News from Lew and Deb


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Posted by John (63.155.14.188) on 11:28:18 06/14/14

A short response to your email.

My health has not been good. I started having problems in August. The symptoms included extreme back, hip, quadriceps and knee pain. I lost the ability to walk without help.

I was sent to an orthopedic surgeon but he was unable to perform any tests other than surgery. Due to my artificial inner ear I cannot have an MRI. The hospital would not do any contrast test since I have a allergy to the contrast medium. Other hospitals will do the contrast tests after I go through a period of desensitization to the dyes, but this one would not. The doctor treated me for the knee pain. It was not successful so he sent me to physical therapy. That went on for several months until he decided not to authorize more sessions.

In January, I went to a different orthopedic surgeon who specialized in spinal surgery. He diagnosed a problem with my Lumbar Vertebrae and scheduled a procedure for the end of February. Five days before the surgery I scraped my shin. I had the surgery and it worked, but the scrap on my shin became infected. My lower leg and foot swelled up so bad that they could not hold any body fluids and I started bleeding clear fluid. My foot was so swollen you could not see my toes. The leg turned black down to my toes. They were considering cutting the leg to relieve the pressure but then put me on an extended period of antibiotics. By now I could not even get up so Deb had to work from home so she could help me. I don't think I would have made it without her help. They finally sent me to a wound clinic and they did their magic. I had a good recovery to the point they sent me for physical therapy again. I needed it in order to start walking again. Unfortunately I had a relapse of the infection and that set me back for a few more weeks. I have graduated from a walker to crutches and I am now using a cane. I am back to physical therapy but had some problems and they delayed further work.

This problem appears to have affected my surgery. I have an appointment on Monday to address that.

Our trips to Montana have been delayed as would be expected. We finally made a short trip as we had some problems with the house. We are on the road back to PA now.

We lost our internet at the house so, based on remote diagnosis, we replaced our router and firewall. There were more problems than that. We had a lightning strike that fried a lot of the network equipment as well as the telephones. Our UPS systems did not help as the strike hit the radio and telephone wires. We ended up replacing the radio and other equipment that was supplied by the ISP as well as our equipment. We got the system working , but it would drop connectivity after about 5 minutes. We determined the there is a problem with the firewall hardware. Cisco will replace it but we will have to reconfigure the new device. We will make another trip to install it. We were able to get the system up, but in a rippled mode.

Coincidently we had a similar problem in PA but were able to repair the router and firewall. We did have to replace some switches and a lot of cable. Our ISP reconfigured our system and changed our upload speed from 2MB to the standard 756KB speed. You can guess what this did to the response from our websites.

Meanwhile Deb lost her health insurance due to Obamacare. She was able to get a replacement policy through her workplace but it is only valid in the local area. Due to Obamacare restrictions she was not allowed to get any other insurance, so when she quits work she will be without health insurance.

Other than that we are doing fine.



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