I’ve got blogs on so many sites at the moment, I’m getting confused as to which one I should decide on as the one that I contribute to. As I hope you will agree, posting to more than one blog would be stupid – not to mention difficult to manage!
For the record, I have’nt included my MSN Spaces blog
http://spaces.live.com as I can’t see myself using it due to the space restriction on images, etc.
I’m making my decision on one of the following 5 blogs at present:
For the next week or two I’ll post everything on all 3 blogs while I get used to how they operate. After this “trial” period, I’ll make a decision on which one to keep.
If you wish to let me know your preference, please do! I can use all the help I can get.
My current Linux Web Host, Ausweb has let me down on 2 occasions in the past Month.
On both occasions, the sites I’ve hosted with them have been down (as well as their own website!) for a sizeable amount of time.
The first time, the site was down for around an hour. When I asked them about it, I wasn’t given a satisfactory response. The lastest outage caused my sites to be ‘off the air’ spasmodically during a 24 hour period. Once again, I was given an unsatisfactory explanation for this outage.
Not good enough Ausweb!
A Member of one of my sites, Yellow and Black suggested MD Web Hosting. I’ve opened a Reseller Account with them and am starting to move some of my personal sites to their servers. I’ve also moved one of my client sites (Melbourne Ultrasound for Women) to MD Web Hosting.
I’ll move the rest of my personal sites (except for Yellow and Black) to MD Web Hosting so I can determine their performance over the next 2 to 3 Months. Once I’m confident their service is better, I’ll move Yellow and Black to them and cancel Ausweb for good.
There is no change to my current Windows Hosts, Crystaltech and WebHost4Life. They’re both giving me great response times and very good uptime.
It probably appears as though my blog is only for my health updates. Unfortunately, this will be the case every 6 Months for (hopefully) a long while to come!
My latest medical visit was to my cardiologist for my 6 monthly checkup. Everything went well but because I reported some minor chest pain to him, he decided it would be a good idea for me to do an Echo Stress Test.
If you don’t know what’s involved in and Echo Stress Test, they took an ultrasound of my heart while I lay on my side. The head of the ultrasound had to be pressed hard up against the side of my ribcage – and let me tell you it hurt! While this was happening, I had electrodes stuck to me so that they could record an ECG of my heart’s rhythm during the test.
After the ultrasound, it was onto the treadmill for some work. The treadmill is run by a program called, ‘Bruce’ which speeds up the rate and incline every 3 minutes until you’ve had enough. I lasted 13 minutes (my best previously was around 11 minutes) at which time I was jogging at 8.5 Km/h at a 17% incline. Although only doing this part of the test for a minute, I had spent the previous 12 minutes building up to a 3 minute stint walking at 6.6 Km/h at a 14% incline. It’s pretty hard work let me tell you!
Immediately following the treadmill workout, I had to lay on my side again so that they could take ultrasound images of my heart after being stressed. Try to picture yourself after reaching your optimum heart rate, lying on your side with ECG electrodes stuck to you, breathing heavily and the doctor says to you, ‘Hold your breath’. Easily said than done, but I had to do this on 3 occasions – pretty hard to do!
The end result of all that was that everything was great. My heart reacted the same at rest as it did under stress, my blood pressure reacted as it should, and the ECG showed all the proper patterns. All in all, a great relief to know that everything is as it should be. All I have to do is make sure that I look after myself as I have been and my good health should continue.
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It was my birthday on November 26th so we decided to have dinner at Silks in the Crown Towers complex. We also decided to spend the night in Crown Towers and together with my Mother-In-Law and 3 friends, Suellen and I booked 2 double rooms for the stay.
On Saturday morning, Crown Towers rang and told us they’d upgraded us to a 2 bedroom suite which usually goes for $2,500 a night for the same price as the 2 rooms. Sounded like a good deal so we accepted.
When we got to the suite, we couldn’t believe our luck – what a great place! 2 huge bedrooms each with kingsize beds and their own ensuites, lounge room, dining room, and about 5 TV’s (including 1 in each bathroom).
Dinner at Silks was amazing! Their food is the best Asian food I think I’ve ever had and their Peking Duck is to die for!
All in all a great day, a fantastic meal, and wonderful accomodation.
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Time has rolled around for another blood test. Had Dr Sweeney take my blood this morning and looking forward (with some trepidation) to the results which he says he’ll give me over the phone tomorrow.
I’m hopeful that this Year’s results will be better than my 4.9 reading this time last year. I missed having my blood test in June this year – partially because I’m slack and partially because I was worried about the result. I was forced to have the blood test this time as I’m due to see my cardiologist, Dr Hiscock on December 6 and he needs to see my test results.
The gym at VU just isn’t as convenient as what I’d hoped, so I’ll have to push myself to join a gym in the City. Fitness First are seemingly everywhere in the City now – Melbourne Central, QV, and where the Melbourne Fitness Club used to be in Collins Street. I’m undecided between 3 gyms – Corporate Fitness Club in Flinders Lane, Fitness First at Melbourne Central, and Fitness First at QV. The FF at QV is a “Platinum Club” which I need to find more information about. They say that they give members more individual service and I need to find out what that is before committing to it. I like Corporate Fitness Club because their prices are similar and CFC supply all your gear and have regular fitness assessments so you can keep track of your progress. They are relatively handy provided I get used to catching my trains at Flinders Street.
I’ll check out if FF have a similar assessment process and if not, it looks like CFC could be the place.
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Had a busy week this week. It started early on Monday morning with a drive to Mansfield where I spent 2 days getting the Shire Council up and running with TRIM Context version 6. Since returning to the Office on Wednesday I’ve been busy catching up with e-mail and phone call enquiries from Clients.
Over the weekend I finished painting our new study and moved the PC’s into the room. Still no desk there but I’m hoping that the travelling allowence I receive for the Mansfield trip will pay for one of them. I updated the Windows PC with all the O/S patches and NIS to the 2006 version. I finally finished configuring NIS last night so that Jarvis’ parental control will operate correctly. I also installed Fedora Core 4 on the other PC so I can start playing around with that. The next stage will be to get the wireless antenna working on my old laptop so I can work on it in the lounge room!
It’s great to be busy but I’m looking forward to having a relatively quiet weekend!
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Originally posted on ‘toby.net.au’ on June 9, 2004 and reposted here to keep all my blogs in one place.
I thought that I’d share with you how I spent last week.
Last week I thought that I’d been experiencing some indigestion pain – something that I’ve never had. When this indigestion pain woke me up on Sunday, I thought I’d see my doctor to see if there was anything that could be done. He checked me out and thought that I had indigestion as well, but thought that he should refer me to a cardiologist to do an Exercise Stress Test. This involves having a bunch of wires attached to your chest while you walk at varying speeds on a treadmill.
The results of this test were inconclusive so the Cardiologist told me that he’d like to perform a Coronary Angiogram on me the next day (Wednesday) and that I’d need to stay overnight in Hospital. I’ve never been a patient in a Hospital before, only ever been there as a visitor so I was pretty scared to say the least!
Wednesday morning comes around and I’m admitted and taken into the ‘Cath Lab’ for my procedure. If you haven’t followed the above link, the procedure involves making an incision in your groin and placing a catheter into your femerol artery. The catheter then travels to your heart and releases a dye into your coronary arteries which is then seen via x-ray on a TV like monitor by the Cardiologist. They found 2 blockages (known as Stenosis) – one 80% and one which was 90% blocked. They then inserted a Stent which is a small, expandable wire mesh tube that keeps the artery open and allows the blood to flow through at a better rate.
They placed one stent in me on Wednesday, and another on Thursday morning using the groin on the opposite side giving me a matching pair. This meant another night in hospital. I was released from hospital on Friday morning and have been resting ever since. Walking is painful due to the tenderness of my groin on either side.
The chest feels fine though which is the main thing. I’m now on a low-fat, low-salt, high fibre diet which sounds pretty boring but is better than the alternative! The Doctor tells me that I’ll fine again in another 2-3 weeks so I should be able to hit the gym again then. I’ve been going to the gym now since December and lost about 10 Kgs. It appears that my years of smoking and eating fatty foods and that sort of thing finally caught up with me – either that or following Richmond Footy Club for as long as I have is a health hazard!
The good news of course is that the problem was caught before it caused a serious malfunction – i.e. a heart attack. I guess the moral of the story is that if your body tells you something is wrong, going to the doctor is probably a good idea!
My thanks go to my GP Dr. Sweeney, my Cardiologist Dr. Hiscock, all the nurses and Staff of Epworth Hostpital who made my first hospital stay as pleasant as possible, and the most thanks go to my wife Suellen for looking after me and just caring.
Here are some scanned images that my Cardiologist gave me. These images show the state of two of my arteries both before and after the stents were inserted. I’m sure you’ll agree that they look much better afterward!
Artery One – Pre
Artery One – Post
Artery Two – Pre
Artery Two – Post
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