The Saga of the Foot continues…
I’ve been homebound since I got home last week. It’s a combination of using the wound-vac and the fact that I’m having trouble walking. The walking thing is getting better, but it still isn’t 100%. All of this, of course, is because I had a raging infection that turned half my foot purple and required hospitalization and a chunk of meat the size of a finger to be carved off the bottom and side of said foot.
The wound-vac is an adventure. A nurse comes in three times a week to change the dressing and check on my foot. It involves cutting a couple pieces of foam rubber to fit the hole and wrap around, then wrapping it in a few layers of plastic kind of like heavy duty scotch tape. Then a hole is made and the tube is attached with a big piece of the same tape. I run the tube up the inside of my pants leg, attach it to the tube coming off the wound-vac, and fire it up. All told, it takes about 15-20 minutes.
Problem is, the tube seems to have been sized for someone six inches shorter than me. So every time I get up there’s almost no slack and I end up pulling the vac by the tube. Sleeping has been interesting, to say the least. I have to stick the vac itself under my pillow so the tube can reach my foot and the power cord can reach the vac. Which would be annoying enough without it constantly chugging and farting away. You know that video of the guy playing the giant PVC Pan flute with the rubber pigs? That’s what it sounds like sometimes.
Had a follow-up with the podiatrist on Friday. He looked at it, said it looked healthy and the infection seemed to be under control, and then mentioned they could change the wrap for me if I’d brought the stuff. Dammit. First I’d heard of this. So next time I can save the time and money of a nurse visit by having it done at the doctor’s office.
Gave him the doctor’s portion of the short-term disability paperwork. I’ll be picking that up after my appointment Wednesday, then turning it in at work. When I asked how long I’d be out, he said he was going to go with a couple of months and work from there. So if I recover enough for him to sign off on me going back to work sooner, I should be able to, but if necessary he could probably extend it.
I was hoping it would be the one to three weeks estimate that had been thrown around in the hostibule. Two months of disability checks is going to suck. Not as bad as losing a foot would have, but it’ll still hurt.
On the upside, this is a chunk of time where all I have to do is let the meat of my foot grow back. I can’t use the Devil Monkey Laboratories rig, but I still have Augustus and most of my books and office supplies. Aboot all I can’t do with my portable rig is heavy game dev because it turns out there’s a pretty significant difference between a monster desktop running an i7-8700 3.7Mhz 6-core CPU with 32GB of RAM and a 6GB video card and a laptop running an i5 at 1.6Mhz and 4GB of RAM. Who would have guessed?
I can still do design pretty easily. I was doing game and asset design with pen and paper when I was six years old. If I can’t pull it off with a laptop there’s a serious problem. I can do 3D modeling and C# code on Augustus, and some basic Unity work as long as I don’t overpopulate a scene or go too nuts with physics and intricate 3D models. So I can at least do some prototyping and work on AI.
This seems like a good time to quote Maxim 70: “Failure is not an option – it is mandatory. The option is whether or not to let failure be the last thing you do.”