Today was kinda bad.  The pain meds make her nauseous and she has some medicine to help with that but thought it was ok today since she’d made it yesterday…  Ended up throwing up around noon which was super bad cause of the stress on the throat plus acid, etc.  Gross.  Anyway, bouncing back a little from that, but overall a low day.  Clearly less of an appetite, but still doing ok, and I think still drinking enough.

So she’s cut back on her pain meds a bit, 7.5cc from 10, we’re hoping that helps the nausea and is still effective for the pain.  We’ll see tomorrow, it seems worse in the morning.  Still no talking, lots of ice water.  Tomorrow’s day 4, which I’ve read may begin a turn for the worse, but I also think every case is different and she’s probably ahead of the curve.  Here’s hoping!

My work has been great during this, letting me work from home, and today I got a good chunk of work done on my biggest project.  Still sort of behind, but this was a good burst of progress.  Probably work a bit more over the weekend to make up for some of the time off.

And that’s the update from Duoteam Headquarters!  Hope everyone is in their extended weekend of holiday fun!

Today was a mix of good and bad – a theme I suspect we’ll see repeated.  Highlights:  Karen had a mid-day "I’m sick of laying around" burst of energy.  She got to take a shower, dye her hair, brush her teeth, and catch up on some email before crashing again.  Sierra came by after work to walk the dog, which was a nice break.  Karen’s also managed to eat a decent amount again today: ramen, jello, some juice, and an energy shake!

Lowlights: she seems to be generally in more pain today.  I blame the cough, which, while currently a bit under control, was much worse last night and this morning.  She brought up a few super-gross phlegm globbers twinged with blood, but many glasses of ice water later that seems better — just phlegm and mucus, no blood.  I still can’t tell if it’s a cold or what, but I guess it doesn’t matter.

Also, while it seemed yesterday that she could whisper and get away with it, she’s not up for vocalizing at all today.  Probably means we should have kept her quiet the first two days, but…  We’ll start now.

Currently watching a great Wild game, we’re up 4-2 with 4 to go in the 2nd period.  Go Wild!

Here’s a small selection of the food we got while trying to cover all the bases.  Hard to predict what’s going to sound good when recovering, a lot of that is still sitting in the package – and most of the juices, too.  But she’s been eating!  Some cream of wheat, some yogurt, mac & cheese, and several popsicles – including one I made out of Emergen-C, so she’s getting some vitamins too  Really good news, as far as I’m concerned!

I don’t think either of us slept very well last night, what with adjusting to the new beds (we’re both upstairs), the pain, the humidifier noise, etc.  Not to mentioned getting up every 4 hours for more drugs and a few spoonfuls of mashed potatoes to wash them down…  But Karen slept in a bit and napped during the day, so she’s getting plenty of rest.

On the left is a post-op Karen holding some ice to her throat.  She got her hair cut the morning before the surgery: looking good!  At right is the inner Karen, post-op.  Uh oh.

Finally, here she is in her "sickbay" yesterday.  It looks pretty much the same today, and probably for the foreseeable future!

My only real concern at the moment is she has a bit of a cough.  Not sure if there’s a cold on top of this, or it’s phlegm from her throat, or something else.  If it’s a cold I imagine the antibiotics will help clean it up, and if it’s from the surgery only time will help — either way we’ve just got to wait.  But it’s hard, whenever she coughs it seems to stress her whole system and I’m sure it’s not good for the ex-tonsil area.

She says it hurts more than yesterday, but I think that’s to be expected.  The drugs are doing a fair job controlling the pain, but making her generally woozy and tired.  On the whole, though, doing very well!  Thanks again for all the calls and emails, we appreciate the support!

PS – eating more mashed potatoes as I type!  Woo hoo!  :)

Well, we’re back, and the surgery went fine.  Six hours in the hospital is draining even if you’re not the one being operated on, so I’m trying to mentally multiply my fatigue and stress by 100x and then pretending I’m in pain AND drugged up and achy: that’s gotta be close to what K is feeling.  Actually I’m pretty impressed so far – not because I thought she’d be a wimp about it, but because she’s eating some real food!  A popsicle, of course, first thing, but then she wanted some mashed potatoes!  And now that she’s taken some more meds she’s talking about another round, maybe some jello this time!

So, this is super encouraging to me, since my biggest recovery goals are hydration and nutrition.  (I’m assuming the rest will take care of itself).  So far so good!

Thanks to everyone for their calls and offers of help and support.  Karen would thank you if she could, and I certainly do!

T Minus 2 hours!  …or so.  I actually can’t remember quite when the surgery is since they moved it up.  But it’s soon, we’re taking off in 45 minutes!

Went out last night for one final solid meal before the popsicle routine kicks in – had some Punch pizza, and it hit the spot!  Then went shopping for everything we could think of that might taste good and go down easy.  I think we’ve covered almost every possibility!  I’ve been running the humidifier upstairs, where we’ve build the "sickbay" around the TV, and have stocked the area with DVDs, books, hard candy, gum, and a notepad for writing.  Chipped up some ice for her to suck on, and… probably more, but that’s all I can remember!

Send some positive thoughts her way, but mostly watch this space for updates – I don’t think she’ll want to do much talking for a day or two or more.  We’ll keep you posted!

Today was the day.  I’d finally had enough with excuses, so even though I still have a bit of a cold I dressed up, pulled out the bike, and hit the snow-packed trail to work.  It was awesome!

• Temperature: 10F, pretty calm day, sun shining.
• I wore some nice socks and my hiking boots: feet never started to get cold.
• Synthetic long underwear, two pairs of boxer briefs, and shorts for my legs: also plenty warm.
• Synthetic long sleeve undershirt, synthetic light-weight jacket with neck zipper, and a nice rain jacket outer layer to block the wind: waaay too warm by the time I got there.  Started sweating out, which can be dangerous if I ever have to stop.  Need to unzip my neck, open the chest a bit, and unzip the underarm vents as I warm up next time.
• Lightweight hat and velcro face protector: super warm.  May need to vent my head better.
• Synthetic liners and my new lobster gloves: freezing freakin’ cold finger tips.  My fingers must have extra bad circulation or something, or maybe I should try without the liners in case things were too tight?  I don’t know, but it was really painful when I arrived…  I had to run them under some lukewarm water for a minute or two to make things feel better, and they’re still (2 hours later) a little sensitive.  Hmm.  I may need to get some pogies to put my hands in.

Overall impressions of the ride: the snow makes me go slower.  The Midtown Greenway’s been plowed pretty well, but there’s about 1/2" to 1" of packed snow on most of the surface.  (that picture’s from last year, when we had much less snow)  Thanks to the plowing there aren’t many tire track ruts, but there’s just enough unevenness and slipping potential to make me slow down and really focus on the terrain.  I have to work at keeping my upper body relaxed: my instinct is to tighten up to keep my front wheel aligned, but it’s actually much easier and safer to stay loose and react gently rather than trying to keep it tight.

(actually, that may be part of my cold finger issue – may have been gripping too tight, combined with a slower ride generating less internal heat.  Hmm.)

The on-street portion of the ride was good; I have to jump out more into the lane where it’s been plowed, but I never really felt unsafe or like I was impeding traffic.

We’ll see how it goes tonight in the dark, but so far it’s a blast!

Whew.  I wasn’t sure if I’d find time to post until after the holidays!  It’s been a little hectic around here, for sure.  A quick recap for those wondering what Duoteam’s been up to:

• Celebrating Thanksgiving in Nebraska at Karen’s brother’s house.
• Karen helped decorate and overall spread good cheer for her office’s holiday party.
• We’ve both had colds.
• I haven’t biked to work since the day before Thanksgiving (see above – but I intend to soon!)
• I finally started brewing again after blowing my supply at the wedding.
• It snowed!  We’ve had two storms in a row, and more forecast for tomorrow.  After a disappointing winter last year, we’re off to a good start.
• Bruno turned 3!  He got to have a little friend over for some massive bouts of tug-o-war.  Fun.

I’ve also been tweaking the mostly-working-perfectly wakeup system, just today I adjusted the sensor to determine when the alarm is going off and fixed a little bug in the light timing.  I had to program it to start about an hour before we want to get up since it takes that long for our house to get up to the temperature we want – it’s been near zero in the mornings for the last few weeks.

Not sure who’s interested in the details, but in the pic at right you can see the components that went into this.  From roughly left to right: the cannibalized innards of a 5V power supply ($2 at Savers!), the kit I put together to fade the 120V light, and on the right is a barebones Arduino board soldered into a little PC board I got from Radio Shack that’s also holding the rest of the circuitry I designed.  Nothing too complex, and I know I could have gotten it in a smaller box, but this one holds the light nicely.

Pretty nice in action, too.  It’s nice waking up to some light instead of bleak & cold darkness.  I’ve found it’s much more of a psychological effect (for me, anyway), where I’ll wake up with the light and the sound and know that there’s more time in the cycle before I’m "supposed" to get up, but I’ve been making an effort to not be tied to this "scheduled" wakeup time.  If I’m awake and it’s close enough, I get up!  Hard to break myself of the "but the alarm won’t go off for another 10 minutes!" thing – but I think that just leads to bad sleep in the morning.  Anyway.  Good progress, and I definitely like it better than any other alarm I’ve used.

That’s all for now!  Keep bugging Karen, maybe she’ll post!

This is almost certainly the coolest thing ever built.  Brent, feel like making some modifications to your MAME cabinet??  I’ll brew the beer…

So the ride home was awesome, windy and brisk, but the wind was mostly with me.  Still not pitch dark at 5 by any means, but it’s dark enough I’m glad to have the light — and it’s super bright!  I still love the Cat Eye for the ground view in front of me, but having a light on my head is awesome!  I can look at a stop sign on the next block and see it blinking back at me, then move my head and it disappears.  It’s a 1/2 watt LED with a really focused lens so it throws a tight beam quite a long way.

But the whole contraption, as I mentioned, was way too bulky and unsafe in case of an accident.  Taking a leaf out of Apple’s MagSafe book, I decided to go with magnets as my "quick-release" mechanism instead of velcro.  I bent a bit of scrap metal into a Z to allow me some leeway to aim and super glued it to the front piece of the light.  This would attach to a rare earth magnet on the brim of the helmet.

I intended to glue some metal to the battery case (two AAAs now) and stick this to more permanent magnets on the helmet, but the batteries themselves provided enough sticking power when I used two magnets.  These went along the back right, and in the dead center of the back I glued one more bit of scrap to attach the rear blinker.

I had to bend more metal and wedge it into the clip of the blinker so the magnet could grab something – it almost worked on the batteries inside but not quite.

Now I have a super low-profile helmet during the day – just three magnets and a bit of metal – and it converts with a few clicks for night biking!  I’ll have to get it back on my head tomorrow and see how it’s aiming, but early testing looks good.  The super glue seems plenty strong, and I can swing my head around pretty fast without any wobble in the lights.  Sweet!