Category: Rant

Medical update

Ok, I’ve seen the orthopod today. The official diagnosis is “PARTIAL TEAR SUPRASPINATUS, AC OA, IMPINGEMENT”. What he said was that the tear wasn’t as bad as my doctor said it was, but that I have some sort of bursitus or tendenitis. He gave me a cortisone shot into the bursa, and a scrip for physio therapy, and I see him again in 6 weeks. He said we’ll have to see if that works, and if not I’m going to end up getting similar surgery to what Vicki had.

This could be a disaster for my hopes to paddle the “90” next year. Or I could recover quickly and get back to where I was a few months ago.

A tale of two MacBook Airs

I have a little netbook that I borrowed from my step-daughter for our trip to England and haven’t bothered to give back yet. (I don’t think she uses it much) I love the portability since my main computer, a MacBook Pro 17″ is kind of tethered down most of the time, but the tiny screen size is hurting my back (I kind of crane forward to read things, and it hurts after a while). So when Apple announced the new MacBook Air (MBA), I had two thoughts:

  1. A computer that’s lighter than a netbook but with a decent sized screen would be great for that sort of use
  2. A new MacBook Air should drive down the resale value of older MacBook Airs, making them affordable

So I contacted a few frieds I knew who had the old ones to see if they were selling and upgrading. Two of them were, one with an older one with a hard drive, but the other with year old one with a SSD. If I’m going for portability, the SSD was obviously the way to go. Obviously Apple agrees, since the new ones don’t have a hard drive option. But here’s the age old problem with Apple products – just because there is a brand new model, the resale price as seen on recent eBay auctions has not come down much, if at all, on the SSD ones.

So my options are currently

  • Buy a perfectly good 1 year old MBA with 2 years of Apple Care on it
  • Buy a brand new MBA with exactly the same options (RAM, SSD size, etc), slightly smaller and with much better battery life and with 3 years of Apple Care but for $450 more
  • Buy a brand new MBA with 4Gb of RAM instead of 2Gb, for $550 more than the used one.

I’m wracked with indecision on this one. I probably don’t need 4Gb of RAM on the computer I use when I’m not at my main computer, since it won’t be doing as many tasks (I’m currently got 21 Chrome tabs open, plus iTunes, Terminal, Skype, Word, and Remote Desktop) but that’s the sort of thing I’m likely to throw in just for future proofing if I buy one new. The difference in specs between the old one and the new one are pretty minor, except the battery life. And is that really worth the extra $450? That’s what I can’t decide.

Oh yeah, and there’s always option 4 – forget about buying a MBA, put the money away, and when my shoulder heals up a bit buy a SpeedStroke kayak ergometer. It’s about twice as much, but it would probably do me a lot more good.

Shoulder update

Just got a call from my doctor – the MRI results are in, and I have a small but full thickness tear in my rotator cuff. I suspected it might be the rotator cuff. Now I have to see an orthopod to see if this is going to require surgery or physio or something in between. It sounds stupid, but I’m almost hoping it will be surgery because in my history of pain, physio never fixes anything.

In the mean time, it’s time to dust off my old SafeType keyboard. I hated having to crane around to see the infrequently used non-alpha keys, but being able to type when your arm is in a sling is a major plus when you don’t have sick leave.

The brain is a gate for pain

I was watching “House MD” and Doctor House is trying to live without pain killers for a week, and ends up crushing his hand with a pestle to deal with the pain in his leg. Doctor Wilson just shrugs and says “The brain is a gate for pain” or something like that, explaining that the brain only lets you feel the worst pain of the multiple pains you’re experiencing. I’m only too aware of that, as the constant pain in my knees and hips makes it hard for me to feel other pains until they are so intense as to be dangerous. The three days I spent walking around with a burst appendix which I thought was trapped gas is testimony to that, as is the foot and a half of gangrenous large intestine they removed when I finally went to see somebody about it.

And thus, a new sudden shoulder pain is very worrisome. All too often in the past, the first indication I’ve had of a joint pain is when it’s so bad that it becomes permanent. And of course, every new joint pain is just another one that the doctors shrug and say “I don’t know, maybe you’ve just got bad joints”. I don’t even want to bother seeing a doctor about them any more – they’ll think they know what it is, put me through months of treatment, and when all it does is make it worse, they shrug and go on to somebody they can actually treat.