Peter’s Hospital Diary

Check up time again, so it was off to Guy’s this morning, arriving bright and early just as the clinic was opening. In fact I was number 3 for the blood queue, and then it was a wait to be seen. In fact the examination was quite quick – confirmation that the sore mouth (which seems to be getting worse again) is GvHd, and that ‘It will get better eventually’ and confirmation that my blood counts are better – Haemaglobin now 12.3, which is at the bottom end of normal range. I came away with a prescription for more stuff for the mouth ulcers and an appointment for 2 weeks, when more blood will be taken for another chimerism test (to make sure my immune system iisn’t reverting back to my original). It has been a medical week, as yesterday I had the first of my immunisations – pneumococcus, and Diptheria and Polio. The last one will need another two boosters at one month intervals.

The pictures of Olivia are on the gallery (with some others!). The top one also features one of the delicious scandishhake food supplements (no – I wasn’t feeding it to her!) while the middle one shows her wearing some very stylish Ug boots – brought back from Australia by friend Marian! The bottom one was taken today after she eventually settled – she had some immunizations this morning, but not being used to being used as a pin cushion, found the whole business rather unpleasant.

Now a bit of geek stuff. Those who are interested in these things may recall that the blog and website are all running on a Linux based system (sitting at my feet as I type). The actual distribution is Red Hat 9 – a fine system in its day, but I have been running it for about 3 years (originally downloaded as a self teaching project) and it was 18 months old then. Things move quickly in the Linux world, and although I am a great believer in the maxim “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” support for this distribution ended in February, so I think it is probably time to upgrade. I have been tinkering with the latest stable version of this particular Linux distribution – Fedora Core 6 – or FC6 as it is colloquially known. FC6 is derived from the Red Hat products but it is a separate project in its own right. Red Hat now concentrate on commercial implementations of Linux in its enterprise versions.

Although FC6 is a little different from RH9, I am now reasonably confident abouit upgrading. However, as with all upgrades, I will be taking a complete back-up of the hard drive (effectively cloning it) so that if it all goes wrong, I can easily restore things. The backup and upgrade will take a while, so the blog may be unavailable for a few hours at various times – probably this weekend. I will put up a page saying what is happening while I am doing it.

So that is it for the moment… Onwards and Upwards!