SteveStreeting.com

For 18 months I’ve been told by a succession of doctors and physios that I didn’t have anything structurally wrong with my spine and that my bouts of back pain were simply ’standard non-specific back pain’ – ie muscle problems that I should just take NSAIDs for and exercise more. I’d been a bit skeptical because the problems were occasionally quite extreme and seemed to be always centred on one particular location (the joint just at the bottom of my ribcage), but after getting many opinions and one set of x-rays I went along with it.

Things have been quite good recently, up to mid-February when I had a bit of a relapse for a few weeks after doing a little too much. I raised it with my doctor again, explained that I’d been doing all the exercise and going to the gym as recommended, and yet it still flared up at what I considered to be fairly minor provocation. He scheduled me in for another set of x-rays which I expected to not come back with anything conclusive since the last set didn’t (and you can’t get into the MRI scan here unless you go through this step again first, allegedly). They took more pictures this time but I didn’t expect much given all the opinions so far.

Imagine my surprise therefore that when I got the results today, they actually had a concrete explanation for me. Apparently in my lower thoracic (ie exactly where I’d been pointing all these months) I have some disc degeneration and calcification going on, which is what is causing the stiffness and pain. This is something that happens with age anyway, but given my relative(!) youth (36) they thought it looked like it might be a result of either a trauma such as a sports injury – I can’t think of anything – or sometimes they see it in people who were child gymnasts – again not something I can attest to! Basically, something has happened to make my spine degenerate in that area faster than it should have done for my age. Too many hours spent stressed out at a desk may have been a contributing factor in that, although he thought it would have to be a lot of hours and probably combined with other factors.

So anyway, the ‘good’ news is that I actually have a reason now, an explanation for why I’m so susceptible to strains and stress on my back these days. In a way it’s nice to have something to point at. The bad news is that this isn’t fixable, it can merely be managed via careful exercise and lifestyle changes – many of which I’ve made already but I probably need to go even further. The prognosis is that I should be able to live pain-free so long as I manage it carefully over the long term to stop it degenerating further.

Following this analysis, I’ve been prompted to make a decision which I’ve been reluctantly considering for a while anyway – I’m retiring as OGRE Project Lead. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed my 10 years leading OGRE from unknown personal project to where we are today, but leading an open source project requires an enormous amount of dedication, passion, and above all an awful lot of time spent at a keyboard, most often in addition to a ‘regular job’ with which to pay the bills, and I feel I just can’t give that to the level that’s required any more. It will be with no small amount of sadness that I finally take off the leader’s hat – which by now is quite battered and worn in.

I still intend to be around and involved in the project – I’ll be contributing some code, giving advice when it’s wanted, and overseeing the establishment of an OGRE Foundation to handle the donations and funding side, but the days of me living and breathing OGRE, vetting every change, and being the person with whom the buck stops when there’s a bug, will be over. I’ll basically be contributing what and when I can, but shrugging off the responsibility and expectation that is inevitably associated with being the lead developer.

We have a great team and community around OGRE and I’m sure the project will be fine with me taking a more back-seat role – time for younger and less physically challenged developers to step into the limelight

So, I’ve been a little quieter than usual since the new year, and that’s because I’ve been in  a rather reflective mood as I plan out how I’m going to spend my time in 2010. That’s right – planning! Talk about the final frontier

Basically, as you may have gleaned from my previous post, I’ve been looking to make some significant changes to the way I do things in 2010. I spent 2009 reeling from a back injury and trying to figure out how to deal with that given that I’m self-employed (ie I don’t get paid when I’m not working, regardless of the reason), and a leader of an open source project (with the inherent time requirements that comes with). This meant working out on the fly how to stay afloat financially, and still keeping my own interests and open-source plates spinning, without slipping back into the ‘permanent voluntary crunch mode’ style which triggered my back problems. I can’t stress enough how difficult that transition has been for me – it’s not like anyone was forcing me to work/live that way, I did it because I wanted to, but then it suddenly had to stop. When you invest so much of your time and perceived identity in something, backing away from it is very, very hard.

Of course the economic climate wasn’t great either, meaning I spent a lot of time jumping around between many small projects, leading to more overhead dealing with admin & business relations. I ended up just going almost month-to-month on-demand, not  planning very much and just being grateful to be able to work a decent amount at all – which given how unwell I was at the start of the year was definitely something to be glad about. But, now I’m back on my feet and pretty confident of my future health again (within reason – I’m not going to be bungee jumping any time soon!), I’m ready to start being more pro-active again and to map out some plans.

One thing is for sure, there’s no going back to how I used to do things. My days of saying ‘yes’ to almost everything and being at the keyboard until past midnight most days, and most of the weekend, are gone forever. I don’t regret doing it, despite the pain it ended up causing me, because OGRE wouldn’t be here otherwise and I learned a vast amount and had a ton of fun – but I’ll leave that to the under-35s in future; have fun guys From now on, I’m being ruthless and somewhat selfish about what I work on, and concentrating on things that maximise my personal love-growth-cash triangle. It means I’m passing on a lot more projects, and concentrating far more on things that are strategically significant to me, rather than anyone else.

I’m still planning to lead OGRE, so long as the community is happy for me to do so, but by necessity I’m stepping back a bit to let other people take more responsibility where they want to, and to refocus my time on mentoring and advisory roles rather than trying to be everywhere at once. We have some great people in the team and in the wider community, and I hope our MIT license will foster even more in future. Both I and the community have gotten used to perceiving me as the ‘go to guy’ in the first instance, with responsibility for pretty much everything, but in practice for some time now it’s been very much a team & community effort, just one that I happen to lead (and financially support where needed). In fact one of the things I’m quite proud of is the way so many others have picked up on the way I do things, and taken things forward themselves in a way that I wholly approve of. That’s open source in action, and I’m glad to be part of it, even if I can no longer have my fingers in absolutely every pie with an OGRE symbol on it

Here’s to 2010 anyway. It’s going to be different, but change is good.

The last 12 months have been a big adjustment for me. Just over a year ago, I almost lived at the keyboard of my PC – work, hobbies (mostly Ogre & general coding, but some PC gaming too). It was not unusual for me to spend 12 hours in a day sitting in front of a computer, coding away. I had a bit of RSI (addressed with low-profile keyboards and less mouse use), and some back pain on occasion, but I carried on because I loved what I did, and with always a huge list of things to do (and that I wanted to do!) I felt productive and content. I was the can-do guy. I felt I could take on anything if I wanted to, just by concentrating enough and putting the hours in. That enthusiasm and ability to focus was a blessing, and a curse.

It all came to a crashing end in one week in October 2008, when I spent several nights in a row not being able to sleep because of acute backache, pacing around the house at 4am in a lot of pain, culminating in not being able to get out of bed one morning, and being carried off in an ambulance pumped full of morphine. I hadn’t properly addressed several years of grumbling back problems in favour of getting on with what I loved doing to the exclusion of most other things, and eventually there was a breaking point. I’ve spent the last 12 months recovering from that sudden cliff-dive, and I can truly say it was a life-changing event; not at the level some people have to deal with of course, but still it’s one of those events that, in hindsight, everything can  be described in terms of “before” or “after”.

I’ve scaled back my PC time extensively. I try to work smarter to compensate for it; that means more ruthless prioritisation of things that I want to do, and being far more hard-headed about getting sucked into other people’s priorities (and not putting up with as much bullsh*t as I used to). I think I try to juggle less balls now, and am less worried about letting the occasional one drop. Before, I would have worked my ass off to try to handle all incoming projects and keep all the balls in the air, now, my ‘What’s the worst that could happen’ metric has been completely reset and I’m far more likely to walk away from projects if they’re more hassle than they’re worth, or if I feel my time is being wasted. It also means that with Ogre I appreciate my community even more than before, and am more willing to delegate than I used to be. I don’t feel under the same pressure (which was largely self-inflicted) to be everywhere at once and spearheading everything myself; I’m happier to let others take the lead on many aspects and offer advice instead, on design, API structure and so on. I suspect that I’m probably developing into a better leader for that experience, learning how to loosen my grip a little and do more guiding instead; and I’m really lucky that our team and community seem to grow stronger every year.

I’ve also completely changed my exercise regime, which is to say I have one now I hit the gym a couple of times a week and have a daily routine of home exercises (about an hour a day) which keep me flexible and compensate for the time I do spend at the PC, which is now mostly just office hours and maybe a few extra hours at the weekend and the odd evening. I spend a few hours a week gaming, play my guitar(s), read and socialise.

Strangely, I actually think my back problems have done me good overall, although I can only look at it with that perspective now that I have the situation largely under control. I think my previous level of intense focus, while very productive and hugely satisfying, and ultimately responsible for lots of great things like my career and Ogre, was very unhealthy. It’s hard to step away from when you’re on a roll, but having been forced to do so, I feel much better for it – less stressed, more centered generally. There’s more to life than work, than computers, and yes, even than open source That’s not to say you can’t do those things, I certainly intend to continue to do so, but balance is so important, and yet so easy to lose track of. Society these days is hugely pressurised – you have to compete hard for everything, to earn money, to be more successful, to do things better than the other guy, and so on. Many of us just push ourselves as a matter of course, because we have high or maybe even unrealistic expectations for ourselves, or maybe just out of habit, and we end up sacrificing too much on the altar of progress – for some it’s marriages or relationships, for some it’s moral integrity, for some (including me) it’s health. Sometimes getting sideswiped by events and being shoved off that perpetual better-faster-stronger-harder treadmill can be a good thing long-term, because you get to stop concentrating on just keeping up for a while and take stock of what’s important. I’m certainly going to try to keep that in mind from now on.

I’ve watched with some entertainment the latest round of scraps across the pond about health care, which has now turned into a Brit-bashing exercise. Apparantly the NHS is ‘Orwellian’ and ‘Evil’ (allegedly that particular accusation was from the eminent scholar and international expert Sarah Palin) according to the American right-wing – which, when perceived from this side of the Atlantic constitutes most of the political spectrum compared to what is considered centrist here – all of which is news to most people in Britain, barring the usual suspects on the fringes of the Conservative party that their own leader would like to disown, but who always turn up on American TV because no-one listens to them over here.

I live in a Crown Dependency which unfortunately doesn’t benefit from the NHS, and frankly I’d love to have it over here, instead of paid-for primary care and state-run specialist care as we have (I’ve spent an awful lot of money on physios and doctors over the years). My parents moved back to the mainland a few years back and have had nothing but positive experiences with the NHS since; when we were visiting, my Mum was taken ill late at night and an NHS doctor was on the scene at her home within 45 minutes, all for no charge – something you would pay through the nose for here. It’s not perfect, but frankly IMO anyone who considers it optimal to have profit interests involved in the process of saving lives is either smoking something, or has a vested interest.

But, regardless of your point of view, it’s the blatant lies which are most amusing. My favourite is this quote from the editorial in Investor’s Business Daily, a national American financial newspaper:

“People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn’t have a chance in the UK, where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless,”

For goodness sakes, who writes this nonsense? Prof. Hawking has lived in the UK all his life, and has hit back himself at this article explaining that he’s around today precisely because of the NHS, not despite it. Clearly facts are irrelevant when it comes to reinforcing your personal point of view. They’ve tried to take it back, but it just makes them look a little more stupid, especially casually tossing the word ‘Colony’ in there to somehow bolster the emotive side of the argument (taking speech tips from Mugabe now? not smart). Stephen Hawking was ‘a bad example’? In other words, they’re just making it up.

I’ve had some kind of flu for the last couple of days -  I don’t know if it’s regular flu or swine flu, but what I do know is that it’s been pretty weak and at no point has going to the doctor remotely entered my mind (although, I’m the kind of person who has to feel really sick for a number of days before considering going to the doctor, unlike some people who seem to go whenever they have a sniffle). I’ve had all the normal symptoms – fever, persistent headache, dizzyness, nausea, sore throat etc – but they’ve all been fairly mild; unpleasant but no big deal really. I’ve been working throughout, just taking paracetamol, and apart from feeling a bit crap for a few days and having to have a couple of early nights because I’ve been extra tired, it’s been pretty much business as usual, just a little annoying. I’m already feeling better, if not 100% yet – in all I’d rate it at about 1/5 of the potency of the last bout of winter flu I had, or less.

Lots of people seem to be panicking about swine flu though, which is somewhat puzzling to me – the media probably has a lot to answer for. Ever since the 2009 pandemic began, the media has been scaremongering about swine flu, concentrating on individual but really very rare cases of complications, and to my mind generally blowing the whole thing out of all proportion. Sure, it’s a pandemic – but that just means lots of people get it. So far except for a tiny number of cases people just seem to get over it – ok there’s a minority of bad cases, but those happen every year in seasonal flu too (even among the young & healthy, they just don’t get reported because it’s normal and statistically miniscule).

I can understand the concern from people who have underlying medical conditions; the sorts of people who would normally need to have the seasonal flu vaccine. But everyone else just needs to calm down. The hysteria going around at the moment seems rather irrational, and very much fueled by the media concentrating on headline-grabbing minority cases rather than the general picture. It’s almost as if the media wants it to be as serious as the Spanish Flu, because that’s better news than the reality.

Current estimates are that, of those people that get swine flu badly enough to seek medical assistance (and presumably that’s genuinely need to seek it, rather than wasting the GP’s time because they panic), approximately 0.5% of those people (1 in 200) may die from it – and note that that excludes the vast majority who will just breeze through it like a regular virus. That’s pretty much the same as seasonal flu. It seems the vast, vast majority of people will just get regular flu symptoms, feel a bit lousy for a few days, and recover. Based on current reports, most people’s symptoms will be milder than seasonal flu anyway.

I don’t know – maybe it will get worse, but it seems like people are doing more damage to themselves with all this panic than the actual virus is doing.

Good news for coffee lovers such as myself – caffeine seems to prevent and reverse Alzheimer’s.

The doses in the research were fairly high though – 500mg per day, or about 5 cups of coffee (the US standard for espresso is 64mg caffeine per fluid ounce, which equals 96mg per shot). I might have got through that in a day at one stage, but I’m not chain-chugging Red Bull and coffee like I used to a few years ago. I do tend to double-shot my home-made espresso so I’d need to drink 2-3 a day to keep up with the mice in the test – not too bad, but still more than I usually have these days (I go for quality over quantity).

Of course, they don’t say how much the mice started twitching, how many heart palpitations they had, and how they coped with the inevitable post-caffeine crashes. But overall, I think everyone would take those ahead of a degenerative mental condition. Here’s hoping this research continues to go well.

I’ve been pretty busy lately, so there hasn’t been much time for blogging – I’ve tagged a few subjects for future expansion in my drafts, being very much a reentrant blogger, but so far meat has only been added very sporadically to those particular bones. By the time I get around to filling in the detail, the subject matter will no doubt be considered ’stale’, but maybe my particular brand of commentary might lend a modicum of life to them anyway.

I’ve deliberately avoided talking about my back for a while, for multiple reasons; firstly, that I suspect it gets a little dull to read, and secondly it seems that whenever I talk about it on this blog, it seems to get worse the day or two following. I’m not a superstitious man by any means, but it’s really quite uncanny; of course, it’s probably just because when it’s feeling better, I’m more likely to overdo something & injure it again.

So, with he appropriate caveats about what might happen in he next 2 days, the good news is that ever so slowly, my back is improving. After several months of following the advice of my physio to concentrate on stretching out and lengthening the muscles and tendons in my mid-upper back, to stop them clamping up and locking my back in enormously painful ways, I’m definitely seeing positive results. I now do about 1.5 hours of exercise and stretching per day, and go to the gym twice a week on top of that for something a little more strenuous. It still hurts moderately every morning and most evenings, and occasionally I get a more serious bout which requires me to take painkillers (usually the day after doing something unwise, or being too immobile such as when travelling for long periods), but overall, I can see positive results. Each month I seem to be a little bit better than the last – it’s not a fast process, but at least it is a process.

As you can imagine, it still plays havok with my daily routine, and I’m almost constantly frustrated at the amount of stuff I can get done these days. Years of sitting at the PC until 2am if that was ‘necessary’ led to a certain baseline expectation of how much I could do in a day. Now, I’m mostly a regular daytime beast, with a few extra hours at the weekend and the occasional evening here and there, so it’s quite different. But, I’m adjusting to it, such as learning to say ‘No’ to work offers that don’t feature highly on my personal priority list (which basically means that stuff that enhances Ogre gets top priority, things that use Ogre next, everything else brings up the rear, if at all), and time-boxing what I do in the community / forums – now, if I can’t do it in the time I have, it probably doesn’t get done (by me anyway), rather than the old situation of me just spending as much time as it took. I don’t like having to pass on work, or get slightly out of touch with some aspects of the community, but on balance it’s an acceptable sacrifice given the alternatives, no matter how guilty I might feel about it sometimes.

So, if I don’t talk about my back much anymore, it’s because it’s just on a very slow but seemingly steady road to recovery, which as you can tell, doesn’t make for very interesting blog posts It doesn’t mean I’m ‘better’ yet, and I’ve accepted that I’ll never be able to return to my old ‘all night coding marathon’ days, (revel in those while you can guys, but definitely think about giving them up before your back ends up like mine did) – but it’s probably time to stop talking about it now. My thanks to all those who sent their good wishes, and helped me out over this rather testing time.

Laptops are great, of course, whether you’re travelling or just enjoying the flexibility of having a PC wherever you want in the house at any one time, instead of closeted in a fixed location. But if there’s one dimension in which they suck (barring upgradability – but then modern laptops are pretty nippy these days), it’s ergonomics. Laptops are excluded from the design standards that regular PCs have to adhere to, simply because it’s hard for them to comply within the form factor we expect.

I’m a little sensitive to ergonomics, having had bouts of RSI over the years, and of course my back problems.  However, I still love my laptops – particularly since right now the only Mac I have is a laptop, so that’s where all my testing for OS X has to happen. The reason I’m raising this today is that, despite having limited my laptop time in recent months because of my back, I decided it was feeling good enough in recent weeks to try to finish the OS X support for CMake this weekend. It took quite a lot of time over 2 days to get everything sorted out, but I did manage it, and was pretty happy about it. My back though – not so much; today it’s more painful than it’s been in a while.

The trouble is that I can either use the laptop on the dining room table, which places the keyboard and screen at about chest height – which strains my mid-back because I have to sit up pretty straight to use it (ie exactly what my physio says I shouldn’t do), or, I can use it at my stand-up desk or on my lap, which then hurts my upper back because you have to hunch your neck over quite far instead. For me, mid-to-upper back strain is the main problem, not lower back as is more common (trust me to be different), so this is straining the exact area I don’t want to.

Of course the usual way to resolve it is to use a laptop stand and connect a separate keyboard and mouse, but that pretty much defeats the object of having a laptop in the first place if you have to cart those things around & have cables trailing about. There are other more modest stands just for the laptop itself but I’m not entirely convinced about their effectiveness given how little they can change the configuration (if you’ve used one, please shout )

It would be nice if laptops could start trying to address this. Maybe incorporating some kind of telescopic housing for the LCD, so you can put the keyboard and screen at the right height simultaneously. The main challenges with that are strength, space requirements and the centre of gravity I guess, but it would be nice. Or, maybe a simpler approach of just a detachable screen with fold-out legs or something. Am I nuts?

Since I keep getting asked this question by friends, existing business partners and prospects, I figured I’d just confirm it here – I won’t be attending GDC this year. It’s a shame, because I’d love to meet up with all the people I know who are going, but the primary reason is the 5,000 miles between here and there. Given the issues I’ve had with my back over the last few months (the worst episode of which emerged just after I made it back from California last time), I decided to have a break from long-haul travel to allow it time to recover. It would be different if I could afford to travel anything other than economy class, where I have to spend 10 hours wedged in a space PETA would find objectionable, but that’s not really an option. So for the moment, I’m limiting myself to 2 hours flights or less, which lets me get to most places in Europe (in May I’ll be at FMX in Stuttgart doing a talk), but rules out the US of A except in the unlikely event that Concorde makes a return and is curiously both faster and cheaper.

On the back issue, I can tentatively report that things are improving. It’s slow, but the number of ‘incidents’ where I do something that takes me out for a few days with major pain are decreasing; it’s been a couple of weeks now since the last one (touch wood), and before that I had a fairly good couple of weeks. It’s still sore a lot of the time, but sore is a big improvement Having been back to the doctor & physio again, they both appear to be convinced now that my spine is ok structurally (which is very good news), the problem is in the soft tissues – specifically that the muscles in my mid-back have become way too dominant, caused by years of spending too much time sitting relatively motionless and a bit too upright (aka my usual typing position). The result is that the multitude of muscles and ligaments down my mid-back are a bit too short, a bit too tense all the time, and poorly balanced by all the other muscles that would have been doing more if I wasn’t sitting at the desk so much. That means that they have a tendency to over-tense and jam the ‘fins’ at the back of my  spine in awkward ways, which means inflammation and aggravation on the clusters of nerves running between them.

The symptoms I’ve had can be caused by much more serious problems, but the fact that mine recovers in between the ‘incidents’, and doesn’t seem to react to prodding once the inflammation has gone down, means that it’s not serious, apparently. I have to say, it’s easily the most painful and prolonged non-serious condition I’ve had in my 35 years!

This week I’m adding the gym to my schedule of activities, for the first time in a lot of years. I’ve got a list from the physio of the things I should and shouldn’t do, but it’s time to take my recovery to the next stage (that is, Stage 1-2: Moderate Discomfort Overworld), and to redevelop the bits of me not related to adopting the keyboard position. Here goes…

I’ve had the HAG Capisco for a little over two weeks now, which is not really long enough to give a definitive verdict, but it is just about long enough to give some initial impressions of it.

Let’s get something out of the way right off the bat – this is not an instantly comfortable chair. It’s most definitely not the kind of chair you can buy, plonk yourself into and be immediately at ease – far from it. It might seem crazy to spend this amount of money on a chair that initially makes you rather saddle-sore, but if you’ve ever had recurring back problems, you’ll know that the word ‘comfort’ is relatively alien to you anyway, and having sore thighs for a while really isn’t a big deal in comparison to something sawing away at your spinal column day-in day-out.

The saddle seat means your weight distribution is very different to a normal chair, shifted from the back of your pelvis (which can remove the healthy ‘S’ shape of your spine and put you off your centre of gravity when you use a desk, despite lumbar supports and other ergonomics) to the  middle of your pelvis instead, largely mimicking the way weight is carried when you’re standing up but mostly taking your legs out of the equation. It takes a while to get used to that. I still can’t sit on it for long periods of time (maybe an hour) before I need to switch to standing up for a while, but that’s actually a good thing, since variety and movement is precisely what my back needs. Going back and forth means that I can do almost a regular day at the desk again, so long as I keep moving and stick to my exercise regimen.

I also like the way you can spin the chair around and use it backwards (the back is designed so you can lean against it, and put  your elbows on the arm rests which work both ways). I don’t use it like this myself, but I can see some people might like it. Lastly, the fact that the gas lift goes way high and is still super-stable is ideal for me with my stand-up desk setup.

So, what about results so far? Well, I think it’s helping. My back has been a bit variable this month; starting pretty bad – the ogre3d.org hack probably had a lot to do with this, since I was stressed out and putting loads of hours in- but improving a lot in the last 2 weeks. I’m not sure if this improvement is just down to the chair, since I made some other changes too. After the problems I had after recovering the OGRE server, I changed my routine so that it’s much more strictly focussed on health rather than work again, because that really is more important. I go for a brisk walk of a couple of miles every morning without fail (previously I’d leave it until a variable time later in the day which didn’t work very well), followed by 30-45 minutes of careful stretching and strengthening exercises.  I use the stand-up desk and chair all day, and switch between postures at least once an hour and generally try to keep active. In the evenings, I have to make sure I switch things up a lot. No sitting / standing at the PC/laptop all evening like I used to, or indeed doing any one thing for long periods – sorry to those wanting more work on OGRE, but I have to be realistic. I might catch up for an hour standing at the PC, do some guitar practice, play on the 360 a little bit (Rock Band is interesting because it’s active enough to actually help rather than hinder like most other things).  Basically, I’m forced into being a delittante in just about everything these days! I seem to have to avoid using the laptop very much, because sitting at the dining table for a long time really sucks the next day.

Still, awkward regime or no I’ve definitely noticed my back getting stronger overall. It is still susceptible to occasional upsets – I had one this week for example when I either lifted something I shouldn’t have, or spent too much time using the laptop one evening, and I’ve really paid for it these last 2 days. Not as badly as I once might have done – it doesn’t hurt most of the time, but exercising it (like I have to for the longer term!) or moving in certain ways can set off a pretty nasty bout of pain if I’m not careful.

Blips aside, I do think I’m on an overall upward trajectory, and I think the Capisco is one positive facet in that process. I’ve lost a stone in weight since mid last year and in these last 2 weeks, for the first time in around 4 months I’ve been able to get up in the morning without a good chance it’ll feel like I have a rusty, barbed chain running down my back. The trick is to maintain that improvement without accidentally overdoing it, which is a lot harder than it sounds and I don’t always get the balance quite right. Still, there are definitely positive signs here that I’m trying very much to remember whenever one of the ‘blips’ occurs. As my wife keeps reminding me, I’m light-years away from the situation 4 months ago which included being in hospital jacked up on morphine, hobbling around the house at 4am trying not to scream too loud, and laying in a crumpled heap on the floor wondering how I was ever going to get up, none of which I’ve done for ages. So, big improvements since then, and improvements even compared to a month ago. It’s hard when you’re as impatient as I am, but staying the course for the long term is clearly the way to go.

My primary goal for 2009 is to recover enough to take a holiday back to Canada this year, which is about both being able to tolerate a 10 hour flight in economy class again, and be fit enough to get around and have fun when we get there. You certainly won’t see me horse riding or white-water rafting any time soon though