Tag: health

Life update (10/22/2024)

On By Jon UreñaIn Escritura, Slice of lifeLeave a comment

Tomorrow I start a vacation period that could last until early December, but the whole thing may end up getting cut short. These are the circumstances: I’m covering for a nutcase who goes on medical leaves constantly. I’ve been covering his latest leave for close to a year. In my country, if you extend your leave for more than a year, you’ll get transferred to Social Services, where you’ll be forced to do interviews with them and have some administrative issues. People usually want to avoid that, so I expect this person whom I have to refer to as my coworker to return a day before his leave reaches a whole year. That’s October 31st.

If the guy returns, my contract will end. I’ll get paid for the unspent vacation time (because I already scheduled it; wouldn’t have gotten paid for them otherwise), but that means that I’ll be unemployed, and I may get called into work right that day as part of a new contract. Best case scenario for me is if this coworker keeps working throughout November.

I really need time off in general, but even more so because I haven’t been doing well physically. As I posted some time ago, during a period of sustained stress for months, I suffered what a neurologist referred to as a “complex migraine,” likely a hemiplegic migraine: I was experiencing flashes of darkness in my right eye, and during the attack, I lost sensitivity in the right half of my body. I’m quite sure that I also caught a “burnt smell” at the time. The young doctor diagnosed me with a migraine because I had a history of migraines (that had ended since I started taking beta-blockers for my heart issues), and because of the visual aura. I’m quite sure he also said something to the effect of, “You’re too young to have strokes.” I should also be too young to have arrhythmia, or any of the other shit I’ve ended up burdened with, but here I am.

However, the visual aura never went away entirely, and a couple of weeks ago or so it developed into a torn retina. That got treated, leaving me, however, with permanent “floaters.” But it made me think that what I suffered at work wasn’t a migraine, but a stroke. I feel like I haven’t recovered fully from that episode, that I’m clumsier, more forgetful, and “off” in general since. I don’t know if you can spot brain damage in an MRI or if they just assume the kind of brain damage given the symptoms, but in any case, I have a visit scheduled for November 6th, that I hope will end up either confirming brain damage or giving me good news.

I must add that I have very little confidence in the medical profession, or at least as it stands now. I deal with many nurses and doctors on a regular basis. More often than not, the nurses are the chatty, dumb, “tactile” type, and the doctors are very often egocentric and have something of a god complex. I am vaccine-injured thanks to Moderna, and have visited three cardiologists for it. The first one, annoyed, denied that the covid vaccines caused any heart issues. The second, close to retirement, seemed ashamed of the whole thing, and admitted that the covid vaccines indeed were causing heart damage; he told me that he had treated lots of young women who had ended up in his office because they had acquired Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome (POTS) after covid or the vaccines. This doctor, however, behaved as if admitting that the vaccines caused any issue was a huge taboo. A third cardiologist said that indeed the vaccines were associated with heart damage, but that there weren’t enough studies to prove that they caused the problem or if they just triggered a predisposition toward having that problem. “What came first, the chicken or the egg?”. Hey, remember when you jabbed millions upon millions of people with an experimental treatment without having enough studies to prove their effects?

I’m my spare time, I’m working on my Flask/Python app neural-narrative, that allows the user to chat with characters controlled by large language models, and do some other narrative stuff. I’m very pumped to work on it, aching to return home and keep programming.

Recently I decided to add the overarching notion of Story Universes to the hierarchy of places of a story, and that led me to tinker with other stuff. I have yet to finish returning the app to normal, in a significant part because I added a new type to ensure that strings that should have content indeed had it. In retrospect, that was a mistake, because it would have been enough with validating the content of the string at times and throwing a ValueError if the validation failed, so I’ll have to get busy reverting those changes.

Good news is that I’ve racked up about 400 pytest tests to ensure the proper behavior of those parts of the code. All the tests are written by versions of OpenAI’s Orion preview model, which are wonderful for routine work that is very useful but annoying to write. Of course, preparing a part of the code so that it can be testable necessarily forces you to ensure its code quality (using dependency injection, adhering to the Single Responsibility Principle, etc.). However, I also have a God Class lingering around, one that handles everything related to the file system, that I’ll need to chop up and test soon.

OpenAI recently released an initial version of a “swarm of agents” framework, that will allow you to easily set up chains of responsibility and action with an arbitrary number of AI agents. That has gotten me thinking about setting up a writers’ room page in my app in which you could speak in natural language, and different AI agents specialized in writing, analyzing lore, considering character development, etc. would work on whatever aspect of the ongoing story you want to touch. It could work pretty much like a real writers’ room, but without the nasty ego and other human aspects.

I’ll try to visit new places during this vacation time, although I’m limited by my lack of a car, poor stamina, IBS, etc. Thankfully I have plenty of money. I’m also aching to get lost in a good game, and I have eyed that new JRPG by the Persona dudes, Metaphor: ReFantazio, quite lustfully. I’m constantly reading similar stories (although usually with an isekai bent), and most Western games are falling one after the other to the ESG and DEI rot, so you can’t rely on those. However, I don’t know if I can justify to myself playing games when I’m constantly juggling creative projects.

Ended up in the hospital (as a patient), Pt. 5

On By Jon UreñaIn Escritura, Slice of life1 Comment

It feels like I’ve just posted an entry of this series, but here comes the next one! The previous entry recounted how I had ended up in the ER with a diagnosis of hemiplegic migraine. As they performed tests on these poor eyes of mine, to discard possible damage, they did in fact find damage in my right eyeball: my vitreous gel had detached. The doctor wasn’t sure whether that had happened years, months, or weeks earlier. Anyway, she told me that I should be careful, because it could develop into retinal tears or retinal detachment.

Yesterday I started feeling that another migraine was coming. Given that I no longer experience regular migraines since I started taking beta-blockers for my poor heart, this was probably yet another episode of the dreaded hemiplegic migraine. I experienced a weird pressure behind my right eyeball as well as in that temple, and I felt some nausea. I also made bizarre errors at work that I can’t explain; in the worst case, I accidentally mixed the data of a user I was creating with my own data, which left me unable to access the intranet. I still don’t know how that happened, because as far as I know, it should have been impossible.

This morning, as I finished writing the latest entry of my ongoing novel We’re Fucked, a conspicious black filament suddenly appeared in my right eye’s vision. When I shifted my gaze, it moved like thin kelp in the sea. I’m familiar with floaters from my previous detached vitreous gel, but this was a new artifact in my deteriorating vision. And, as I came to learn, just the beginning. The vision of my right eye worsened: the couple of blurry dots turned into a myriad, the thin kelp-like fibers became a tangled mass right in the center of my vision. Soon enough, it felt like I was looking through the water of a fish tank that hasn’t been cleaned in a while. This wasn’t a migraine, but a physical defect in my eye, one that was worsening by the minute.

I hurried to the ER. A couple of tests later, they confirmed that I’ve developed a tear in my right retina, and it was necessary to patch it up with laser to block further deterioration. The doctor was young, in his early twenties. He didn’t explain basically anything about the procedure or what steps I should take to recover from it. He didn’t even give me a report, which I’m pretty sure they’re obligated to do. Anyway, he sat me in front of some contraption with a built-in laser, he numbed my right eyeball with some drops, and pressed some crystal thing to my cornea. Shortly after, I learned how it feels to have a laser stitch the inside of your eyeball. Every flash of red light was accompanied with a gnawing sensation in the middle of a very delicate organ. Manly tears of pain streamed down my face. If I had retained a sense of humor at that moment, I might have imagined myself receiving a demon eye from Kishirika Kishirisu. Alas, I wasn’t in the mood, because my body has been breaking down steadily, in strange ways, these last three or so years. I’m exhausted and pissed off.

Worse yet, although the laser, with its biting, burning ways, has likely prevented further deterioration, what I can see from my right eyeball at the moment (my pupil is still dilated, and I’m not wearing that contact lens) suggests that the floaters that had seeped in from my retina or whatever have found a permanent residence there, and the vision of that eyeball is permanently fucked.

After that young doctor finished messing with my eyeball, he left me seated at the waiting room, right after telling me that I should have no problem going to work (I’m working the afternoon shift). The guy disappeared. After I regained some sense of self, I looked for him again, but couldn’t find him. I wanted to know if I could put on the contact lens, and if I needed to do something specific to recover from the ordeal. A nurse informed me that my right eyeball should be able to tolerate a contact lens. She also pulled me aside and cleaned the residue from the sticky numbing drops, which apparently looked like white splotches. So on top of the humiliation that my right eyeball subjected me to, I must have looked as if someone came in my face. I’m living my best possible life.

Anyway, I’m at work right now. I have informed my boss that I’m not supposed to lift weights nor do any strange movements for about two weeks, which could be a problem; we are sometimes told to move computers and printers around, or at least crawl under tables to push the ends of cables into wall sockets. Now I can only anticipate in what bizarre way my health will deteriorate in the upcoming years, until get tired of this shitty life and jump off a bridge. By the way, my health issues, from my heart to my eyeballs to my other balls (found a lump in there), apart from a markedly subdued mood and occasional disorientation, started when I got pricked in the shoulder with an experimental treatment for some world-wide disaster that shan’t be named. My heart started acting up that same day. It’s a good thing I won’t have children, because I probably lack swimmers at this point.

Anyway, fuck off and all that jazz.

EDIT: I fed this post to the Google AI thing that generates podcasts out of your material, and they came up with a particularly compelling Deep Dive. Thanks for cheering me up, guys.