My surgery (second try!) was over a week ago - July 18th - so I'd better start recording things if I want a record for posterity! I'm planning on moving this blog elsewhere, but that won't be for a while.

I got a few more details from the anesthesiologist on the morning of the surgery than I'd gotten before. Apparently, the trouble is not so much the shape of my airway - that's a pain to deal with, but it's doable - as it is the way I respond to drugs. Normally, they do what's called "rapid sequence induction", where they shoot some drugs up your IV, and you are completely under in 30-40 seconds. In me, because my head is proportionately larger than the rest of my body, they have to deliver the drugs more slowly to avoid hitting a toxic level. So although I stop breathing on my own fairly quickly, I don't relax enough to be intubated for about 4-5 minutes after they start the IV. That's too long to go without oxygen (I believe - it might be that it's not too long, but doesn't leave any buffer for delay or screwup). So instead, they had me breath pure oxygen for about 10 minutes before starting the drugs, saturating my blood and filling my lungs. They also kept an ENT standing next to me with an emergency trach kit just in case ... but fortunately, that wasn't necessary.

The surgery took 6 hours, which is quite a bit longer than the average of 2-3 hours. I attribute this to several things: difficulty with intubation (that process goes for some time beyond the induction sequence), the added care needed to protect my spine during the surgery, and the time taken to patch the hole in my ear drum (goodbye, old friend ... you won't be missed, except perhaps when flying).

I went home the next day. The recovery has been surprisingly easy - I was off pain meds (if you call Tylenol with codeine a "pain med") 2-3 days after surgery. Since them, I've had vertigo to varying degrees. It's mostly gone now, although I wondered at one point if I was learning what it would be like to be in space. The only symptoms I have left are major tinnitus (which should mostly go away in a few weeks) and deadened taste on the right side of my tongue (which usually self-corrects a few months after the surgery). I have the option of getting a second (left side) implant in a year or two; the surgery was easy enough that I'm definitely not ruling that out. Ah, yes, and a little sore spot at the top of my incision where I was stupid enough to itch the stitches.

So, in the end, I have an Advanced Bionics HiRes 90K Implant in my right ear (image courtesy of Advanced Bionics), which will interface with a Harmony processor starting August 8th when this whole shebang gets turned on. Wahoo!

My tax dollars go to set up government agencies as Microsoft-only shops. Concerns about the vulnerability and lack of flexibility of a monoculture aside, it leads to situations like this one:

Employer: We're hiring you because you have a lot of Linux experience, and we'd like to get some diverse ideas in the group for this project.

Employee: Cool. I can do that. Can I work from home?

Employer: Sure.

Employee: Uh, my password isn't working. Can you reset it again?

Employer: Ooh, right. Our extranet is IE-only. But that's okay, you have a Windows computer around somewhere, right? Everyone else does!

Employee: That's because you bought them those computers.

Can you see where this is headed? Grr. So much for standards and openness. Glasnost and perestroika.

Coming home for the summer, I wasn't sure if I'd be able to find an ASL class; when I did find a place to take classes, I was worried it'd be a beginner's class, and not all that useful. The class I started on Tuesday, however, is excellent. It looks like most of the class will be freeform conversation, which is perfect, and we'll be starting to work on interpreting skills - voicing for each other, and so on. In the 11 person class, we have 4-5 professional interpreters, so things are moving pretty quickly! Should be a blast. Even better, there's a beginner's class in the same building at the same time - Dad's taking that as a review, so I have a driving buddy. This is definitely the sort of class that could be repeated in the future, although I don't know how many more summers I'll be coming back to live with the 'rents anyway.

I recently re-read the BMEzine article about magnetic implants. Obviously a very different beast than the cochlear implant I'm - getting installed? hmm - next week, but I think there's some interesting parallels. Body enhancement, a delay between installation and utility ("For the first month I thought this was a failure; my main goal was to be able to sense things and I hadn't sensed anything so far."), 'cochlear moments' versus 'magnetic moments' (" Todays event was rather significant, it was not planned, nor was it forseen.") - yeah, yeah, laugh at the bad pun there. Quinn Norton, in particular, wrote some interesting stuff about human augmentation in general, though I seem to have lost said link.

There's even a bit of a reverse parallel - I'm toying with the idea of 'alternate uses' for my hardware. Will the CI magnet work to open my car door (which has a magnetic sensor)? Can I, uh, "hang stuff" from the magnet in my head? Nothing heavy, but more decorative-ish. I guess I'll get to find out soon!