Peter's Hospital Diary

Hard to believe that this time last week I was 7,000 miles away, looking at snow covered hills! I have pretty much got over the time zone change – I always find travelling forwards across time zones more tiring, but I have had a few fairly restful days. I am back at work tomorrow, although I shall be in London for three days having the next session of ECP and also a haematology check up. However the feeling of well being induced by the trip has continued!

The weather down here has been hot – we had a BBQ yesterday and this afternoon – almost too hot sitting out in the sun!

If you looked at the blog this afternoon, it was down for a while while I did a disk change. (One of the disks in the RAID array was reporting a fault) so I have installed a new drive (and a cable which looked a bit suspect) and I will test the disk later. I think it is probably OK and it was the cable at fault. (It took a bit longer than expexcted – because I was called to do the BBQ just as I had started taking it apart!)

Still, all back online now – time to take a backup!

Onwards and Upwards!

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Yet again it has been a week since I last posted – and another busy one! Firstly I am sorry the blog hasn’t been updated, but I have had little opportunity to connect to the internet – and when I have, the server has been unavailable because of the ongoing network snags. I have now found the source of the problem! You may recall that I had thought that it was one of the network devices (a switch) that was overheating, but having removed it (for return to the suppliers under warranty) the problem happened again, and I can now point the finger at one of the computers, which may have a hard disk or motherboard problem, possibly caused by overheating. I will have to look at improving the airflow through the case but until I can sort that out, I’ll be leaving it disconnected so the rest of the network, with the webserver, can run normally.

This week saw the first ECP sessions! All quite uneventful really. I went up to St Thomas’s on Tuesday, and had the first session in the afternoon. One (large) canula is placed into the vein near the inside of my elbow, and about 125ml of blood removed and centrifuged. The white cells are separated out and the red cells returned to the body. This happens six times, and then a photo-sensitive drug called psoralen is added to the white cells which absorb it. The cells are then circulated through a tube past an ultra violet (UV) light which activates the drug and modifies the cells attributes (in a way I don’t fully understand). The cells are then returned to the body. The idea is that because only the target cells are exposed to the drug, which is activated outside the body, the side effects are significantly reduced. However one side effect is the risk of cataracts, as it does make the eyes sensitive to UV radiation, so I had to wear UV blocking goggles (like safety glasses) for nine hours after each session – I received some strange looks in a restaurant!

I stayed in a hospital room overnight (adequate but spartan – it reminded me of the flat I shared in Leeds as a student) – 6 rooms with a communal bathroom – although I was the only occupant! Next morning (Wednesday) I had session two, and then I went off to meet Felicity and Katie who had come up to London as Katie had an interview for a job placement as part of her degree course. Session 2 was uneventful – once the canula was inserted – it took two attempts.

We stayed in London that night in rather more comfort at the flat of our friends Marion and Martin. We were out for a Chinese that night, and then Thursday saw me head off to Guy’s , while Katie went for her interview. My haematology check up at Guys followed the usual pattern, although they think my Hb was 11.9, while the team at St Thomas’s claimed it was slightly better at 13.4! However, having had four needle inserted, I have a nice collection of bruises! I did get a bit more of the coursework done, all but finished. Katie’s interview went well – but she found out at the interview that it is an unpaid placement, which makes it rather undesirable!

We drove back on Thursday afternoon, I was out for dinner that night, and back at work on Friday.

Friday evening saw me driving up to Worcester for an excellent but intensive week-end of training (nice to be doing it instead of receiving it!) and I drove back home this afternoon, to finish off my coursework and email it off – which I did about 2 hours ago, just before the midnight deadline.

So another busy week! Next ECP is in two weeks, and currently planned for every two weeks for the next twelve months – which leaves my in a bit of quandary as to how to classify these posts. Certainly having treatment, although not for the original disease, and with the appointment schedule it feels a bit like ‘life on hold’ again, yet at the same time, it is part of getting my life back! Maybe all three (or four as there was a bit of ‘geek speak’ at the start).

But whatever the categories, we stay Onwards and Upwards!

(Oh yes, I passed the financial management course with 71%)

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Where did the last week go? I suppose it is a sign that life is getting back to normal, and perhaps a little more mundane, that the frequency of the posts is decreasing slightly! On the health front, the only remarkable event was my trip to Guy’s for my bone density scan, which took all of 40 minutes, including waiting time, and half of that time was filling in a questionnaire. Still, it gave me time to have a browse round Waterstones before heading back home to do some more of my coursework – the deadline for the first piece is Sunday 25th. It is about two thirds complete in terms of words, although most of the research is done. Technically, it isn’t that difficult, far harder is compiling and citing the list of references to support the text!

My parents visited for a couple of days at the end of the week, and Olivia has been over a couple times. Vicki has some photos for me, I’ll post them when I get them!

On the Leukaemia Care side, I spent a day with Neil and Suzanne (fellow trainers) yesterday, tying up some loose ends for some modules on the training courses we deliver. This was after getting up early to put Felicity on the train for London, where she is working this week, at the Chelsea Flower Show. I did a little more coursework last night!

On the technical side, the availability of the blog has been a bit variable this week. Apart from the power cut on Monday, I have been having problems with the home LAN (Local area network). It is relatively complex, with a high speed core running at 1000Mb/s, and an outer core running at 100Mb/s. There seemed to be a problem with one of the 1000Mb/S switches, that was locking up and blocking all network access, including that to the internet access router. I think it was overheating, so I moved it to a cooler position – forgetting that the sun would shine on it during the day – and it locked up again for most of yesterday! It now has a sun shade!

I am at home today – I have another appointment at Guy’s this afternoon – at the dermatology clinic, and I think it is decision time over the Extra Corporeal Photophereses! The aches haven’t got any better, so if it is chronic GvHd, it isn’t getting better on its own. It might not be getting worse, but if it flares up every time my immune system is triggered into fighting an infection, like the HIb, then my physical condition is likely to deteriorate. So it is probably better to act now rather than later. There is no ‘right’ decision, because whatever I do, I will never know what would have happened if I had made the other one – so whatever I do decide, it has to be made on the basis of as much information that I can find -and then stick with it!

And now – back to the coursework!

So… Onwards and upwards!

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So far the sniffles haven’t returned, although I seem to be coughing a bit more. However the really good news is that my appetite has returned. Bacon sandwiches have made a welcome return to my diet, as has ‘wet’ food such as Cottage Pie – and of course sponge puddings with lashings of custard! (I guess this is of no comfort to those on enteral feeding, like Chris – sorry Chris – food discussions – especially the ways of preparing a bacon sarnie – have been a feature of this blog in the past!) The Scandishakes and Calogen remain on standby, but I hope I will put on the weight that I lost in the last few weeks – and perhaps a bit more as I am still a few Kg below my ideal weight

On the tech front, I have just carried out a major upgrade to the WordPress software that powers the blog. You, dear reader, will probably notice little difference, except that pages may load a bit faster, but the ‘behind the scenes’ control pages have changed, and the database structure has changed slightly to allow for future enhancements. (Just to re-cap, WordPress is a content management system – all the posts, comments, and data about the poster or commenter are all stored in a relational database, and extracted as necessary to form the HTML pages that are served by the web server. Once data is in a database, it can be presented in a variety of different ways.) I am still finding my way round the new layout!

Olivia has been over today, but my camera battery was flat, so no photos this time – sorry!

Oh yes – I see this is the 300th post! Onwards and upwards!

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Where did the week go? After last week’s more prolific blogging, this week has been quiet. However, while it has been quiet I have been reasonably busy. On the one hand, Felicity is organising a repeat of last year’s wedding fair, so my IT skills (10 have been put to use, and on the other, I have been looking at a new IT project, following on from some problems we had with E mail a couple of weeks ago. For a bit of background, my mail service provided by my domain name provider, and is separate from that of my Internet provider – the advantage of that is if I change ISP, my e mail address remains the same. However there have been problems recently, and so I have been looking at setting up my own mailserver, in much the same way that I have my own webserver. However it is a liitle more complex, as there are several components that need to work together, and security plays a big part – both to protect against the mailserver being used by spammers, and also in ensuring that mail isn’t lost. I have been doing some experiments, and got bits of it working – I am relaying mail through one machine, but only from the internal network. Next stage is to look at receiving mail centrally for distribution, rather than each mail client on each machine contacting the remote mailboxes individually. So there has been quite a lot of research into the best way of doing things.

Olivia has been over, but the poor little mite has had conjunctivitis – each photo I took had her with runny eyes, so I haven’t published any. Katie also came home on Wednesday and Rachael has had a friend staying, so it has been busy!

I was delighted to hear from Simon again – doing well on his two weeks off from Chemo and over half way through the course – O&U! However I haven’t heard any more from John or his family, so he may still be in ‘Heath Towers’. Fingers and other digits crossed for you John, when you get round to reading this!

So a mixed bag – but all part of ‘getting my life back’!

Onwards and Upwards!

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If any of you tried to look at the blog last night, you will have received an error message as the server was down for about 4 hours from 7pm.. In fact we had a power cut, just as we were about to go out for the evening. We do get brief interruptions to our electricity supply, usually caused by a sensitive main circuit breaker in the house, and we initiallythought that was the case yesterday – by the time we realised it was a local outage, the batteries on the Uninterruptable Power Supplies (UPS) that feed the server were running low and I had no option but to shut it down before firing up the generator – yes, the one I bought last year for just this eventuality!

Anyway, it started easily and operated the lights, central heating, as I wished, but because we were going out and leaving Rachael on her own, I didn’t want to risk loading it up more than I needed to, just in case something caused the generator breaker to trip, so the webserver remained off until we arrived home 3 hours later, when mains power was again available.

But it all performed exactly as I had planned, and as it had on test, so I was very pleased!

Incidentally, I notice from the statistics that I have made 100 posts in the “Getting my Life Back” category!

Onwards and upwards!

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And finally everything is back as it should be! Full raid, disk layout fine, all burning and turning!

I was talking to fellow blog master Mark about it, and he commented that this episode was hardly a good advert for Linux, which rather got me thinking about the last couple of weeks.

The initial failure was a hardware fault in the memory which manifested itself as disk corruption. However Linux uses a journaling file system logs disk transactions before they happen (large disk transactions are processor intensive, so most modern OSs delay disk writes until the processor isn’t doing other things – but a system crash can mean lost data that hasn’t been written to disk – which is why a computer should always be shut down properly, never just switched off)) Linux uses a journaling file system which logs potential disk transactions so if the system does crash, the journal can recover the expected transactions and make repairs. (Windows NTFS also uses a less robust form of journaling).

However in this case the potential corruption was so bad that Linux deactivated the disk so that no other damage could occur – a fact that I didn’t immediately recognise. If I had, I could probably have had the system up and running again within a day or so. As it was, I took the safe course and reloaded everything onto a new disk, got it all up, and then transferred it back to an array. What would have happened had I been using Windows? I’m not sure, but I doubt it would have been any easier. However, as Mark pointed out, having up-to-date backups would have helped!! (That is now in hand) Mark – enjoy your Apple Mac when it arrives – and remember that the underlying operating system is Linux based!

I said I would post some more photos of Olivia at a birthday party when I received them. I have and they are in the November Album in the Gallery (under Olivia).

I am off on another module of the computer course I started a month ago – this one is about networks, so I may not write for a few days – but keep watching this space!

O&U

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Hmm – it didn’t go quite as smoothly as I had hoped! For some reason (I think I know why – do do with the fact that the disk had been cloned from a previous RAID array and also a power supply connector problem preventing proper operation of that disk) the computer started treating the two drives in the RAID array as two separate arrays with one drive in each! It took a bit of sorting, but after checking (and double checking!) the drives, the solution was to erase one, and then re-configure it into the proper array and rebuild it. This is a seamless and transparent background process (I hope) but takes some time as is happening at the moment. There is one other thing to do after that, but then all should be well!

Enough of computer stuff! Richard asked about the mouse repeller! Well it seems to be working in that I haven’t heard any mice in the attic above the bedroom since it was installed, but that is a long way from the attic above the kitchen, where the latest problems have been. However I haven’t caught any more mice since the weekend!

My best wishes go to Simon (BT fame) who I said I heard from last week. He has since posted a couple of comments here and here describing a medical snagette of his own. Simon – we are all with you – keep smiling!

Finally, Elspeth, of Elspeth’s blog fame and fellow LeukaemiaCARE volunteer is off on some exciting travels in the New Year. I’m thinking of setting up a gallery in her blog so she can post her photos there! Good to see that all is well after her medical issues.

So onwards and upwards!

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Apologies for the absence of the blog for the last couple of evenings – this has been while I restore the computer back to its normal configuration. Last night was spent installing the two discs for the RAID 1 array, and tonight was spent migrating the data off the single hard drive (shown resting on the top of the chassis) to the RAID array (one disk can just be seen at the top of the case) This didn’t go quite as smoothly as I expected – partly my fault – I carelessly deleted a logical volume, but because the changes aren’t recognised by the kernel until a reboot, the data was still accessible – until the computer was turned off, so I could copy it all to the array. The computer underneath will be the backup server.

Tomorrow I will be putting it back in its case and starting to configure the backup server, so it will be down for an hour or so.

O&U!!

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Pheww! That was a bit of a tense week, but all is (I think) restored and the blog is up and running again with no loss of data!

So what happened?

Well, after I got back and started looking at the computer, I found I was getting some erratic behaviour, nothing serious, but a few error messages, so I ran a file checking program to make sure the disk file system was OK. I use logical volumes on the computer, so checking can be a bit tricky, and I was getting lots of errors reported, so I ran a repair program. Half way through that the computer crashed and would not restart – basically saying that it couldn’t find the operating system! Major panic time as that indicated that the disk was corrupt!

The first thing to do in that situation is STOP DOING ANYTHING as panic measures nearly always make a bad situation worse! After some thought, I did a little careful work on the system – I could see the logical volume, but nothing in it, however I also ran a memory check, and it showed several faults on the memory (which has since been returned under warranty, and is waiting replacement). Meanwhile I found another memory stick, installed that and re-installed the operating system from scratch. I also contacted some data recovery companies to see if they could help. The feeling was ‘yes’ – but at a cost! (Several hundred pounds)

I did have a back up from last May (I had had one from September, but I had recently cleared that to make way for a not-yet-done backup! Grrr!) so all was not lost, but a great deal potentially was at risk (most of Olivia’s recent photographs as well as 5 month’s blog). Before sending the disks off, (there are two, in a mirrored configuration, the idea being that if one disk fails, the other takes over – but no use in this case as both mirrored disks would have the same corrupted files) I took images of them so I could have a play first.

However, the imaged disks didn’t work (for reasons I’m not sure about) but I did discover that I could use one disk in the array – so I could cautiously look at one of the damaged disks. In the meantime I read up about the logical volume system, and noted that one of the error messages said ‘LVM inactive’ meaning that although the ‘container’ that holds the data was there, it wasn’t in use. A glimmer of an idea was that if I could make the logical volume active, I might (just might) get something.

So that is what I did – and there was the data! In principle the only task was to copy it over to the main disk.

In practice it was a bit more involved as I had to re-install and re-configure the webserver and database applications, but that is now complete – and here I am! There is a lot more to do to get the computer back as I like it, but that will take a while and won’t affect the blog. I haven’t looked at everything on the disk yet but the important bits seem OK.

The process hasn’t been helped by the fact that I have had some bug since the weekend. Usual stuff, D&V, and it seems to be doing the rounds. I have felt very tired, and haven’t been eating very well, but I seem to be over the worst now.

So, with a huge sigh of relief, it is onwards and upwards again! (Now – about that backup…)

P.S. Just realised that there was a problem with comments – now fixed!

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