More than you really wanted to know…

So Tuesday I met with the nurse, then Thursday I met with a psychologist. Psychiatrist? I don’t know what the difference is. But basically insurance requires a psychological evaluation to make sure I’m mentally stable or whatever… that I can emotionally handle the whole weight loss thing.

Can I? who knows. But I guess I’ll find out.

I didn’t realize it was multiple visits for this thing. Three minimum, plus a visit to do a 500-some question True/False evaluation. The doctor is a personable enough guy. Don’t think he’s much older than I am if at all, and it was a pretty casual chat. We talked a bit about the surgery stuff, what I knew… did I have questions, a bit about how they’ve come to realize that the mental health aspects are very important, etc.

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Had my meeting with the WLS (weight loss surgery for those jumping in to the middle of this conversation) nurse last Tuesday. They took my official starting weight, measurements, etc and a picture. 369.5#, 5′11″ tall, 18″ around mid arm, 59″ wait, 56″ hips.

wow.

So here’s the pic they took of me. Shoulda done a profile too. Maybe I’ll do one of those on my own. My insurance requires six months of medically supervised weight loss. Been working with my doctor, but I was only going in about every three months when I needed blood pressure checks for my meds. The nurse doesn’t think the insurance company will take what’s there right now, thinks I should give it about three more months. With the various stuff I have going on now, by end of January or start February I should hit that six months, so I guess I won’t be scheduled for surgery for about 4 months.

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One of the fun memories I have as a kid is the family gatherings at my grandma and grandpa’s house… and every summer grandpa would get out the hand-cranked, wooden bucket, ice-cream maker.

Well, recently I was going through grandma’s recipe box, and I found this… “John’s Ice Cream”, grandpa’s recipe for that great ice cream he would make for us.

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Tonight was my first meeting in awhile regarding the WLS. It was a group intro session… they had a staff person from Unity talk… and she is 7 years post-op herself. BTW, I realize these posts are getting long and maybe boring… but what do you want me to do? I’ll try to start finding some sort of inspirational or maybe at least humorous images to go along with these posts in the future.

I got there just in time for the meeting. I don’t think all the people there were possible patients… folks are encouraged to bring a support person with them. There were maybe 9-10 guys out of the over 50 there… including myself. The presenter mentioned knowing what it was like to be “here”, to be sitting in this room, all nervous. I’m not though.

I think I’ve learned a lot about this whole deal, but I started getting more details I haven’t found elsewhere… gonna run through them here… now, if you are reading this cause you are looking in to this, one thing I should mention that I discovered tonight - different hospitals will do things slightly different. What I list here may not be how the hospital you check out does certain things.

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I mostly write what I post here, but every once in a great while I find something that I want to share… given today is election day, and everyone has been waaaaaay too serious the last few weeks/months, I felt I would lighten things up a bit. Well, least some will see the humor here.

History 101: Conservatives & Liberals

A Simplified, Example-Based Account

For those that don’t know about history … Here is a condensed version:

Humans originally existed as members of small bands of nomadic hunters/gatherers. They lived on deer in the mountains during the summer and would go to the coast and live on fish and lobster in the winter.

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As I continue to re-build my system after a fresh install of Ubinutu 8.10 yesterday, I’ll also continue to document it here. I don’t plan on doing this again in six months, but least I have a record to help myself out (or others) if I do… and will also help in setting up other machines I’m working on I suppose.

The next couple programs I added all can be pulled from the Add/Remove Applications set up. Just click Applications, then click Add/Remove… I changed the Show option to All Open Source applications right off the bat.

First up, FileZilla. Hands down the best all around FTP Client for the money. If you don’t believe me, it was picked at the High Five Winner by Lifehacker readers. It’s multi-flavored as well, and also has a portable version which, like KeePass, I keep in a Dropbox folder so I don’t have to install it on both my laptop and work computers. I just need to find a way for my desktop here to read the same file that keeps track of my server list. For now, I just manually copy the data file once in awhile so I have the same list no mater what computer I’m on.

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