hawkida

One of the things we do at work is to have small bursts of work known as "sprints". We plan what we'll cover at the start, work on it, then present it with a demo at the end, to all interested parties. On Friday they asked me to do the demonstation part of our presentation.

I went in with no preparation beyond writing down on a post it note the four things I wanted to show people. I stood up and talked to the room of somewhere around 50-60 people about it, and then we moved on. There were more presentations and demonstartions, the last of which was very innovative and flashy and interesting.

After the meeting eight different people came and told me separately how well they thought I'd done. I've been told I paced it well, I was engaging, I put things at the right level for the audience, and that I was a natural.

Now, I was comfortable with the material I was talking about, but I had no preparation time, and didn't feel particularly nervous. This morning two more people told me how well I'd done - and that's after they had a whole weekend for it to fall out of their heads completely.

I appear to have wowed an audience. I can only attribute this to being a side effect of learning to present material in an off-the-cuff way through larp. Give me a skeleton and I can give you back a ritual. Dump some plot on me and I can manufacture a rite. Tell me where we're going and I can pull a transportation rite out of nowhere. And give me the thing I've been working on for three weeks and I can tell you all about it and make it sound impressive.

As a colleague said on Friday - the trick is to work out how to make this skill work for me. Hmm.

So Greg is likely to share driving with me when we go to Wales soon. He is covered to drive my car 3rd party. My car, according to http://www.webuyanycar.com, is worth a grand total of fifty quid (the tyres cost me four times that! And it doubles in value when I put petrol in it!).

Given these facts, is it worth insuring Greg to drive my car fully comp? Not sure if this is a factor, but I have RAC roadside recovery.

So I have a really slow heart rate. It's always been slow, at least, as long as I've paid it any attention. When we learnt at school how to take a pulse my fellow students were puzzled. The people on my first aid course thought I must be amazingly chilled out because my heart went so slowly. When taking my blood pressure the doctor got concerned about how slow my pulse is and ordered a suite of tests to check nothing was wrong. It's supposed to be a sign of fitness, which is odd, because I'm really not particularly fit, but there's apparantly nothing wrong, I'm just weird that way.

When I say slow, I really do mean slow. An average resting heart rate is 70-100 beats per minute. Mine is in the forties - the slowest I've ever seen it was 43bpm, but it's usually around 48.

What I want to know, though, is what my maximum safe heart rate should be. It's generally calculated as something like 220 minus your age. But for an average 35 year old that's somewhere around 2.5 times their resting heart rate. For me that's more like four times my resting rate - so is that still a suitable figure to use if doing something intensive like running?

Incidentally, I still read LJ every day, but it doesn't take nearly as long any more. I guess I should write more myself, but we've heard that refrain about a million times, haven't we?

Hot
- General buzz - people like my character lots.
- Cap'n's ritual results
- Rumours of Graf's death on two consecutive nights, and being entirely fine.
- Whack-a-Satuun and Twister Balance rites were hilarious - although the first de-power Satuun of the weekend was awesomely powerful in terms of atmosphere, too.
- Peace negotiations saving our bacon, but hairy moments despite it
- Running away from Satuun and sitting in camp with fingers in the air, Jay and K8's reaction was priceless. (Wide eyes and a subdued whisper of "motherfuckaaaa...." as they turned around immediately upon seeing us.) Subsequently being congratulated on actually having left a message saying where we'd gone.
- Stealth healing during the final battle.
- Monstering for a change at a mainline and getting to be part of the group that did the rites that empowered the Big Bad of the weekend (although I would have been better if I could speak at that point but my throat wasn't having it).
- Getting caught up in rites to Law after hearing the rather funny comment that "The Chaos worshippers are very organised".
- A chance opportunity to get to know Sue's new Incantor character.
- Shocking the healers: "We could use more sanctuary items" "Just use your paladins" "We don't have any."
- Trying to give away beer cake to the Bears who seemed wary that it might be poisoned and kept refusing.
- Inadvertently choosing a totally sheltered corner to camp in - standing in front of the Jackal's fire I was freezing, but when I came to my tent to sleep and took layers off, I warmed up!

Not
- Stupid, annoying illness. No voice for most of the event and a hacking cough developed, too, reducing my ability to sleep.
- Trying to get everything into the car - in both directions. Packing would take far less time if I had more space to play with.
- Weather. The crazy, crazy winds. My new bell tent has uber metal pegs and was placed well so survived, and my oc tents were sheltered, but the wind killed tents around us and just made it really cold at night, as well as throwing my cloak in people's faces. And, despite factor 50 sun screen and snaz all over my face, I've got mild sunburn.
- Vague guilt at not doing a ritual. I had IC reasons to not be there and I had no voice, but the circle was perfectly aligned to my character and with a couple of rituals under my belt I think I could have beaten the score we got by a lot (a sad and harsh 4). Still, it means the new guy has got one under his belt now and the feedback was useful.

Well, almost. It's 90% better. And my personal diagnosis of "I have RSI in my foot" appears to have been totally correct. The timeline goes like this:

September
My foot hurts. It's been hurting for a while, I don't know why, can't remember quite when it started but it's been weeks and weeks at least. I wait for it to get better and avoid things that make it hurt more, like jumping off rocks on holiday or attempting climbing. After trying running on the treadmill I stop doing that.

Mostly the hurting is a bruised kind of feeling, that hurts most when weight is on the front right of my foot. Sometimes it hurts randomly in an aching and shooting pain kind of way. Just like the rsi pains I get in my wrist occasionally from overuse of the mouse. Sometimes this is really, really painful and requires medicating.

December
Foot still hurts. People repeatedly tell me to get it checked out so I go to the Dr. It snows. Lots. I turn up for my appointment and see a friendly doctor who pokes and prods, says my diagnosis sounds like it could be right, but wants an x-ray to confirm it's not a fracture.

I go to the hospital and discover the friendly doctor forgot to sign the form for my x-ray. I wait a very long time for a signature to be faxed through, it doesn't come, but a random doctor in the hospital is grabbed and asked to sign it. I get my foot x-rayed.

Just before Christmas a doctor calls me. This is my actual doctor who didn't previously see me because it was snowing. She hasn't read up on the history and tells me all about the arthritis behind my big toe. This is kind of interesting as now I have a name for the clicky crunchy thing it's done since I injured it when I was in my early twenties, but it's got nothing to do with this particular issue. My doctor says oh. And then says she should see me so she can examine it. It is nearly Christmas. There is snow. I put it off until January.

On Boxing day I take all the painkillers available to me without going into overdose territory as my foot REALLY hurts.

January
I try to get the online booking system working for me. It takes a while. Then there are no appointments with my doctor. Then one day there are, so I book one.

February
Then I have to cancel it for a meeting where work tell me they're not going to make me redundant, too bad for all those other guys. I rebook my appointment, and have to cancel it again for another work meeting which is completely pointless and dull. I rebook my appointment and finally see my doctor. She is at a bit of a loss, tells me to keep a diary of what's going on and come back later. I refuse. I've looked for stabbing pain patterns and found none, and the underlying pain doesn't go away. She goes hmm a bit. I tell her that I'd take more anti inflammatory if it weren't for the fact that in the past that once gave me gut ache. She suggests giving me stuff to take with ibuprofen that will protect my stomach and digestive system, and I can use it when the foot hurts. I point out it hurts all the time and how about if I just take it regularly along with this stomach protection stuff and see if that helps? She says oh, what a good idea, yes, let's do that. Then she has an idea. Another Dr in the surgery sometimes injects ligaments and joints with steroids, perhaps I should see her to talk things over. She tells me to get an appointment on a day both of them are in so they can discuss the case if necessary.

I get the appointment - it is only a week later. I try taking the big pink ibuprofen all week at regular intervals. It does nothing. I go to talk to the new doctor about my foot. She examines it, believes she can feel swelling as she manipulates my foot. She looks up Morton's Neuroma and rules it out as the symptoms don't really match well. Then she draws on my foot, swabs it with iodine and stabs me with a needle. It hurt a bit but not nearly as much as I expected, and I'd not really expected it to happen there and then. There's anaesthetic and a steroid in the injection, and the anaesthetic seems to help a bit quite quickly. By the next day the pain in my foot is notable by its near absence. It's still there, but only mild and now I realise it was more persistent than I'd thought previously. I'm going to wait and see what happens to it next. Perhaps with the swelling reduce the last bit of the problem will sort itself out. And if not, I can live with it. If it gets worse though, I'll be going back to see if they're willing to stab my foot again.

The NHS is not perfect, however the total cost of all this investigation and the solution was the cost of the stomach-proofing drugs which I got on prescription for about £7.50. I paid for the ibuprofen off-prescription and it cost me about £2.20 for 24 400mg tablets. And although it took a while, they have largely fixed my foot. Hurrah for heavily subsidised, essentially free, healthcare.

I've had pain in my foot since August. I went to see a doctor, and she said that my own assessment of possible tendinitis based on it hurting in the exact same ways as my wrist's RSI sounded plausible. She recommended ice (done that), antiinflammatories (done that) and rest, and said maybe physio would be an option. However, first she wanted to rule out the possibility of a fracture. So I went to get it xrayed.

Got the results just now. Nothing on the xray to suggest why the right side of my right foot hurts, but they have revealed arthritis around my big toe.

Damnit, I didn't know I had arthritis! I don't want it! And I'm back to square one on the actual issue as I saw a stand-in doctor and the real one wants to examine it for herself.

Tomorrow I'm off to help with Mitch Benn's "Proud of the BBC" movement. Come along! http://bit.ly/bCPAeB

I'm planning to go to this tomorrow:
What's in a brain? Bring yours and join us as we explore vision and perception through a series of interactive brain-bending games and experiments, and hear about some of the cutting-edge research helping us understand human and computer intelligence. Our guide, Peter McOwan, is Professor of Computer Science at Queen Mary, University of London. He'll be coming along with his extra brain.
http://brains.science-london.com/

Anyone else?