ABMU (2)

    (stands for Another Boring Medical Update)

It's been a while since I posted anything, mostly because I've been a bit poorly for the last few weeks. Five weeks, in fact. It started with a fairly normal, if rather severe, colitis attack - stomach cramps, diahrroea, feeling completely washed out. After a fairly prolonged period of liquid poo, I felt so washed out that I decided to take some iron tablets - something which is normally pretty good at perking me up.
However.

Iron supplements do have a tendency to make you constipated - not such a problem, you might think, and even a bit of a relief. This time, though, I found myself in considerable discomfort, which got worse and worse. After a couple of days, I was having to sit quietly for five minutes after going to the loo. After five days, I was in continuous pain from my rear end, and going to the loo was utter torture. A visit to see Kindly Consultant was quickly arranged, and that same day I was able to get a considered medical opinion on my problem, which was that I had an anal fissure.

What had happened was this: my arsehole had endured such a lengthy period of diarrhoea that it had softened somewhat, and the sudden introduction of small, hard things through its little maw was too much. It tore. It was probably only a tiny cut, but blimey it hurt. And it has hurt, ever since. Not only is the area incredibly sensitive, but any scab that forms has to undergo a battery of sh1te twice (three, four, five times) a day, making it very very slow to heal.

I was given some muscle relaxant cream (which goes by the rather charming name of Anoheal) to counteract the natural impluse to clench and cut off the blood flow around the offending area, thus hindering the healing process. In addition, I've found regular hot baths (regular like, every night) and sleeping with the electric blanket on (warmth increases blood flow, improves healing) have helped enormously - as has a big foam ring-shaped cushion, which sits on my office chair at work.

I'm definitely on the mend now - last weekend I discovered I could cross my legs again! Ah, the bliss of simple pleasures. But it will be a few weeks still before I can move freely, and in the meantime I am a very sedentary bunny indeed.

For the record, at the moment I am taking: mercaptopurine, Budenofalk, Alendronic acid. That may all change in a couple of weeks, though - I'll be going into hospital for a sigmoidoscopy, and if the results show a lot of inflammation (hmmm, d'you think that's likely? Maybe?), then the chances are I'll be put onto Infliximab - even stronger magic than 6MP, although the odds aren't great - something around 60% of patients respond to treatment. Hey ho.

Caption me: Sketchy

A couple of interesting links about colour and presentation

Thee have been sitting in my inbox for ages, so it's high time they were posted.

The first, livelgrey.com, is the work of a certain Igor Asselbergs, who as well as working as an illustrator and CEO of a company making digital colour design tools (whatever the heck they are), lectures and writes about colour. It's not that frequently updated, but what he says about the use of colour in design is interesting.

The other one is a bit more fun: infosthetics looks at how information is presented, and the aesthetics at work. 'S good.

It also has, I notice, a post about gapminder, which has to be one of the most fascinated and brilliantly presented look at international economic and social trends ever.

NaNoWriMo revisited: Pan and Titan revisited

I've been thinking about NaNoWriMo again.

I was planning to focus on the story of the first colony on Titan, that I alluded to in Government Joe Must Die - the disastrous settlement which collapsed and resulted in the Howl which haunts the Saturn system in GJMD, and which gave rise to Government Joe itself. But I decided that there probably wasn't enough material there to let me reach the magic 50k word count. So I've been thinking about the other real character from my first NaNo novel: the Bantolith.

The Bantolith in GJMD doesn't talk. He manipulates people like automata, and anyone within the boundaries of his domain can never be sure if their actions are the result of free will or the Bantolith's machinations - so subtle are the AI's directives that it's impossible to tell the two apart. But why does it operate so obliquely? How did it come to be so silent, so unknown?

I'm thinking that the two stories - the birth of Government Joe and the creation of the Bantolith - are maybe not so far apart. Perhaps they were both created by similar events - failing colonies which demanded drastic action. And while Government Joe was created by a terrible act of treachery, the Bantolith's silence might have been some sort of self-sacrifice - a last-ditch attempt to save an ailing colony by assuming near-direct control of the people within it.

So what we have then is an interesting contrast. Two failing colonies, a few decades apart: one damned by the treachery of an out-and-out baddie, the other saved by an unselfish act of deliberate self-mutilation.