It’s the day after my surgery and here I am touch typing so you can pretty safely assume I am alive and still in possession of both hands.
That is a good thing. However I would still say it has been a below average week.
1. On Monday night I pushed some Zappos code changes that caused enormous trouble… the site was down and/or behaving badly for about 2 1/2 hours. Hundreds of customers got error pages or erratic behavior. Because I was leaving Tuesday it was left for my good team to do the cleanup.
2. Upon arrival in San Francisco I foolishly left my backpack in the backseat of Sophie’s car while dining. The window was smashed upon our return and my bag was gone. The limited edition Zappos bag contained: my new 17″ PowerBook G4, my new electric shaver, some of my favorite clothes, my retainer, my checkbook, season two DVD’s for Millennium, the Cryptionomicon book, a Serenity comic and BBC Blue Ocean DVD set borrowed from a friend, my keys, and a pair of nice headphones. It also included a handful of business cards so at least i may have accomplished some networking.
3. Though no harm was done, the surgery didn’t go as planned. There was the plate and 9 screws… but after getting out six they couldn’t get out the last three. Apparently the bone had grown too hard around them and they stripped the heads trying to back them out. Somewhere in my mind I’m wondering why a $15K set of screws has allen heads instead of torx, but that’s not for me to judge. Anyways, the options at that point included prying and drilling out the screws, but Dr. Prieto felt it was too risky as it might re-break the bone, so they closed up and left the plate in. Though I’m disappointed that the plate and screws will be in there permanently, I do trust his judgment on the risk of having forced things. They did get to clean up the scar, though we won’t know how much of an improvement it is for months. And I do have the six screws that came out. They’re nice and shiny.
So time to move on. The arm is what it is. Hopefully there will be no complications later in life. I’ll probably buy an intel MacBook Pro to replace my stolen 17″. I’ve got a good todo list for Zappos to get things back on track.
Oh, I do plan to write up a sort of journal/story of my whole arm experience from beginning to end with pictures. Not that a lot of people will encounter anything similar, but I remember appreciating what little info I found when I poked around online after my injury. So I’ll add my experience to the mix. Sophie took some great pictures of me pre-surgery so I’ll remember what the scar looked like the first time. Hopefully something I’ll have up in the next couple months.
