deQuervain's release update

Had the soft cast/splint removed today. I pulled the steristrips off rather than have the nurse do it. The incision hasn't healed much. It's still split right open between the stitches. The ends of the stitches were cut off and apparently they're going to dissolve in the skin. I like that. I've had "old fashioned" stitches before, not eager to repeat the experience. I just hope the two sections of skin bond before the stitches expire.

Pain isn't bad at all. I can type with that hand for short periods of time. I can grasp a coffee mug and open some doors (depending on the type of handle). Twisting isn't so good. Anything that tugs at the incision is instant screaming pain. Other than that though, it's much smoother than I expected.

My other hand isn't enjoying doing the work of both. Hopefully this cuts down on the discomfort on the other side, until we can cut that one up too. Whee. Had the option of doing physical therapy again, but I'm passing for now. I can torture myself just fine, thanks. I'd only go that route if the pain was excessive.

Sleeping should be interesting tonight.

Another day, another surgery

Barely a year after bilateral arthroplasty on my jaw joints, and I'm at it again. This time it's a "de Quervain's release". I've had painful symptoms in both hands since the beginning of the year. Basically, it's painful to extend either arm and apply pressure, or to grip things with the thumb. Somehow it affects both hands, no idea what brought it on. It came on suddenly and won't go away, and is quite painful at work. The tendons get tighter and tighter and won't let go.

I tried physical therapy, anti-inflammatory medicine, and immobilization. So now I've had surgery on one side, and will do the other side once this one has recovered. The surgery was quick, done in the hospital under anesthesia. It's the day after and there's not really much pain. It's no where near as bad as I expected. Only painful if I attempt to grap things with that hand, or extend my arm. Mostly it itches where I assume the incision site is. There's a hard cast along the thumb and arm on the inside following the thumb tendons. Just bandage everywhere else. This will be removed by the orthopedist in ten days.

Going to be a long ten days. It's not very easy to function with one hand, especially being a lefty. Hopefully it heals quick, the right hand isn't pleased with having to do twice the work.

Zero Hour - America's Medic now available

As a software developer, there's nothing I love more than a good simulation. The folks that creates America's Army have been hard at work with an EMS training sim called Zero Hour. I'm sure many like myself have been eagerly checking and rechecking its availability. Well, it's here!

You can access it from this site: http://nationalemspreparedness.org/

Sadly, the installer won't let you install this on Vista x64, even though the app appears to work fine.


The installer can be modified, if you know what you're doing (hint: Orca).

Update

Been a while. Had my last checkup with the surgeon. I can open to 35mm and move side to side 8mm. The pain isn't gone, but the muscles are still healing. No clicking or popping lately. Still a lot of pain in the jaw with stress. The joints ache a lot, especially if I don't remember to shift the jaw from side to side several times a day. I'm very happy with the progress. It's certainly not factory new, but at least it's bearable now, and I can eat fairly normal food.

Insensitive advertising anyone?

I couldn't help but notice this horrible ad placement in an MSNBC news story. The article says that a recent horrible train accident may have been caused by text messaging. What advertisement accompanies the article? It's an ad for a phone with a large keypad, which people use for text messaging. Even worse, what's the tagline of the advertisement? "Get on with life." Way to go Sprint.

Fixing "Personalize handwriting recognition" tool in Vista

Onto an entirely different subject..

I finally broke the bank and purchased a new laptop/tablet. I'd been eying this one online for sometime, finally decided there's more to life than money and satisfied my craving. I swore I'd never buy one with my own money, but I don't want to carry around a corporate laptop either. This one doesn't come with a lock and chain.

What did I get? Well, I've been wanting a tablet so I could take notes in meetings without being that obnoxious fool that types while other people are speaking. That drives me nuts. But I'm also not keen on a PC that has no keyboard. So I got a laptop that does both. It's a Fujitsu T4220. I've already used it for note taking, and it's very nice.

It came preloaded with Vista Business, which has great support for tablets. Wanting to tailor its handwriting recognition for my own personal brand of scribble, I tried running the "Personalize handwriting recognition" tool one evening. No dice, wouldn't run.. told me to whine to my administrator. Yup, that'd be me.

Searched around online for the error that popped up, found a few forum threads but no resolutions. Wasn't until I dug into the event viewer and saw this that I had a clue how to fix it:

InputPersonalization (5620) InkStore: Database recovery failed with error -1216 because it encountered references to a database, 'C:\Users\Administrator\AppData\Local\Microsoft\InputPersonalization\inkStore.mdb', which is no longer present. The database was not brought to a Clean Shutdown state before it was removed (or possibly moved or renamed). The database engine will not permit recovery to complete for this instance until the missing database is re-instated. If the database is truly no longer available and no longer required, procedures for recovering from this error are available in the Microsoft Knowledge Base or by following the "more information" link at the bottom of this message.


Hmm. Users\Administrator? That's not how I log into Windows. When I first powered up the laptop, it went through new account creation and asked me if I wanted to personalize the handwriting recognition. I said no at the time, my bad I guess. It must have mistakenly set up the handwriting database in the Administator's file area. Now how do I get rid of that link? The procedures the event log record hints at are nowhere to be found.

Simple answer? Go into C:\Users\MyAccount\AppData\Local\Microsoft and rename the "InputPersonalization" folder. The name doesn't matter, just add an underscore to it at the end. Reboot. Alternatively, you could try to stop every service that accesses it, but that's a pain. When the machine comes back up you can run the Personalize tool. It creates a whole new recognition database in your account. The old one can be safely deleted. It would've been nice if Microsoft provided a tool or some indication of how to remove extraneous links like this one. It's in one of the files in that directory, but it's not XML or a text file.

D'oh

Alright, I take back the pizza comment. Bad idea. Been paying for that all day. Muscle pain and spasms all day long which I attribute to having satisfied my Dominos' craving yesterday. Bad me, no cookie.

Freezable gel packs are nice for dealing with cranky muscles. Most of them can be heated as well, either in the microwave or in a pot of boiling water. I particularly like the Elasto-Gel brand. It's a firm gel pack that doesn't all glop to one side if you hold it vertically. It's very reusable, similar to what some physical therapy places use. In fact, could be the same thing.

Coincidentally, work bought pizza for our group today. Ugh. Would have been nice to blend in for a change.