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| Author |
Message |
| 25 new of 480 responses total. |
davel
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response 350 of 480:
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Dec 2 17:06 UTC 2003 |
With Grace's arm we also, several times, just gave up & paid things. I think
that they dig in their heels knowing that many people will do that. I suspect
that it's not cost-effective in the end (for them), though. <sigh>
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keesan
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response 351 of 480:
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Dec 2 18:28 UTC 2003 |
Today I seem to finally have whatever Jim still has. I am coughing and my
throat is sore. I emailed the nurse to ask if I should delay Monday
chemotherapy so as not to infect other people. Jim had muscle aches,
very hoarse throat, and exhaustion as well as the usual respiratory symptoms.
We have been putting off visiting mutual friends with our visitor until Jim
was better and now we are both sick. She continues to cook for us.
I will try peppermint tea to stop coughing.
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keesan
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response 352 of 480:
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Dec 3 21:39 UTC 2003 |
My sore throat has passed but I am still coughing. I think this is not what
Jim has/had but something new.
Today U of M Billing phoned to say that my credit card number did not work.
Turns out they don't have a way to deal with debit cards over the phone. My
debit cards work fine for internet purchases. Also turns out that the $43
I tried to pay is not 30% of $138 but the discount off $182 to $138 and they
are still billing the full amount. I phoned the doctor and was told he
must have had some reason for billing this as non-preventive but he was not
going to talk to me and I was hung up on. I phoned the insurance company and
got the name of someone that the doctor' refused to talk to. I phoned ppom
and someone spent half an hour trying to help and phoned the doctor's office
and was told he 'exercised his professional judgment' in refusing to bill as
preventive a blood count and PSA that he had recommended to Jim because he
is male and over 50. If this is not a routine test, what is?
PPOM said I could send them a letter of complaint and they also gave me the
address to send an appeal to the insurance company to get them to pay this
even if it was billed wrong. I just wrote up 1.5 pages for each. I hope that
this doctor will be removed from the ppom list and that the insurance company
will take responsiblity for fixing the problem he has caused. The former
might help with the latter. If these were not routine tests they should not
have been done at all since we made it clear that we were there because the
insurance paid for routine tests.
I am getting tired of this but not tired enough to pay the full $138.
If the doctor refuses to cooperate, who is responsible for the problem?
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gelinas
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response 353 of 480:
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Dec 3 22:23 UTC 2003 |
(Have you stopped using that doctor?)
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klg
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response 354 of 480:
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Dec 4 02:08 UTC 2003 |
You may have covered this previously, but why are you receiving bills
for Jim's medical tests?
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keesan
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response 355 of 480:
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Dec 4 02:37 UTC 2003 |
We went to this doctor just once. I pay Jim's expenses. He is taking care
of me.
Is there some virus going around that starts with three days of scratchy
throat and coughing so hard you almost throw up? I thought I had what Jim
used to have but it is acting differently. I would like to be able to predict
if it will be better by Monday. I started coughing Monday and thought I had
a strep throat last night (which stopped hurting so much by morning).
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klg
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response 356 of 480:
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Dec 4 03:02 UTC 2003 |
You pay for his health insurance? Even so, wouldn't the deductible/co-
insurance be billed to the policyholder?
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scott
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response 357 of 480:
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Dec 4 04:50 UTC 2003 |
Sounds a bit like that I had a few weeks ago... never did figure out if it
was a really nasty cold or the flu.
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keesan
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response 358 of 480:
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Dec 4 14:00 UTC 2003 |
How long did the nasty cold last? Yes I pay for Jim's insurance and his
medical expenses as well.
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scott
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response 359 of 480:
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Dec 4 14:18 UTC 2003 |
Not quite three weeks, I think.
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gull
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response 360 of 480:
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Dec 4 16:15 UTC 2003 |
My strategy for a while now has been, whenever I feel unexpectedly
cruddy for no good reason, I take a day off work and sleep a lot. So
far I've been successful in avoiding getting truely sick this way.
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slynne
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response 361 of 480:
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Dec 4 16:42 UTC 2003 |
I had a pretty nasty cold in October that lasted for the better part of
two weeks.
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keesan
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response 362 of 480:
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Dec 4 19:06 UTC 2003 |
I hope this does not last three weeks as I cannot postpone therapy for two
weeks. Does it get somewhat better after the first week? So far it is just
four days of lots of coughing and scratchy throat, complicated by the
pharyngitis so at night I am wheezing trying to get enough air. Okay when
I am standing up. The week after chemo the pharyngitis is worse.
Scott and Slynne, do you recall how you felt after just one week?
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scott
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response 363 of 480:
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Dec 4 19:12 UTC 2003 |
Mine doesn't sound exactly like yours. First couple days maybe I felt a
little lower energy, and then a sore throat started to show up. The night
that I knew I was sick I had a fever over 100, then normal the next day. Then
a milder fever that night, after which it settled down to a bad cold. Colds
do tend to throw off my internal temperature regulation, though. After some
unremembered amount of time I developed a really bad cough, which at times
seemed like I was about to pull a muscle. Eventually things tailed off, but
the cough stayed on for a few more weeks until I went to the doctor. That's
when I was on prednisone for a week, to reduce thoat inflamation.
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slynne
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response 364 of 480:
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Dec 4 20:52 UTC 2003 |
After a week, I still had a cough but I felt well enough to go to work.
Mine started with lots of sneezing and a stuffed up nose. By the third
day, I had a slight fever and a cough. The cough is what lingered but
it went away around two weeks after the initial illness.
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keesan
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response 365 of 480:
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Dec 5 03:24 UTC 2003 |
Maybe we all have/had the same thing but responded differently? I have been
coughing for four days now, no stuffy nose but a sore throat two nights ago,
and no fever. I sneezed maybe five times the week before it started. I will
be on prednisone for five days next week. My big concern is that the
pharyngitis will interact with the infection and I will be choking on mucus
like I was second cycle when I had a cold. If I have a very runny nose next
Monday I might ask to postpone a couple of days.
Today I got notice from the insurance company that they are not reimbursing
me for the mattress pads recommended to prevent bed sores because they are
'for comfort and convenience'. Yes, it is convenient to be able to sleep.
I am now exchanging emails with someone who supports one of my favorite
programs, whose brother had lymphoma 25 years ago and refused to be treated
again after it recurred. Chemotherapy was apparently quite a bit worse then,
and the second time you get it they use worse poisons. His mother was cured
of leukemia for 15 years then died of a stroke. Leukemia is usually harder
to cure than lymphoma. His brother had an advanced case. They decided
against surgery after taking a look inside. We are discussing hospital diets
and the advantages of having a Puerto Rican restaurant across from the
hospital so visitors can bring cooked food.
He said his mother never regained her sense of taste. Mine is cyclical and
is worst just about now and returns around the beginning of the next cycle.
The other side effects are worst shortly after treatment and my hands are
hardly numb now. I have had only one finger with shredded skin at a time this
cycle (maybe 4-5 total) and no hand pain. The laryngitis was nearly better
until I started coughing a few days ago. Leukemia treatment is more frequent
so the side effects are worse and probably longer lasting.
I would REALLY like to get the last treatment over Monday. The thought of
this has been sustaining me recently through eating sour-tasting potatoes and
drinking sour-tasting water and walking 3/4 mile each way in the cold on feet
that I cannot feel, and pulling out clumps of hair when I know it is about
to get a lot colder.
The hot flashes don't seem to be quite as hot or frequent (down from every
45 to every 60 minutes?).
One leukemia patient said she had chemotherapy for a whole year and it did
not help. She was pretty cheery about it all, relative to how she could have
been. Her next step was a bone marrow transplant within 2 weeks. It must
have been nice to have that decision over with.
I am not coughing quite as much (yesterday I coughed so hard I nearly threw
up) but now my head hurts a bit. My eyes are sill runny. Jim made me some
more salt water gargle, which when I used it almost made me choke. But it
is much nicer tasting than the thrush treatment was.
Our visitor made a special trip here and tried to tempt my jaded appetite with
stir-fried bitter melon. It is green and has scalloped edges. I grew some
once and it had gelatinous looking red seeds. I tasted one piece and it
tasted exactly like prednisone and benadryl. Apparently bitter things all
taste the same, at least to me, right now. Jim put lots of chili pickled
cabbage on it and ate it all including mine. I managed to eat a preserved
egg and 2 small sour-tasting potatoes and some cocoa and baby cereal and
steamed bread today. As long as I don't lose weight for three more weeks I
am not going to worry.
Jim wrote his first program in C and compiled it on the basiclinux computer.
It is named 'hello'. Today we also got a script for reading man pages with
man2html going. After three hours of testing different parts of the script
separately (someone else wrote it) we reported that zcat does not operate
properly for us on strings surrounded by ' '. Turns out the characters should
have been 1` ` (back quote) which is located under the ~ - first time I ever
realized that character existed. I spent most of the day on the couch under
a warm down sleeping bag suggesting things for him to try, in between coughs.
My head has finally stopped hurting enough to read the bbs. Jim read it to
me earlier, and answered my email, and reported our problem to basiclinux,
and learned how to do all sorts of other things I had been doing for him.
|
gull
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response 366 of 480:
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Dec 5 14:18 UTC 2003 |
A brief introduction to how quotes work in shell scripts:
Single quotes (' ') tell the shell "pass this on as a unit without
changing it." This is handy if you're passing arguments with special
characters in them, like filenames that contain spaces or ampersands.
(For example, rm File With Spaces.txt will try to delete three files,
"File", "With", and "Spaces.txt". rm 'File With Spaces.txt' will
remove one file called "File With Spaces.txt".)
Double quotes (" ") allow some processing, like replacing variables with
their values, but otherwise they act like single quotes.
Backquotes (` `) tell the shell, "run this command and used the output
as an argument." This is a very powerful feature and is used a lot in
shell scripts. It's as if you'd copied the output of the command and
pasted it onto the command line.
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keesan
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response 367 of 480:
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Dec 5 16:25 UTC 2003 |
Very helpful explanation. Jim said with single quotes it would tell him 'file
or directory not found' since what we had in there was a command and argument.
He got all excited about this and wants to write a script with back quotes
now. He was about to go shopping (by bike) before it snowed. Somehow
computers don't seem to save any time. It is now snowing.
So now we have a very small program and a one-line script that accomplish the
same thing as the man package and the groff package (8 MB).
Today my head does not hurt and my eyes are not as runny but I am still
coughing. I expect I will be enough better to do chemotherapy Monday.
My legs are much less wobbly than last week. My hands are less numb. My voice
is less weak. In three weeks I should feel the same but I won't have to go
back to square zero again if I am lucky.
Jim says 'works fine'. Must have been a very small script that he wrote.
He wants to try dosemu (Do I need to compile it?) and run his editor under
dosemu. Does dosemu work with programs that call BIOS and DOS functions?
The alternative is to rewrite his editor in C and recompile it.
Maybe I will try compiling lynx while Jim is out. He does not let me near the
computer when he is in.
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gull
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response 368 of 480:
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Dec 5 17:04 UTC 2003 |
It's been a long time since I used dosemu. I think it works with
programs that use BIOS calls. It'd be pretty useless if it didn't.
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keesan
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response 369 of 480:
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Dec 5 22:03 UTC 2003 |
Do you need to recompile the DOS programs or just load dosemu?
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gull
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response 370 of 480:
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Dec 5 22:06 UTC 2003 |
No need to recompile. You might try www.dosemu.org for details.
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keesan
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response 371 of 480:
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Dec 6 05:23 UTC 2003 |
We downloaded BOTH the required files (after I read the README of the first
one I pointed out the need for the second one to Jim). Now he thinks it will
only run as some user other than root due to file permissions. ???
You can configure it to run with two monitors plugged in at once. I never
got DOS working that way, just linux - vga and ttl (hgc).
I am still having coughing fits. Right now the left side of my throat is
scratchy and my left eye has been runny most of the day. I just realized that
the hot flashes slowed down yesterday and decreased in intensity (not as hot
and not as long) and today they seem to have stopped. I wonder if being sick
makes me underheated and therefore no hot flashes. I have spent most of the
time under a feather sleeping bag trying to stay warm.
This temperature instability has been keeping me from sleeping very soundly and
it is nice that it stopped but now the scratchy throat and cough have taken
over the job of keeping me awake. I seem to have lost at least a pound, maybe
2-3. Things taste worse than last week.
I read about an English man who tried to prove something by traveling through
the desert of Mali with two camels. To get to where he was starting he took
trains, buses, and trucks and when the sandstorm stopped the truck he switched
to a local sailboat with one mast that looks like a local treetrunk in the
photo. The truck was delivering charity rice to Timbuktu. The sail was made
of rice sacks sewn edge to edge and it came apart at the seams during the
storm and when it was repaired, the rigging ripped and the mast came down.
I think you are not supposed to sail during storms.
I may have just had a mild 10 sec hot flash or else I got warm typing. It
does not feel like a blast furnace is emitting heat at me when I pull open
my shirt collar to let the heat out, nor is there any sweating.
|
twenex
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response 372 of 480:
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Dec 6 09:59 UTC 2003 |
Any DOS program that works with *documented*
system calls from Microsoft will work on DOSemu,
or that's the plan. DOSemu does *not*, afaik,
attempt to work for any program that uses
*undocumented* DOS calls (nor, it has to be said,
did M$ ever support programs that did, since they
reserved the rught to change those syscalls from
version to version of DOS). DOSemu also does not,
according to the authors, attempt to work for any
program that uses features of the 386 and higher
processors (so presumably the DOS Protected Mode
Interface and any program that use it [Windows
3.x in enhanced mode?] are useless under DOSemu.
Finally, since UN*X only uses the BIOS to boot, I
believe it's unlikely any program which makes
BIOS calls will work, or work correctly.
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keesan
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response 373 of 480:
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Dec 6 15:50 UTC 2003 |
Jim wants to try dosemu on a little 4K text editor that he wrote in assembly
language which will work on an 8088. Dosemu claims to work with freedos and
dr-dos as well as msdos. I am interested in using WP51/DOS, which worked
(from two floppy disks) on my 8088. No protected modes needed, text only,
fast (except it took a while to read off floppy disk). I will warn him about
the BIOS calls - his editor uses them, does WP51?
Jim thinks he needs to have a user other than root for dosemu so he is
installing shadow.tgz (419K zipped) to get adduser and password programs.
Something about permissions. I don't understand. He is having fun. If this
does not work he may learn enough C to rewrite his assembly language editor,
which he likes better than pico or even joe.
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jor
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response 374 of 480:
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Dec 6 16:34 UTC 2003 |
'permissions' just refers to file protection.
You can set files and directories to be readable,
writeable, etc. by certain users or
groups of users.
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