9/05/08

Condition Summary #1

Except for taxi rides to the hospital and the occasional brief and painful breakfast outing close by I have been largely housebound since getting back from Chiang Mai. You would think that would give me plenty of time to work on this blog, but I can't focus and it takes serious and exhausting effort to get the correct words to come out of my fingers.

But yesterday on my second trip to Bangkok Hospital Pattaya, I got my second lithium injection. The first one was last Saturday; a conciliation prize for my medicine not arriving on time. That one was 60mg and free. It left me feeling slightly drunk and life my head was filled with warm protective cotton. It felt great and Mai and I went to The Avenue.

This time it was only 30mg and they charged me 800 baht. Personally I preferred the feeling of the larger dose. But it was enough to allow me to go out into the world for the remainder of the day.

I'm not go to go into the details of the times I haven't posted on. I will get to that, hopefully, when they get me my meds. I will use the fumes of this lithium effect to bring you up to speed on me.

Health:

• As often happens I got just what I needed when I needed it. In this case the cane I found in Chiang Mai. My dizziness has increased, and the weakness in my right side is getting worse. The shaking is also becoming noticeable now more than just me. The cane helps with this.

• The whispering is getting louder, and I suspect a lot of the insects I see aren't real. Lights are too bright, and I can't sift out the din of multiple conversations, and the noise of the street is often too loud and painful.

• My mind is sharp lately, but often comes to the incorrect conclusion. That is to say I make brilliant leaps of logic but they don't bear out when rethought about. Unfortunately I sometimes forget to rethink things.

• I tend to get a step or two ahead while doing tasks and forget the current step.

• The right eye is still half blind, and I still hear my name several times a day.

• On the plus side, acupuncture has removed all non-spasm related pain.

Housing:

• I will be in this hotel room until Nov 1st. Unfortunately when I first moved in I was only planning to stay a month, and when I told Meow I was definitely staying through at least November, it seems the 'at least' part was lot in translation and they booked my room to others.

• On Nov 1st I will be moving into first floor newly built rooms in the Information building of this complex. It is a little smaller, and I'll need to buy a DVD player and a Safe, but it has a full size shower - which is the only downside of my current room. It is slightly cheaper.

Finances:

• I missed a credit card payment. That sent a shock wave through my other cards, limits and APRs. I have no cards now.

• This has made it much easier to see where I am financially. With housing secured and paid for and assuming 200,000 baht for the nano-lithium, 500 baht weekly for acupuncture and 8000 baht a month for Mai's mother (she is taking care of Mai's son) and assuming an end date of 1/22/09 (sooner if the nano-lithium is a dud) that leaves us 4917 baht a week to live on. (I originally accidentally wrote 917 and wondered about the reaction of worried panic until I came back and reread it. Sorry for any concern created. 5000 baht is difficult enough to manage on, I can't imagine living on a 1000.)

• A recent article in the paper defined the very poor as living on 200 baht per day and that wasn't excluding housing and utilities. So while it isn't the semi-lavish life style I was hoping for, it is doable. I just have to live on strict budget, and my tastes are fairly cheap now anyway.

• Also I have the fund for Mai's transition back to the workforce when I am gone. And the small cache of Euros - in case the political unrest here collapses the baht - to fall back on in case of unforeseen emergency.

• So, I can stick with my core values and not resort to begging (which to be honest was clearly not going to go well anyway. My closest friends are broke, and my family isn't in a position to help, and I don't believe I have the right to reach out to strangers.)

Nano-Lithium:

• The story keeps changing as I get more information, but it is clearly stuck in TIT syndrome. I now know that the drug itself is in the Pattaya hospital.

• However they need a piece of machinery to administer it. I suspect the 200,000 baht I am paying is either tea money to side step whatever laws are being bent here, or I am paying for this piece of machinery. While this makes sense as to why I get a six month supply for one price, but even in the cheapness in Thailand that seems like too small a price for a piece of medical equipment (about $5,500) so I suspect it is a combination of factors.

• The machine arrived Monday, but it was the wrong machine. So now I am waiting, mostly housebound and jittery as hell, for the right piece to arrive. They say they will call, but I call them everyday anyway. And when I can take being in any longer I take the scary motorbike taxi to the hospital for a shot of panacea.

• We have a reservation in a Pattayan resort - the last present from the days of credit cards - for Monday. I so hope I have my meds by then.

Love:

• Mai makes life bearable, enjoyable and interesting. She has to go home for two weeks at the end of the month to make her ex-husband a little more formally ex.

• That is going to be a very hard could of weeks for me, and her.

• For those thinking, go with her, besides the fact that that would make a complex situation more complex, I would not survive the trip or the accommodations of her small remote village.

• It has been suggested I use this time to act out any fantasies I have left. But my fantasies are strangely vanilla, and frankly beyond my budget unless I get very creative. We will see.

9/06/08

Carol Huff and I have have been having a fast flurry fo emails the last few days. She is one of my favorite audiences as I don't think anyone brings out my humorous side quite like Carol - Lorne would be a close second. This is a different side of me than most people only get glimpses of, if that.

While you, the reader will understand none of this, as the emails leading up to it are not included I thought I would preserve one of the emails.

Cane

Fight Club

Budget

Marriott (and yet more pictures)

Budget 2

Euro is too shallow to have oil pegged to it. (Guy in pool)

9/24/08

For those that don't know, I have been largely stuck indoors for the last several weeks, and have also been having difficultly typing and concentrating enough for email. So there has been very few blog posts, and many emails have been unanswered (they are flag so I will catch up with them) as I waited for a experimental medicine to arrive. This is "merely" symptom management not any type of a curative drug, and it has been a wacky three week comedy of errors between two hospitals by I finally had it applied today. And it works so far very well.

I plan to go out and burn off this cabin fever but in a few days I will post on my blog and answer my emails.

Sadly this occurred the same day that Mai had go away for 17 days.

Anyway, I'll catch you all up in a couple days.

9/28/08

Condition Summary #2

First I have to correct an error from early condition summary. It often happens especially in the frenzied state after the implant expired that I drop words, use wrong words, drop letters and such while writing. If it triggers the spell checker I usually catch it. If not, I only catch the error about half the time. In this case I dropped a number turning the figure we were living on from 4917 baht (~$150) a week to 917 baht a week (~$27). This created a bit of stir and I apologize for any undue concern created.

Also it bears reminding people that my rent is paid through the end of January, and I have almost two months worth of medicine on hand. With Mai's help we are managing to live cheaply and in comfort and still put a tiny bit away each week to build a fund for emergencies, my next trip to Laos and Visa fees, and so forth.

Okay, on to the nano-lithium (hence forth to be called NL). After getting a wrong machine, then a correct but broken machine, the third time proved the charm and last Thursday I received the NL.

I never did get to see the machine as it was used to apply the NL to the patches that were given to me. The whole process took less than ten minutes, but then the doctor, who speaks incredibly good English except when it comes to technical terms, took close to an hour explaining it to me. Clearly he is fascinated with the potential and I must admit it appears a brilliant solution.

Now a caveat, what he said, I may not have heard correctly, may not understood correctly or may not have remembered correctly. So once again this is layman talking who may or may not know what he is talking about.

What I have are several round patches about the size of a two baht coin (3/4 of the way from a dime to a nickel) in the center of which is a small round flat sponge. Nestled in a hole in that is a tiny but strong magnet. Smaller than can be seen by the unaided eye suspended in the magnetic fields surrounding that is the NL: lithium only several atoms wide. Maximum surface density at minimal size. This is small enough to fall through the space in glass!

So how do you administer something like that? That is where the magnetic bandage comes into play. The patch sits on the back of my neck just below the outward slope of the skull. When I push down on it, the sponge compresses and the magnet touches my skin. Electrical fields fight for the NLs attention and the skin gets some. I stop pushing and the magnet retreats. The electrical activity of the brain now offers the greatest attraction to the NL and the skull does not come close to blocking its way.

Now here is the beautiful part? Where is the greatest electrical activity in the brain? For me it is where two or more axons and neurons in close proximity have had their myelin stripped away and the energy impulses are arcing between them. The NL is attached to that area and shorts out the arc.

That's the plus. Now the minuses, the first couple are just fine tuning and I expect to be corrected when I go back for a CAT scan on Thursday. The first problem was sweat. They gave me twenty patches each supposedly would last 3 to 7 days. The first vanished in three hours. It simply fell off and probably gave some animal a nice nap.

I applied a second one and put a bandage over it. That lasted until the morning shower, but at least I was able to find it and dispose of it more safely. At the second road market I was able to find bandages that will require pliers and blow torch to remove. Still it would be nice to have this incorporated into the patch.

The second problem was the sponge; it needs to thicker and stiffer. It is way too easy to accidentally trigger this thing and I have done so three times now.

As to the effects, unfortunately delivery occurred the same day Mai went back to her village so on some things, like insomnia, it is difficult to figure which is the cause.

The big effect though is my reaction to the world. I've gone from having the world shoved in my face: too bright, too loud, too fast, to it feeling like the world is a close dimension away. It is as if I am sitting in a corridor and can see, hear and smell life out at the end of the corridor. The bigger the doses, the longer the corridor. It is a bit like watching TV, I don't feel connected much to what is going on around me, yet I'm still there.

On the plus side, my reactions to loud noises and lights appears to me normal; a brief second of pain - occasionally - and then it is okay. We went to Club Blu to test this out and I was able to handle it with only a light additional push on the patch. I did notice though in this extremely noisy, bright and chaotic atmosphere what I can only describe as time fractures. I ordered a drink - the drink and bill cup arrived without me noticing. This would not be an easy feat from where I was sitting. Then bam, my glass is half empty, I don't remember drinking any. Things of this nature.

Another plus is that my anger impulses are now under control. Haven't mentioned this much or possibly at all, but I have come very close to striking out at things that were hurting me - motorbikes, shouting Thai and that damn parrot. This especially became worrisome to me after I acquired my cane. It never progressed from impulse to action but I could feel that barrier dissolving, and I remember the problems before the original drug protocol where thoughts were actions before I was aware of it.

Of course there has been drinking (I asked my doctor about drinking, and he mulled it over and came out on the side of it: it's a mental depressant. And wondered why someone in my position wouldn't be drinking. You have to love the Thai.) and combined with the insomnia, I've run my system down enough to get a head cold - right side only for some reason. I am close to beating that.

Cold sober, but without my cane, I stepped on a fragment of tile just lying in the street. It shot out from under me and I skinned my right knee and hands. On the hands I only lost a couple of layers skin and it did not reach blood, but the knee lost a big old patch of skin almost perfectly round and just a bit bigger than a quarter. But it wasn't very deep. I cleaned it up, hydrogen peroxide, alcohol, and Neosporin (I don't take chances with my legs) and cotton pads. I had to use electrical tape to hold it in place.

The next morning it was still bleeding - you can't not bend your knee. So after breakfast at Pattinis I went across the street to a clinic and they did pretty much the same thing but with the correct dressings. The last night the wadding was soaked with blood. I bought some bandaging specifically for knees.

Looking at the wound I couldn't decide if the white area was new skin growing or infection. So I poured H₂O₂ on it and let it bubble away until it stopped, whipped gently with an alcohol pad, applied Neosporin and covered the whole thing with another bandage.

This morning, the blood stain was very small and I think the bleeding had stopped. I removed the assembly before showering, soaped the area good and tried to remove any adhesive and cotton fibers that I could. After toweling off I repeated the whole process. I see no blood on the wadding so far.

As you can tell from that painfully detailed section above, focus is no longer an issue but deciding what to write about is. If anything I am more monumentally self absorbed than before.

And speaking of me, someone has written a computer application that allows BBSs to run and accessed via the Internet. (Don't worry if you don't know what that means.) What it means for me is that many of my diehard Ultimate Universe fans are playing again. And Caliban Darklock, partially alarmed by my misprint, started a small campaign to get people to donate money to me.

From this came Caliban promising to finish paying for the writes to UU when he has a job next, which he expects to be soon. And I got an email

hello there.

need some information.

i need to know if thai.bigelow@gmail.com  is legit and you can get funds from paypal for it.

i was going to setup a modded ultimate universe and have tips go to a paypal link directed at this gmail address.

So two possible possibilities for some help with the expenses down the way.

It also spawned this article. This has led to two donations from well heeled Ultimate Universe fans, totally $700. It'll take about two weeks to get the money transferred to Thailand, just about perfect timing for funding my Visa run to Laos. Funny how the universe provides just when needed.

Unless I hear otherwise any donations will remain anonymous.

Now I need to go figure out my logins on a few forums so I can correct the impression that I am starving to death.

Posting will be very sporadic. Don't expect anything new until after my CAT scan on Thursday.