Phones and Watches

My problem with phones — became apparent about a month after discharge. The hospitalization and preceding sickness scared my mother and sister significantly. So I committed to check in regularly… by video or phone.

At one point we were having bandwidth issues during a video call, so I turned my video off. The conversation abruptly ended to be replaced by several repeated “Are you still there?”. I turned video back on, and continued my (choppy) description of my week.

There were hints prior to this interaction of an issue: for example when my mother would miss things I said when I was looking away from the screen, or when I would try to ‘check-in’ while in a voice-only meeting from my car and they would ignore my comments. But these were sporadic enough to be explicable other ways (like simply me not speaking loudly enough). The video-toggle interaction was a blatant confirmation that audio-alone would no longer work for me.

From that confirmation point onward, I stopped carrying a phone (even a smart phone) so I would avoid being in a voice-only situation or seem like I was ignoring calls from important people. Instead, I ignored calls from everybody, but made up for it by ‘just appearing’ as soon as possible. This behavior also improved my social interactions: I was always intensely focused on the current situation and had no phone (or watch) to distract me.

I had a special monitor on my wrist — to support my liver disease cover. Wearing a body-state monitor and alarm after discharge is very common among Amasa patients. The monitor uses multiple LEDs and photodiodes (light sensors) to look at your blood flowing underneath it. These diodes can see your blood oxygen and your pulse by lighting variations. Given my blood barely moves except when in dialysis, an off-the-shelf monitor would not give ‘good’ numbers. But V5 provided a special one for cover. It is more like a screen saver in that it just generates results based on an algorithm based on an inputted ‘healthiness’ level. Reminds me of ‘Flying Toasters’, except for a lessfun pulse graph. Still definitely interesting to watch: I even sent screen shots to my family. None of which were real.