Just one of those weeks to forget.. if possible...

[paris]

Oh sweet Richard!  May has not been a good month for you.  And we MISS you here!    Customer service does not exist anymore.  It seems like no one cares.  And when you do ask for a supervisor, you are told they are the highest person in the chain.  Really?  There is no one higher than you to talk to me?  It must be great to be that important!   Frustrating.      I hope you get your laptop up and running and are back with us full time.       

Happy Birthday to your brother   

[MandaMe1986]

I hope you get it back soon!  I miss chatting with you!

How are things going with work?

[dwcrawford]

Richard, You'd better get your buns      back in here, laptop or no.  Else some of us guys might have to try to take your please with your women... 

[MandaMe1986]

Richard see that Danny Boy is gonna take your woman.

[RichardMEL]

sooo my fun continues (I guess I should have changed the topic to a month to forget, or a season, or something)... HP called today about my laptop with NO CLUE what operating system to put on it. Uh hello dude, you have the model number and the serial number and you have no record what it was supposed to have? And you're asking me?? What if I was clueless about such things? Sheesh... so yeah they are only just STARTING to repair my laptop. Go figure!

Today at dialysis was a bit of a nightmare! I was going along nicely minding my own business watching my laptop when WHAM! massive cramp in my foot... now normally I get a warning of sorts... I tend to get clammy/hot and feel pretty yuck so I can tell and take some action (have a drink, get UF turned off, whatever).. this just hit me like a bang and it was really painful!! And WHAM just like that I was hot and sweaty (and not in a good way  ) and in a lot of pain. Alas our unit was short staffed and I picked the time to go all crampy when a few patients were coming off, so they ran to look at me, but had to finish the other guys and it was all a bit of a drama. So they took my BP and it was like 143/91.. I am *never* that high and I said as much... "oh don't worry it's OK" - I said to the nurse through gritted teeth "No, for me this is not OK I am telling you" - they took BP again a few minutes later (162/97!) and then I started freaking out a bit and that's when they said you have to calm down it's in your head (!).. but they did at least give me some saline and stopped my UF (which wasn't much anyway) and my cramp eventually went away.. but just when I thought it was all good BANG! it came back! so kept the UF off for another 10 mins, and I lay flat feeling very icky and it gradually went good again. ugh. So I am thinking I might up my dry weight a bit, even though my BP's have all been normal coming on and going off so this one hit me out of the blue and it was not good.

I said to the newbie next to me (3rd session) "I'm so sorry it's not normally this exciting around here.. it's usually full on boredom" (I don't think they believed me).

So, I wonder what will happen tomorrow....

(oh and of course my football team lost AGAIN on the weekend - after winning for 2/3rds of the game - typical!!)

hey, I am still positive... honest!! Really!!!

[twirl]

it is football season where you live?
so sorry about your dialysis day -
you could post some of the comments made to you in ignorant things people have said to you -
some of those cramps can be right up there on the "pain scale" of labor pains -
hope it gets better for you -
twirl

[RichardMEL]

Well another update.

The good news is... my laptop is aparently fixed (no comment about the missing part that was supposedly due in June) and I should get it tomorrow. Now how much you wanna bet there's something wrong???

The not so good news is: I woke up today feeling sniffly with a runny nose. I get into work to find my co-worker who sits next to me is out because his kid's grade and school are under quarantine for swine flu.

oh, joy!

[dwcrawford]

That is bad news (worse than the busted laptop).  Can you stay home for a few days until they determine if their was swime flu in the school?  We don't need you on the sick list  too.

[willowtreewren]

Hang in there Richard. It HAS to start looking up.

Aleta

[RichardMEL]

not sure but I will ask the opinion of the powers that be at dialysis tomorrow... maybe they will want to test me just to be sure. i think I only have a cold but who knows.. given the weakened condition my system is in due to dialysis/kidney failure it is a concern. They said here tonight they think 1 in 5 people will wind up getting it at some point so that is a worry.

Will just wait and see I guess... all I can do for now.

[MandaMe1986]

 

[Lucinda]

Hi Rich

Sorry you are having such a bad time.  You should be tested just in case....the swine flu is getting a little out of control here. Definitely up your dry weight.  NOTHNG worse than the cramping and all things associated with being too dry.

Good to hear your computer is fixed.  If you are clear of the swine flu I will come and visit in a couple of weeks.  My mag is finally in the final stages of being built - the nine weeks of training really put we behind schedule but it will definitely be on line by July 1 if not sooner.  I need to be in Melbourne to see a couple of advertisers in a couple of weeks so I will definitely catch up with you.

Hope everything looks up for you real soon.  Hey, give it another month or so and you can come to my place and I can do your dialysis for you if you want to stay more than a couple of days.  How COOL would that be!!! xx (And you thought you had problems before) !!   

 

[RichardMEL]

lol ty lucinda  
 
I am going to talk to the powers that be this afternoon about my porky pig situation so we'll see... and yes, going to up my dry weight for sure... better to be safe than sorry!!!

[RichardMEL]

Here's an update on me.

Well first of all I am swine flu-less - at least for now.

I went into the unit yesterday, explained the situation and my concerns and they were really good and understanding(and didn't make me feel like a total idiot!) and stuck me in isolation and had the doc come in full gown, gloves, mask etc to check me out. In the end they decided it was just a nasty cold and I could be "released back into the general population" lol... but then nurses kept yelling at me "Get well soon!" which seemed off because we all suffer from kidney failure....

anyway so that was good, even though I still feel rotten with my cold.... but I am soldiering on!

My laptop on the other hand is giving me more fun. The repair is fine that all works like a charm, but my new source of frustration and pain came about when I wanted to restore the full backup i did of my system before it died. Simple, right? WRONG!!!

(WARNING: Technical geekery ahead!) - the problem essentially is that HP sold me a laptop (and most vendors do this these days) without installation media for the operating system(in this case, Vista Ultimate 64 bit). You get a "recovery" partition on the internal hard drive, and you can burn (one) set of DVD's to recover your system from - but it's only recover in the sense of "return to the HP factory setup" rather than allow you to access the various repair tools or backup restore tools that I needed. But wait, I could boot into the repair tools from vista's boot menu (f8 at startup) right? Yeah, sure.. it even found my external drive and the backup images I had.. cool.. BUT when I clicked to restore, the system whinged that because I was running that restore from the hard drive and it was going to format the hard drive I couldn't possibly do that. BZZT!! So thanks for NOTHING HP!! Well I spent the night surfing the net and trying various options including downloadable recovery iso's and the like - none of which worked because even a hacked vista install DVD I used failed because it needs some sort of HP specific driver which of course wasn't on there.

However I *think* I have a solution.. maybe.. I found a HP vista business OS DVD at work (we have a lot of HP equipment) and it boots fine on my laptop (YAY!) and I can finally, after a bit of tweaking, get to the complete pc recovery application... fingers crossed when I take all this home tonight I can actually get this to work with my backups.. I hope so it would really make life so much easier.

However big thumbs DOWN to HP for this crappy situation since it should work as advertised and not create nightmares when you're just trying to recover your system!!!

So, the fun continues in my world!!

[MandaMe1986]

You poor thing! You have been through hell and back and headed back for a secound go round.  *frown*  Well you can get online right?  That is a pluse. *smile*   

[RichardMEL]

Well I have some good things to report for a change!!!!

1. MY LAPTOP IS BACK

2. after around 20 hours of problems I actually managed to restore my backed up files so I have everything back (mostly) to the way it was before the laptop died. Hooray!! It feels so good to be "back home" lol

3.  My tiggers ACTUALLY WON a game of football!!! I thought I would have a heart attack near the end of the game when we squandered a 33 point lead to be down by 5 but managed to scrape through and win by 3 points. Woohoo!!!

4. At Dialysis today I was visited by a group of stormtroppers.. As in Star Wars! LOL. One of the nurses in the unit is a big fan and has a whole uniform and all that. So a group got together and were visiting one of their other friends in the hospital so they dropped in on me in all their gear. I'm going to get a pic from him so I'll upload it for a laugh... unless it's horrible.

5. I am mostly over my cold!!!

6. It's the weekend!!

So I'm being positive!! 

[dwcrawford]

Yea Rich....

I'm going to bitch this coming week.

[MandaMe1986]

 

I wanna see the pic of you and some store troopers. Haha. My son would love that.  He loves Star Wars.  He gets mad at me when he asked what color of lightsaber who ever  had and I get it wrong. haha.  Thats great.

Happy your week is off to a good start 

[Romona]

Oh, if only I wasn't married...........that technical geekery stuff is kind of sexy!

[aharris2]

Well I have some good things to report for a change!!!!

1. MY LAPTOP IS BACK

2. after around 20 hours of problems I actually managed to restore my backed up files so I have everything back (mostly) to the way it was before the laptop died. Hooray!! It feels so good to be "back home" lol

3.  My tiggers ACTUALLY WON a game of football!!! I thought I would have a heart attack near the end of the game when we squandered a 33 point lead to be down by 5 but managed to scrape through and win by 3 points. Woohoo!!!

4. At Dialysis today I was visited by a group of stormtroppers.. As in Star Wars! LOL. One of the nurses in the unit is a big fan and has a whole uniform and all that. So a group got together and were visiting one of their other friends in the hospital so they dropped in on me in all their gear. I'm going to get a pic from him so I'll upload it for a laugh... unless it's horrible.

5. I am mostly over my cold!!!

6. It's the weekend!!

So I'm being positive!! 

and
7. You have the love of a good woman (Celeste) not to mention a line steadily growing longer and longer

[Phraxis]

I was going to respond some quick quip about "did ya kill em?"

But then Coke?

Hey Scotch, 18 year or older that is the only prescription.

[RichardMEL]

I wanna see the pic of you and some store troopers. Haha. My son would love that.  He loves Star Wars.  He gets mad at me when he asked what color of lightsaber who ever  had and I get it wrong. haha.  Thats great.

Happy your week is off to a good start 

Yes, I will post when I can get it. Should be a couple of days.

Aparently the group caused a few scenes around the hospital (like walking out of elevators and surprising people) .. aparently kids loved seeing them and it was a lot of fun for everyone

[MandaMe1986]

I wanna see the pic of you and some store troopers. Haha. My son would love that.  He loves Star Wars.  He gets mad at me when he asked what color of lightsaber who ever  had and I get it wrong. haha.  Thats great.

Happy your week is off to a good start 

I bet I can't wait to see. 
Yes, I will post when I can get it. Should be a couple of days.

Aparently the group caused a few scenes around the hospital (like walking out of elevators and surprising people) .. aparently kids loved seeing them and it was a lot of fun for everyone