I am certain that it will surprise exactly no one that I have a large number of books in my (very small) apartment. The prize of the collection, though, is these two shelves. They hold a couple of books of modest value, and a large number of books that I have, for one reason or another, found interesting enough to purchase.
I have never bothered properly cataloguing them, but if my house were to burn down I would miss them very much, so I thought I would make some attempt to document what I have. Perhaps they are of interest to others, as well.
This is the transcript of a talk I gave at WriteTheDocs Australia, in Melbourne, on 15 November, 2018. A video is also available, see the Videos page for a link.
This little story starts with the American son of German migrants, Herman Hollerith. He was born in 1860, got a degree in engineering, and then went to work in the US Census Bureau in 1879. At that time, the census was just a headcount, they didn’t collect any real data on the population, simply because they didn’t have the ability to process that information. As it was, they only ran a census every ten years, and it took them several years to process all the information. This meant that the big concern of the department is that before too long it was going to take them longer than ten years to do the calculation, meaning the next census would have started before the last one was complete.
These days, we call that overwhelming technical debt.
So young Master Hollerith was a bit of a bright spark, says “there ought to be a machine for doing the purely mechanical work of tabulating” and set out to build one. By 1884, he had a prototype, and the US Census Bureau used the machines for the 1890 census.
The day went pretty smoothly, I had a quick coffee before 7am, and was fasting from then on. I headed over to the hospital at 10 and checked myself in. First thing was to change into a gorgeous hospital gown, with a compression stocking on my good leg, and delightful paper knickers and booties. You’ll forgive me for failing to instagram this, I hope!
In the last month, with the aid of lots of physio (and, more recently, hydrotherapy) I’ve managed to get my knee to the level of movement that my surgeon wants (130°! Whee!), I’m getting around without using the brace or my cane at all, and so I’m all booked in to have the surgery on Monday. So this week has been all about preparations. Here’s what I’ve organised:
Some good news, I’m getting around without any walking aides (although I keep my cane close by, I’ve started referring to it as my ‘moral support’ because I really don’t need it any more). While I’m at home I’m also walking around without my brace on, too, trying to strengthen muscles in my leg and knee. With help from my wonderful physio Greg, I’ve got movement between about 2° and 100°. The visible swelling has more or less completely gone, although it’s still swollen inside, which is why it’s still so hard (and painful!) to bend and straighten it.
But, my surgeon wants more! So, surgery has been put off for now, and the physio continues until I can get to around 130°. Dr. Davies tells me this is will greatly help my recovery, and will mitigate the risk of the joint freezing after surgery (which would require more surgery, and I’d rather not do that!). So life is more or less back to normal, although I’m still being quite careful about where and how far I walk, I can get around pretty easily again now, which is a great relief!
I saw my GP again on Tuesday morning (12 days after the injury), and we decided that going to a private surgeon at this point would be a good idea. Waiting times for ACL surgery through the public system can apparently be six months or more, and I was eager to get back on my feet. By this point, I could fully weight bear on my bad leg, and had ditched the crutches for my trusty cane (which I bought years ago when I hurt my calf muscle, and was quite pleased to be able to put back into service). My knee was still swollen, although it was going down ever so slowly, and I still had zero stability in the knee, although that’s not terribly surprising.
I sat around and felt miserable for a couple of days over the weekend, then went to the GP on Monday, and got the MRI done on the Tuesday (four days after the injury). This was my first MRI ever, and I have to admit I was not prepared for the clunking and beeping that machine makes. All the noises sounded, to me anyway, like alarms going off, and I kept on expecting someone to come charging in and pull me out because the machine was malfunctioning. Needless to say, they didn’t, and that’s normal operating procedure. Who knew?
So the story begins early on a Thursday morning, at a boxing class run by my trainer, B. I was doing a set of split box jumps on a fitness step with three risers (like these ones). On the seventh rep, my left foot landed on the ground, and presumably twisted, my knee went pop, and I went down with a yell. Interestingly, there was no immediate swelling or bruising, but I was in excruciating pain, so I think from the perspective of everyone else it probably looked like I was complaining about not much. Well, I showed them! They got me lying down with a rolled towel under my bad knee and an ice pack after I started going into shock, while an ambulance was called. When the ambos arrived, they gave me a green whistle (Methoxyflurane. Incidentally, I learned that this is an Australian invention We’re a smart bunch here in Aus, aren’t we?!) which pretty much took care of the pain, and had the upside of making me fairly entertaining on the way to the hospital.
When we got to hospital (RBWH) I was seen pretty quickly by a doctor and a physio, and had an xray to rule out a fracture. The standard way, I’ve learned, to diagnose an ACL tear is to grab the lower leg and push against the knee to see how much sideways movement there is (if this is making you cringe just thinking about it, then you can probably guess how I felt about it at the time). The physio tried this with me but I tensed up so much (“guarding” was the term he used in his report) that he was unable to diagnose me at the time. Eventually, he said he thought I’d probably done my ACL but he couldn’t tell, gave me a knee splint and some crutches, a referral to my GP for an MRI, and a followup appointment for a week’s time.
