, and it took her until 4:30pm wrestling with tech support via her own personal phone before it started working. And meanwhile the whole day she was getting voicemail messages delivered via email, because she couldn’t answer the phone and so everyone was leaving messages. So it all kind of piled up and was generally unpleasant.

Add to this that Scully got bored being stuck indoors, and it was wet and rainy outside, and I didn’t feel well enough to go on a walk, and the three of us were stuck indoors together trying to do stuff and interrupting one another… it wasn’t a particularly fun day.

Eventually I took Scully out late in the afternoon and she of course got wet and covered in grass. I had to wash her paws off in the bathroom sink.

My throat seems perhaps a bit more painful than yesterday. I had real trouble eating anything today. I made risotto for dinner because it’s nice and soft, and it still took me about twice as long as normal to eat it, wincing down every mouthful.

I don’t really mean to complain, but I’m pretty over this now and want to go back to being able to eat and chew properly and move my tongue around without it hurting so much. More ice cream tonight!!

New content today:

Tonsil recovery day 3

Last night before bed I had some of the super painkiller tablets the hospital gave me, and they definitely helped me sleep better. I slept in a little late this morning. Although the sleep was better, it was still interrupted a bit by a phlegmy throat and coughing.

Today began feeling similar to yesterday, but I think I’ve improved a little over the day. Yesterday afternoon I was really worn out, but today I think I felt a little better – although definitely not back to normal. Although I was hungry at lunch time, I didn’t really feel like eating because of the painful swallowing. I forced down a couple of small grilled cheese sandwiches.

For dinner tonight I made fried rice with broccoli, carrot, onion, ginger, and cashews. Normally I put chilli in, but I’m staying off the spicy food until my throat feels better.

COVID-wise, Sydney had 20 new cases today. Most of those were not already in isolation as close contacts, so it seems to be spreading through the community still. The hope is that contact tracing will see those un-isolated cases dwindle down to zero within the next week, thus confining the virus to people in quarantine, and then we can start thinking about lifting the lockdown.

At some point I need to go buy some groceries, but the news has been showing a lot of crowded supermarkets with people in the throes of panic buying. I’m hoping on Monday morning when people start doing work stuff that the supermarkets will be a bit more normal and I can go in and get milk and stuff without battling hordes of people.

New content today:

Tonsil recovery day 2

Today wasn’t as good as yesterday. I didn’t sleep very well again, although better than the previous night, I think. In the morning I felt okay, and I went on a long walk with my wife and Scully before lunch. But by the time we got home I was feeling very tired and worn out, and was walking very slowly.

I’ve been feeling fatigued all afternoon. I didn’t really feel like eating at lunch time, but I forced down some toast about 3pm, which was difficult as it’s becoming more painful to swallow food.

I’m going to take it easy and basically lie on the sofa and watch TV for a bit.

Oh, the other big news is Sydney is in full COVID lockdown again, as of earlier this evening. The latest outbreak has reached 82 cases, and the whole city, plus the immediately surrounding areas are now in lockdown for two weeks (at least). No leaving home except for (1) essential work or education that can’t be done from home, (2) medical reasons, (3) shopping for necessary supplies, or (4) 2 hours a day of exercise, within your local council region.

Hopefully this will get the outbreak under control. Although I’ve had one AstraZeneca vaccine shot, I need to wait 12 weeks – until September – for my second. My wife is booked in for a Pfizer vaccine in a couple of weeks, and she can have her second dose just 3 weeks later, so she’s going to beat me to full vaccination.

New content today:

Tonsil recovery day 1

I didn’t feel in much pain last night after my tonsil surgery, so I just had a couple of paracetamol tablets before bed, rather than the extra-strong painkillers I’d been prescribed. I think I would have slept okay, but I kept waking with a clogged phlegmy feeling throat, and having to swallow to clear it, so I didn’t sleep very well.

Today, mostly my throat has not been painful in general, but it does hurt when I swallow food. I need to chew well to avoid any hard or scratchy lumps and to swallow smaller portions at a time, and wash it down with water. I had my usual muesli for breakfast and was okay with that routine.

For lunch my wife and I went out to a nice seafood restaurant. Normally we go out on a Friday night, but we decided to do it for lunch today since she was off work to look after me, and then we could relax at home tonight. I had a nice piece of grilled salmon, with chips.

At home I relaxed a bit, made some comics, and then in the evening it was virtual games night. I played a coupe of games of Kingdomino and then a Nidavellir, before stopping to relax and just watch some TV with my wife before bedtime.

New content today:

Tonsils out!

Today was the big day. My wife took the day off work to look after me going in and out of the hospital. I only needed to be there at 10am, so we didn’t set an alarm and allowed ourselves a sleep-in, although I woke up early and got up at the usual time anyway because I couldn’t go back to sleep.

I had nothing for breakfast but a sip of water. A bit before 10 we went up to the hospital and my wife left me outside, since there was a COVID check-in protocol to go through to enter the building. I was scheduled for the surgery for 11am, however I ended up waiting in the patient prep area with a surgical gown on for about an hour and a half. Nurses and the anaesthetist came in to see me and said that the patient before me had had some complications and the surgery was taking longer than usual. I’d packed my phone away tightly in the storage bag with my clothes, which they’d secured, so I couldn’t easily get it out to kill the time, so I just had to do my best.

Eventually they got me and wheeled me into the anaesthetic bay by an operating theatre. The anaesthetist was a cheerful woman who chatted with me for a bit, while putting in a drip and beginning the process. They still seemed to be finishing up with the previous patient, and I had quite a wait again before going in for the surgery. They wheeled me in…

And the next thing I knew they were waking me up in the post-op recovery room. I was groggy for a bit, slowly becoming more alert. They gave me an icy pole (a frozen flavoured water ice on a stick) to help soothe my throat, which was a bit sore. After a while when I was more lucid they wheeled me to a small private recovery room, and brought me a simple meal of jelly (gelatine dessert/Jell-o) and yoghurt, nice soft things. By now it was about 3pm, and this was the first thing I’d eaten since last night, so I was pretty hungry.

My wife came in to visit for a bit, but they weren’t discharging me until 6:30pm, so she had to leave again and come back later to pick me up. The nurses said that the local anaesthetic the surgeon put into my throat would wear off soon and it would start to get painful, and then I could have some painkilling tablets. But I actually felt pretty good the whole time. Even now later in the evening it’s not especially painful, and I’m sure the local must have worn off by now, so maybe I’m lucky and it’s not going to be very painful.

My wife made scrambled eggs for dinner – something nice and soft. Later I’ll have a big bowl of ice cream!

New content today:

Pre-tonsil prep

Today I had my face-to-face ethics class at the school. It was the last week before school holidays – two weeks off, then returning for term 3. The Year 5 students were back after last week’s camp. I asked them where they went and they said Canberra. I said it must have been very cold, and they agreed enthusiastically. Canberra is inland and nestled in mountains, so it gets very cold in winter – sometimes it even snows there. I’ve been to Canberra many times myself, and almost always in winter, oddly enough.

We finished off the topic on moral responsibility, with a couple of stories setting dilemmas of who to spend money on – local people/family, or foreign people (via charities) who need it more. There was some good discussion of this, with various different ideas on how to decide.

After class, I went into the city by train, because I had an appointment in there. (By this I mean the Central Business District, or “downtown” area, although we don’t use the term “downtown” here.) I picked up some Japanese food for lunch while in there, and also checked out a bookshop. And I took some photos!

This is George Street, the main street of Sydney. Normally around lunch time it would be absolutely crowded with people, but we’ve had a new COVID-19 outbreak here developing over the past few days. Today 16 new cases were announced, taking the total up to 37 cases. This was enough to make the government reintroduce some very strict mask requirements and movement restrictions. Facemasks are now mandatory (as from this afternoon) in every non-residential indoor setting, including office workplaces. They were made mandatory again on public transport and in shops a few days ago, but this workplace requirement is new – something we didn’t have at any time before. There are also travel restrictions now in place for subregions of Sydney, with people not being allowed to leave their local government area (essentially an area covering a few suburbs). The general feeling is that this is one step short of a full lockdown, which I think a lot of people are expecting within the next day or two if cases continues to rise.

Back to photos, this is the Sydney General Post Office, which is considered the building marking the central reference point for the city. Distances in Sydney are measured “from the GPO”.

This is the interior of the Queen Victoria Building, and old government office building dating from 1898, now converted to a shopping area. Many people in government in the 1950s and 60s wanted to demolish the building to make way for more modern development, but fortunately that ever happened and we now have this beautiful Victorian era building in the middle of the city.

Here’s an exterior view, of the southern end of the building. It’s a long, thin building running north-south, so it’s a lot longer in the other direction than you can see here.

Back home this afternoon I had a Zoom call with a former work colleague, who is now a professor at the University of Technology, Sydney, teaching various image processing and engineering subjects. He’s offered me a casual job teaching tutorials for his image processing course for the second semester of this year, which I’m thinking I’ll probably take up. So we were discussing what would be involved and so on. It looks promising, and if approved I should be starting this job in August.

Finally today, I got information from the hospital for my tonsillectomy tomorrow. I need to fast from 4am and show up at the hospital at 10am. I don’t know yet what time I’ll be released, but I’m expecting I’ll be home for dinner. Assuming I feel okay to eat anything but ice cream…

So I suppose my next blog entry will be after the operation, and I can tell you how it went.

New content today:

Surprisingly easy Friday

After yesterday’s horrible headlong crash into COVID-19 vaccination side effects, I managed to get a decent sleep and woke up this morning feeling a lot better. And also much more refreshed than I had any right to be after going to bed at 02:30. I presume the nap attempts I took yesterday helped. I was actually much more alert during last night’s standards meeting than I have been any previous night, as well. So I’m happy to report that the feverish/lethargic reaction to the vaccine has passed almost as quickly as it came on.

Last night’s standards meeting went through a few more technical sessions, on image stabilisation, depth metrology, and high dynamic range and wide colour gamut image encoding.

After I woke up this morning, I had the weekly grocery shop to do. I spent some time working on Darths & Droids, and then had my online ethics class in the afternoon, today with 5 students, which is a new record number. It does mean each student doesn’t get as much time to answer questions and I have to cycle through them, but hopefully they all enjoyed it and got something valuable out of it. The topic today was advertising, and pondering questions of why we have advertising, whether you can trust it, and whether it should be regulated in various ways.

After that, I drove out to Turramurra (a Sydney suburb) with the car full of stock for my market stall, as I am running the stall there on both days of this weekend. The venue is indoors and was available for setting up this evening to save time tomorrow morning. I was happy to take advantage of this since I won’t want to get up early tomorrow after another 02:30 finish for tonight’s ISO meeting!

Then I drove home again and watched the Twitch stream of a guy who was solving puzzles from the 2016 mezzacotta Puzzle Competition that I’d written. And that ended just before tonight’s ISO meeting session, which I’m now in…

New content today:

COVID vaccine effects

Last night was rough. As I said yesterday, I had my first COVID-19 vaccination. I’ve never had any reactions to flu shots before, so I wasn’t expecting much.

As the evening wore on and I prepared for my 23:00 start for the ongoing ISO standards meetings, I began to feel worse. I was very tired, although that could easily have been due to the accumulation of late nights, but I also started feeling a bit feverish. Then a lot feverish. I started shivering during the ISO meeting, quite violently. This was not helped at all by the fact that we’re experiencing unusually cold weather at the moment. I was rugged up with warm clothes, but still felt pretty bad, and I had to struggle through the Zoom meeting in this state.

Finally after the meeting ended at 02:30 I crawled into bed, feeling pretty awful, chilly and shivering. It took me a long time to warm up and fall asleep. Then this morning I had to get up at 07:00 rather than sleeping in, because my wife had a Zoom interview and wanted me to take Scully out so there’d be no interruptions.

I rugged up again and took Scully up the street to a nearby cafe for breakfast. I very rarely go out for breakfast, but when I do I often have eggs benedict, since I’ve never felt like tackling hollandaise sauce at home. So I got that, and it was very good. Although the weather was cold—and more about that in a minute—I felt better and was comfortable with Scully keeping my lap warm as I ate.

I was waiting for my wife to message me that she’d finished her Zoom call and had gone to work, so I could drop Scully at the office with her. But I’d finished eating and was ready to go, and no message. So I decided to see what sweets they had, and the carrot cake looked good. When the waitress came by, I asked, “Can I please have a slice of the carrot (ping!) cake?” The ping was the message from my wife! But now I’d committed to the cake and couldn’t back down. So I sat for another 15 minutes and ate the cake. It was really good, a top notch carrot cake, and I don’t regret it at all.

Today I tried to have a bit of a nap around lunch time, when I had a sudden wave of tiredness. I’m not sure if I really slept, but lying down and closing my eyes for 1.5 hours seemed to help. I also hopped into bed after dinner, at 8pm, to try and sleep a little before tonight’s meeting began at 23:00 again. As I type, the meeting has just begun, and I feel much better than last night. So the COVID vaccine reaction lasted about 24 hours and seems to have subsided fully now.

On to weather. Today was remarkable – it was very cold. The temperature in Sydney rose to only 10.3°C, which was the coldest day for 25 years, and the coldest June day for 122 years. And persistent light rain and wind made it feel even colder. A lot of areas further inland got snow, and there were many images of it as the lead item on the news tonight.

Finally, last night’s photography standards meeting was again interesting, with technical discussion of image noise measurement, camera autofocus performance, and image flare measurement. We also had an update on the issue with China pursuing separate standards via the ITU which I mentioned yesterday. The representative from Apple had had a conversation with Apple’s legal team and reported that standards work is technically open – if interested members of the public want to access meeting records they can, although the process is not necessarily easy. So the US State Department prohibition on US citizens meeting Huawei employees doesn’t apply. Also, there was some other legal advice regarding how ISO can react to other organisations essentially stealing scope. Overall it’s going to be an interesting process to see what happens out of this.

New content today:

Taking it easy… until 2:30 am

Last night I had the second night of Zoom meetings for ISO Photograph standards. We got stuck into the technical sessions. First up was a presentation by some people from JPEG (by which I mean ISO/IEC Joint Technical Committee 1, Subcommittee 29), mostly about the new JPEG XS streaming image file format they are developing. They explained briefly how it worked and the advantages over other streaming image compression methods. They also gave some updates on other things that JPEG are working on. I’m not particularly knowledgeable about image coding formats so didn’t get a whole lot out of it, but some parts were interesting.

Next was discussion of the revision of ISO 12233, a standard for measuring camera lens resolution. This has been being updated for nearly 3 years now, and we’re still not converging on something agreeable to all the technical experts in all countries. We ended up with the project leader deciding to give it one more go and submit a new draft for balloting, to see if we can get it finalised before the looming project deadline. If we can’t get consensus with that, we may have to cancel the project and restart it afresh.

Then we had updates on the adoption of Adobe’s DNG digital negative format as an ISO standard. That seems to be progressing slowly, as it has for a couple of years now.

And finally we had a new liaison proposal letter from the International Telecommunications Union, suggesting a formal liaison with a new group under that organisation who are proposing to standardise material related to (1) automatic white balance, (2) image metadata related to aesthetic qualities, and (3) metadata related to computational photography. This was interesting, because as the ISO committee on photography, these things very likely fall under our scope, and other organisations trying to standardise them pose a danger of proliferating/incompatible standards. And a further issue was that every single person listed on the liaison technical committee leadership was Chinese. The Chinese are known for pursuing their own standardisation goals, including existing cases where China then adopts a commercial standard that other countries don’t use, but which manufacturers in other countries suddenly need to follow if they want to continue doing business in China. So this is quite a delicate situation. It was further complicated by the US delegates pointing out that they are forbidden by the US State Department from conducting closed meetings (i.e. meetings not open to the public) with representatives of Huawei. The proposed liaison could be construed as such a meeting. So we actually have a very tricky situation to deal with. Most people at the meeting last night suggested that the best thing to do was ignore the liaison request, while others suggested a measured response to probe exactly what their intentions are and to point out that their proposals fall within ISO scope, and hint that they should back off. It’ll be interesting to watch this play out.

After the meeting ended, a few minutes late at about 02:40 this morning, I finally went to bed. I couldn’t sleep in too late this morning, as I had my face-to-face ethics class at the local school. I was extremely tired last night, but my body is still in the same time zone, so during the day today I didn’t feel too bad. Tonight at the meeting is going to be difficult though.

After ethics I had a booking for my first COVID-19 vaccination shot. It was very quick and easy, but I had to drive a few suburbs away to a clinic that was doing them. As it was lunchtime, I found a bakery afterwards to grab some lunch, which I reviewed once more for Snot Block & Roll.

This afternoon I considered taking a nap to catch up on sleep, but I’ve never been able to have naps effectively. I just can’t fall asleep during daylight hours. And I didn’t even feel all that tired, so it would have been pretty impossible. So I just relaxed and did some fun things. Let’s see how I go tonight…

New content today:

An errant tonsil

Most of today I spent working on taking photos for a new batch of Irregular Webcomic! strips.

But this afternoon I had an appointment with an ear, nose, and throat specialist. A while back I noticed a rounded lump on one tonsil. I’ve been through a sequence of antibiotics prescribed by my GP, which didn’t do anything, so he sent me to the specialist. He had a look and then sent me to a CT scan of the neck region. Today he concluded from the scan that the lump most most likely a benign cyst, but he recommended removal so they could biopsy it and to prevent any future complications.

So I’m now booked in for a tonsillectomy in late June. Surgery is never fun, but I was kind of looking forward to having an excuse to eat nothing but ice cream for a week. But the doctor said I could eat anything after the surgery, except spicy-hot foods. Well, dang. He did also say that it would be painful for about a week and I should take it easy and essentially not do work, what with being doped up on painkillers. So it looks like all the bad bits without the ice cream.

Maybe I’ll just eat a lot of ice cream anyway.

New content today: