Mike Little’s Journalized

I forgot to mention another piece of news earlier: The company I work for Sx3 has just been acquired by Northgate Information Solutions. Though I don’t really know enough about either company to make a proper judgement, it seems to be generally considered a good move: being run by an IT company rather than a utilities company should be a much better fit.
I am particularly taken by the company values. They fit very well with my own.

Hurrah! Google local UK is now in beta! Coupled with Google Maps UK it makes for great results when you want to find a local cinema for instance. Groovy!

Ooh! Shiny! Google Maps UK. My home town. The scene of my accident. No satellite pictures yet

Google SMS UK. I explicitly signed up to the Google group hoping for an announcement about the SMS service starting in the UK. I guess they forgot to announce it.

I forgot to mention yesterday that I have now been smoke free for 2 years! Woot! Go Me!

Kim is back hosted on zed1.net. Go say “Hi!”

One Gigabit broadband to the home! Yes please! (Hat tip Om Malik)

It appears the saga of my bike accident wasn’t quite over. I had had two days off work and decided I was well enough to go back in work on Thursday. My wrist was pretty much OK and my hip was sore but not really painful. There was only my knee which would stiffen when I sat for long periods of time, but soon loosened whenever I got up and walked.

So I set off for work on Thursday. Not on the bike: I’m not up to that yet, but I caught a bus to the town centre. I did notice as I walked up to the train station that whilst I was walking my knee really wasn’t painful at all. However, as soon as I stopped walking the pain became very severe! I thought it a bit strange but carried on. Work was fine. I’m sat down at a desk all day anyway so there wasn’t a problem with my knee. Same pain when getting up from my chair which eased quickly. But then that strange extra pain when I stopped walking.

On Friday morning in the shower I decided to have a good look at my knee. I remembered that on Monday, I had noticed a black area in the would. I’d asked the doctor if it might be a piece of grit. She looked and decided that it wasn’t. Friday morning in the shower I realised it was indeed a piece of grit or gravel. I got a pair of tweezers and had a poke around! As soon as I put the metal tweezers to it, I knew it was a piece of stone! The grating sound was a give-away! I tried for quite a while but couldn’t shift it. I could get a grip but it wouldn’t come out. It seemed like the hole was too small. It was also quite pussy and getting painful.
I decided to go back up to the hospital and have it looked at. I rang work to let them know and took a bus up to the hospital.

Despite the A&E department being almost empty I was told it would be a 1 hour wait. By this time my knee was extremely painful in any position but walking. So I paced up and down for what turned out to be about 40 minutes.
An aside: I had to go outside the waiting room for a while to get away from the blaring TVs positioned so that wherever you sat one was in your line of site. I knew daytime television had gotten bad but I hadn’t realised just quite how bad. Mindless, moronic, antagonistic, sensationalistic, offensive even, with bad grammar galore, and infantile buzz words, all served up at high volume! The half a dozen people in there were all sat staring at the TVs. I’m sure if I’d waited long enough, I’d have seen a couple of them drooling.

Anyway, eventually my name was called, and I went through to see the doctor. After a quick examination she agreed there was something in there and explained that I needed to have two X-Rays. One so they could see where the FB (Foreign Body!) was positioned, and another after it had been removed to check it was all gone.

So after my first X-Ray I went back to the doctor. She expressed surprise at the size of the gravel, I asked for my knee to be numbed: I’m a bit of a wimp really. I learned that they no longer use a freezing spray and four injections and a 5 minute wait later she was able to dig about in my knee. And dig about she did. It took several attempts with a couple of different instruments to try to get it out before she eventually had to get a scalpel and cut into my knee to make the hole big enough.

I should explain that this piece of gravel turned out to be no more than about 6 or 7 mm in diameter at it’s widest, but at the time felt like it must have a been an inch wide!
After it was out I went back for my second X-Ray. This time I had a much longer wait: around 20 minutes. Finally it was back to the waiting area to wait to be seen again, this time by a senior nurse who applied a dressing and huge amounts of bandage. I was advised to rest my leg and so took the rest of the day off work.

I was back in work today and my knee has not been bad at all. Up to now this accident has cost me three days off work and probably two weeks off my bike. All because of some fool!