Electronics

I just have to catch them mid-stride. Maybe five feet would be close enough, so I continue to ‘recline’ into my shrubbery. I need a nap

A hint of red — turns the corner onto Bryant by the bridge. Part of the difficulty around the task is that this path is for bikes only, so you can ’t just cruise back and forth in a car. In a car you have to skirt around the poles (bastions) by shifting a couple blocks and then coming back. But in that time, the target could have wandered away. And being actively on-foot is likely to scare the quarry as well. So I just sit and watch as the faint red gets closer and closer.

Three hours later — I drop Sirius Black (a cat… but pitch black, so they at least got one thing right) at the front door of the Waverly house. Sirius spent the night with me in a cage in ‘El Toro’ (my car, which snorts like a bull when you turn it off) given I thought it a bit rude to ring the doorbell at 3 a.m.. Rose greets Sirius with open arms, gives me a kiss on the cheek, and I head off to my morning coffee routine.

I have done about one lost pet a fortnight since my discharge, always based on postings on Nextdoor that are not resolved within a few days. Most pets are just opportunists taking a little trip into the world, but some get a bit lost and another ‘night prowler’ can relatively easily return them home. The pet return program is both a public service and good practice for other stealth operations.

ELECTRONICS

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.

In spite of all the effort — into the technological wrist monitor hoax… after getting the fistula I couldn’t wear it anymore. If you get a fistula, you can no longer wear any restrictive jewelry on that arm, including rings and watches. It may be that the fistula diverts a redundant blood supply, so if you pinch the remaining one you are effectively suffocating the cells in your hand. This causes minor problems like gangrene.