Dueling Monkeys

Edge and Unspoken

Wed, 11 Jan 2017 22:00:00 +0000

There were a whopping 3 games that came out in 2016 that I worked on. I’ve talked about Ratchet and Clank already, the others are both games that were published by Oculus for their Rift VR headset.

Edge of Nowhere

The first is Edge of Nowhere a horror-ish adventure game inspired by Lofecraft’s Mountains of Madness. It came out last June, not too long after the launch of the Rift itself.

I joined this project about halfway through its development schedule. There were a lot of problems to solve at that time and it was pretty tough to sort out what needed to be done the most. In the end I feel like there are a lot of things we could have done better, but still, we broke a lot of new ground and some parts of it are really cool. Even more than before, my role on this game was focused on managing production; trying to make sure that all of the designers had clear direction, properly scoped and scheduled work, defining the development process, good communication between departments, etc.

I was able to get my hands dirty a little bit. I worked on the design and implementation of the enemy vision visualization and the hero’s observation mode visualization. I wish I had some cool videos or screenshots, but it’s kind of hard to take screenshots of VR stuff and have it make much sense compared to seeing it in-game.

Anyway, if you have a rift, definitely check it out. Also, if you are ever going to play it, don’t watch the spoiler-heavy launch trailer!

The Unspoken

As Edge was wrapping up, I transitioned to another Oculus project; The Unspoken. This accompanied the launch of the Oculus Touch controllers, released on December 6th 2016.

You too can be incinerated by 3 colossal lava cobras and an anthropomorphic crow

Again, I came on about halfway through development. Again, I was mostly a manager and didn’t have time to own specific features. I did make a big push for organizing our telemetry efforts so that we have a much better sense of how people are playing the game and what sorts of issues are common and that effort has really paid off. For a fighting game, I feel like we made a well balanced game for competetive play which isn’t easy!

The Touch controllers are pretty awesome. If you are curious at all, you can set up a demo at select Best Buy locations. The Unspoken is part of the demo (or so I’m told).

Maybe next time I can talk about some new hobby projects :)

New House

Sun, 04 Sep 2016 15:15:00 +0000

Hello folks, some exciting news: we moved! When I bought my first house way back in 2007 I thought I’d stay there for two or three years, sell for a profit, and then move on to the next one. That’s the way it works, right? HA! The housing market crashed, the job market was super-scary, and so of course things did not play out that way. I ended up living there for almost 9 years. It was a great first house and made for an easy-to-maintain bachelor pad, but in those years I gained a wife (complete with cat) and a dog, so long past the point where we exceeded the capacity of living bodies, clothes, furniture, and junk, we decided to say goodbye.

It was a harder goodbye for me than Amanda. I shed some tears while looking out the back porch one last time. Amanda was checking her watch, ready to move on to bigger and better things! That was totally understandable - this was going to be our first home together and there’s only so much that can be done to de-man that house, despite her attempts with welcoming decor and lavender painted bathrooms.

We had looked in Apex, Cary, and even closer to Pittsboro, thinking it was time to leave Raleigh. We looked at a couple dozen houses, missed one or two that would have been great homes (the buyer’s market is tough!), but our patience paid off and we ended up moving not very far from where we used to live, yet somehow much more convenient to places we seem to go to often. I won’t post the address here (feel free to email me if you’d like to update your address book) but we are a little north of Crabtree Valley Mall now. Here’s a picture of the front of the house:

We’ve been here for nearly three months now and we are pretty well settled in. Fortunately there isn’t much to repair/renovate/etc. as a lot of work had been done by the previous owner. A few small things here and there but really just routine house maintenance. I do look forward to working on the landscaping in the back yard in the Spring, but even that is fine as-is. I won’t brag on it anymore before something unexpected pops up!

Aside from the everyday things like work and sleep, the house-hunt process has consumed nearly all of our 2016. We started getting serious about moving in early January, so we got a storage unit to de-clutter and made many trips over the next few months. We also painted our kitchen cabinets white and got new shaker-style doors to freshen them up. I bought a paint sprayer to do this, which worked fine for the doors since I could paint outside, but spraying already installed cabinets inside was a huge mess. It makes for a nice clean coat but it was a lot of work and took weeks. The doors also came unfinished so I painted front and back with 2 coats of primer, 2 coats of paint, and 3 coats of polyurethane, sanding between each coat. I had to carry these doors from the porch to the back of the yard to avoid having paint float all over the house and neighbors. I even wore a path in the yard around the painting station! Having a proper workspace for this kind of work is essential. I’m not sure I’d do it again but the end result was worth it as far as making the house more appealing for buyers.

We also painted pretty much every room in the house, and the bathroom cabinets at our Realtor’s suggestion. I was skeptical at first but black bathroom cabinets were a nice touch. Our carpets were in bad shape so we had those replaced as well. We could have gone on and on with upgrades but this was a good stopping point so we finally got the house on the market and fortunately it sold quickly. Then came all of the paperwork for both selling and buying, and of course the big move. In addition to adjusting to a new place, it’s also been weird to go from working on that stuff every waking moment to… not doing all of that. But we’ve managed and we’re very thankful.

Finally (and completely unrelated), yesterday was Mike’s birthday, so Happy Birthday Mike!

Ratchet and Clank

Tue, 28 Jun 2016 20:42:00 +0000

My first game as lead designer from start to finish has shipped! I’m talking about Ratchet and Clank

Check out this sweet trailer:

A lot of the work I did for this one was keeping the team organized so it’s not too interesting to talk about. We started out with a very tight schedule since there was some uncertainty about when the movie would release. This meant there were a great deal of production problems to solve, not the least of which that this game used an entirely new engine from the previous R&C game. I think getting the game done with so much polish speaks to how well the process worked so I’m really proud of that.

Since discussing production challenges is boring and bulleted lists is much better, here are the things that I had a more direct hand in:

Weapon design and balancing
Weapon upgrade design and balancing
Hero progression design and balancing
Economy design and balancing
Difficulty system design and balancing support

Those are pretty similar to my list of feats on R&C Into the Nexus, not surprisingly. There were 2 lead designers on the project, Joel Goodsell generally oversaw layout and story while I generally oversaw systems. I also got to dabble in shaders and special effects in our new engine, which was super fun.

One of my favorite parts was creating the Econ Tool. This is a C# winforms app that I created to help tune all aspects of the economy. It basically scrapes all of the levels for all sources of potential income and gives you a way to input some tuning values and it outputs final income values for each type of thing you can get income from to ensure that drops are always consistent yet escalate as you get further. It also predicts how much income the player will have at any given point in time and maps this against the available purchases or level up thresholds or whatever; building a colorful graph that you can use to assess whether purchase prices are reasonable. That’s just the currency stuff, it does all sorts of other things like judging weapon power levels (with and without predicted upgrades) over the course of the game, and how well enemy HP is going to stand up to that at various points.

This is what the tool looks like (an early version, at least)

In conclusion, Ratchet and Clank for PS4 turned out awesome. It was a great game to work on too. As it turns out, that isn’t the only game I was a lead designer that’s shipped since my last post, either! However, I’ll save that update for another day.

Lydia Jo Daly

Mon, 21 Dec 2015 20:42:00 +0000

A bunch of cool stuff has happened in the past year but the big one that really eclipses the rest is that Amanda gave birth to a beautiful baby girl: I’m super excited to announce Lydia Jo Daly.

Adorable onesie courtesy of Colin and April - thank you!

Here’s some vital statistics:

Birth date: 4/2/15, 2:41 PM
Weight: 7 pounds 8 ounces
Length: 18.5 inches

Lydia is an awesome baby, we are so lucky! She eats well, sleeps through the night, rarely cries or fusses, she’s very healthy, she’s developing well (she’s crawling now and is great at grasping things).

You may have noticed that the birthday was a few months ago and the picture of that baby is not quite a newborn. The picture is also a few months old; she’s grown even more! Being a dad has not made me any better at updating the webpage, rather it gives me an excuse for not updating as often.

Website Updates - now with more Jekyll!

Sun, 19 Jul 2015 14:26:00 +0000

Our website has gone through a few different layouts over its nearly 13 year lifespan, and now despite having hardly tipped the “visits” column in some time, we’re doing it once again. This time we decided to keep it pretty simple and borrow from the trusted (and perhaps boring) default Bootstrap layout, but of course we have kept our distinguishing blue and gray color scheme. I actually considered lightening up the page a bit and only using the blue sparingly, but Mike quickly pointed out that was no good.

Since the message board rarely got any posts, it’s time to retire that feature. Technically the last post was in October 2014, but that was just me testing when I had to move the site to a new server. The actual last post was almost three years ago and consisted of the text: “awwrrararra”, a tribute by Sam. The last “meaningful” post (sorry Sam) was a year before that; so… you understand why it’s gone.

Also gone is the “Cooking” section. We may actually keep the recipes posted here in some kind of archive section, but like the message board, these haven’t been updated in ages and let’s be honest: this cookbook is mostly filled with ideas from two guys whose fridge was normally filled with beer and expired condiments.

Important sections that are still there: Games and Gallery. I actually do not upload many pictures to the internet these days, but Mike does, and obviously the Games section is where most of the updates happen anymore, so that one is a must. The good thing about these two sections vs. the aforementioned retired sections is that they are fairly static, so there is no need to have a database or even PHP running to serve these pages! For this reason, the site is now generated by Jekyll.

There are some things I like about Jekyll (simple to add news posts and similar to how we were already handling games entries) and some things I do not like as much (the gallery). The things I do not like are mostly related to me not being as experienced with Ruby, so I will take the blame here. In any case, this is still an experiment so hopefully it will be fine, but if Mike hates it, I expect to hear about it (and he should expect me to push back from having to come up with something else ;-)

Alright, well, that’s the news update about the site. I will also give you something that usually comes from Mike: a game! Actually two games, but they are both very simple, classic games you’ve already played. The good news is that you don’t have to install anything to play them, just a web browser that is not Internet Explorer 9 or worse. Sorry, browser coverage was not high on the priority list for these.

I give you: Memory Game and Picture Puzzle.

The games are about as fun as the titles, but a decent way to pass time if you’re waiting at the airport, on your spouse, on the can, etc. I may add these to the games page later but for now, please enjoy the links above.

Thanks for reading! Jody

Render Plan

Wed, 17 Dec 2014 15:44:45 +0000

So in my last update I mentioned that one of the hobby projects I worked on was called Render Plan, and it was a program for testing out data-driven rendering pipeline. I got the urge to try out some new techniques (new to me, at least) so I dusted it off and put some new features in. More specifically, I added some more complicated particle simulation modules, implemented some new compositing full screen shaders, added time controle and the ability to open files, and combined all of those things to make a new effect.

As before, I was underwhelmed by the results. It didn’t end up looking nearly as cool as I had hoped. Oh well, it was still fun to work on and I learned some new stuff. Also, I’m going to do something I neglected to do before and actually post a download link.

Screenshot of the new effect for those who don’t want to hassle with downloading stuff

Also, I don’t think I ever posted a link to the Image Formula hobby project that I also mentioned in my last update. While uploading today’s package, I saw that it was already on the server, so why not? You can download it with this link.

There’s still a ton of stuff that is interesting to work on hobby-wise, though it’s getting harder and harder to find time for it as work is really picking up the pace. Hopefully it won’t be too long before I can post something else new.

Hobby Stuff 2013-2014

Sun, 10 Aug 2014 15:44:45 +0000

I’ve done a few fun hobby projects over the past year.

Board Wars

I tried making a board game inspired by Advance Wars that’s supposed to be like a war game with the complexity of a board game (that’s less complexity, for those of you not familiar with the differences between wargames and board games). I guess we can call this project Board Wars? Anyway, after cutting up and writing out the entire deck of cards, drawing all of the unit icons and cutting them out, and putting together the rest of the game components like the map and guide I decided that I had fun with arts and crafts but I was sick of Board Wars before I even played it. More like BORED Wars, amirite?

Image Formula

On a whim one night, I created a little utility program that lets you enter some C# code in a text box then it would evaluate that code once per pixel to generate an image. It basically works like a poor-man’s pixel shader. The benefit over a pixel shader is that C# is way more powerful since we don’t really care about performance in this case - you can have arbitrary length or complexity with branching and loops. The idea is that if you ever have to create a texture that has mathematical precision (this is often needed for textures that are inputs to shaders), you can generate the texture using the progam easier and more accurately than you would be able to author it in a program like Photoshop (which intentionally hides any math related to it’s operations). The expression you enter just has to assign a value to r, g, b, and a. You can use x and y (and a few other things) as inputs (they’ll be set to appropriate values for each new pixel). There’s an export function that lets you save out a PNG file of specific dimensions.

This is what it looks like; the bottom right panel is a preview of the result

Render Plan

I worked on a data-driven rendering program that let me experiment with some ideas for screen-space FX compositing that I wanted to play with. I got a bunch of infrastructure implemented, but then kind of lost interested when the first few FX I wanted to create didn’t really work out to look as cool as I thought they would. You can specify meshes, particle systems, materials, shader parameters, and rendering steps that include arbitrary offscreen buffers and multiple render targets. Some sort of fuzzy column of chocolate milk smoke or whatever

Pistol Sisters

So it had been a while since I actually worked on a video game for a hobby project. I had an itch, so I made one. It was pretty fun to work on and I think turned out pretty well. I tried something new this time and as a result you can actually play this game directly from this webpage (without needing to download/extract/install anything or installing any redistributables) which is really cool. The drawbacks are that you still need to have a gamepad, your gamepad may not work correctly anyway, performance for this very simple game will still probably be bad, if you are still using a crappy (old) browser it probably won’t work, and the graphics suck. I guess you can’t have everything amiright? Anyway, check out the game’s page: Pistol Sisters for more info or you can just start playing right away by following this link. Let me know if you had fun.

Health, Nexus, and Sunset

Sun, 22 Jun 2014 23:42:19 +0000

Hey folks, here’s what’s been going on in my life for the past few months (categorized for your convenience):

Health

So going into my surgery last year I was told that there was actually a pretty significant chance of post-surgery complications (two likely complications had a 30% chance each) because it was such a major operation. I’m happy to report that I’m feeling great. I seem to have gotten away from the surgery without suffering any major complications. How my body behaves is a little different but talking about how often I get gas is boring so I’ll just leave it as "I’m fine".

Insomniac Games

Did I mention that Ratchet & Clank: Into the Nexus was released? It was. It seems to be well received. I think it turned out great, so pick it up if you have a chance! Here’s some of the things I worked on for this game:

Coding some of the weapons (Warmonger, Nightmare Box, and Winterizer)
Design contributions for weapons and weapon ability upgrades
Coding for the weapons upgrade system
Creation and balance for all weapons’ upgrade grids
Coding for the Arena and some tuning/balance
Difficulty system and difficulty tuning/balance work
Challenge mode implementation and balance
Platinum Tier arena challenges design
Economy system implementation and economy tuning/balance work, including:

** Setting Bolt values for enemies, crates, and weapon prices ** Rubber banding system and thresholds ** Hero XP and HP progression rate ** Enemy attack strength (at each difficulty level) ** Weapon XP and power progression ** Raritanium acquisition rate and upgrade grid sizes ** Telemetry analysis

It was a super fun game to work on. There were a bunch of fun challenges in both programming and design that I’d never had to deal with before. I especially liked working on the weapons, where I got to try a bunch of crazy stuff to see what worked.

I don’t mean to make it sound like I was the only one doing a lot of the design and tuning/balancing mentioned above; a few other people were involved that made a huge contribution. I just wanted to make a list of the stuff I contributed to.

Promotion

After Nexus shipped, we decided to adopt a new team structure which meant introducing team leads. The result of this process, to my surprise, was that I ended up in the role of Design Team Lead. So not just did I have to grapple what it meant to lead a team but also switch departments (I was previously a Gameplay Programmer).

This was pretty intimidating at first because the designers I was leading all had a lot more design experience than I did. However, I’m feeling pretty good about it now. The team is very supportive in areas where I don’t know much and I’ve found that there are some areas of design in which I bring a lot to the table. I think that organizing the team has helped take some pressure off of the directors and has resulted in more attention and thought getting put into decisions and a high and low level. So far I love being in the design department and I like being a team lead. I hesitate to say whether it is better than being a programmer until I’ve shipped a game in this role; you don’t know a game dev job very well until you’ve gone through an end-cycle with it.

Speaking of shipping a game, Sony announced that Insomniac will be bringing Ratchet & Clank to the PS4 next year at their E3 press conference. I’m working on that, so I guess I don’t have to wait long to see what that feels like! Did you know that there is also going to be a Ratchet & Clank movie coming out next year? I think it’s looking pretty good. Check out the E3 trailer.

Although I haven’t worked on Sunset Overdrive, I’m still proud just to be associated with it because it looks like it kicked some serious butt at E3! There’s so much cool stuff about that game, I can’t wait for it to come out later this year.

I’ve done some hobby stuff too, but this is already running kind of long so I’ll touch on that later.

Hospital Time

Wed, 23 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000

So you may know that I’ve had problems dating back to 2005 with bouts of pancreatits. In 2009, we discovered a small cyst in my pancreas that the doctors believed to be an IPMN.

Unfortunately, not enough is understood about the workings of the pancreas to know why I started getting pancreatitis, why it was recurring, or why I had an IPMN. What we do have are statistics correlating conditions with outcomes that can be used to inform how to respond. The suggested response in this case was to remove the larger part of my pancreas and re-attach the remainder in a major surgical operation called a Whipple procedure. The primary motivation behind taking this drastic step is to prevent the IPMN from getting a chance to become malignant, resulting in a very deadly pancreatic cancer.

I was in the hospital from 10/14/13 through 10/21/13 for the operation and the recovery that followed. Expected hospitalization time for this was 7-10 days so I count myself lucky for escaping on the low end of the estimate. Here are some of the fun things I got to experience while I was there; apologies in advance for the very wordy post.

Operating table positioning

I don’t rememer anything from the procedure, but after I woke up, there were 3 apparent sources of pain; one from my wound , both elbows, and the back of my head.

My arms were really sore the first time I bent them, which the nurses explained was probably due to them being hyperextended on the operating table over the entire course of surgery (this was about a 6-hour procedure, by the way). Even now, I feel lingering aches if I leave my arms straight for a minute. If they know that this causes problems, why can’t they figure out a way to keep my arms out of the way in a way that allows them to rest natrually?

I initially dismissed the stinging in the back of my head as the roots of my hair hurting because their direction got changed while my head was resting on the table. I should have probably realized that I was on some pretty significant painkillers at this point so something trivial like that probably wouldn’t come through. It was only until a day or two later that I scratched my head and picked out a huge scab when I realized that I actually had a cut on the top of my head. Even now, 9 days after surgery, I can feel a scabbed bump. Did I get dropped on my head or something?

Tubes

Coming out of the operation, I had a total of 7 tubes coming out of me:

NG tube going in my nose
2x IV tubes
2x drainage tubes going into my guts near the surgery site (internally, they lead to the pancreas)
Epidural catheter in the middle of my back
Foley catheter (warning, description link contains pictures of penis)

The NG tube was vacuuming out any remaining stomach contents to prevent nausea. This is necessary because my entire digestive system was "asleep" at this point so nothing in my stomach would move through in the proper way, causing the body to react by vomitting it. Any time my throat made a swallowing motion, I felt things rub against the tube in the back of my throat, which causes a natural reaction to want to swallow again creating a cycle of discomfort. Fortunately, this thing came out after only a day of recovery. As a disgusting side-note, all of the stuff coming out of it looked like pesto.

I also had a set of 5 EKG leads attached to my chest that came out from a pocket in the front of my robe.

While I was laying in bed, I also had a set of pumps strapped to my calves to help keep blood circulation high

This made simple movement difficult. Getting in and out of bed was a multi-stage ordeal that took a few minutes. Since getting up and walking around is supposed to be one of the best things you can do for your recovery, it meant going through this process many times throughout the day, which ended up making time pass kind of quickly.

Coughing

From very early on, the doctors told me that I’d need to practice coughing. This is a lot easier said than done considering there is a considerable wound in my abdomen. Coughing hurts quite a bit.

One of the first few nights my nasal system starts producing a ton of phlegm. Since I lay back to sleep at an incline, all of this runs down and eventually forces an involuntary cough to prevent it from obstructing my airway. This regular super-painful involuntary coughing basically kept me up all night. At first, there was just a lot of coughing but eventually I got experimental with this vacuum tube they gave me and learned how I could suck most of the mucus out before it was a real problem. Unfortunately, my sinuses kept producing the stuff so it still kept me up all night sucking it out every minute or two with the occasional cough.

Itching

I reported intense itching on my body ranging from above my knees to below my neck (including my arms). The itch was costantly popping up in new places, so trying to rub or scratch it was futile. To handle this, doctors added a medicine (that I forget the name of) to my IV. I couldn’t really tell the difference, so after a while, they doubled the dosage.

That night, the itching got so bad that it woke me up and I couldn’t fall back asleep. I hit the nurse call button so they could help me get medication, the dispatcher said they’d send the nurse my way. I waited, after 20 or 30 minutes of intense itching, the nurse call light timed out and went off again. I called the dispatcher back, she said she’d send the nurse, and after another while the light timed out again.

On the third time I called the dispatcher, I made it clear that the nurse was not coming and finally a different nurse came by to talk about what was going on and eventually give me some Benedryl. The whole episode took about an hour and a half.

Later, when the nurse said that in order to combat the itching, they were thinking of increasing the medication dosage again, I told her about how I still couldn’t tell the difference from the increased dosage of the anti-itching and that I didn’t think it was going to work. When I asked if there were any alternate itch-supressing medications available, she said yes, we tried one, and it worked. Yay! A few hours later, the shift changed and the new nurse says she’s working on getting the dosage increased for the original medication so I got to go through the whole process again. It still took a while for them to stop administering the original medication from my IV.

IV site

One night, a doctor was administering Valium to help manage pain and help me sleep. My left hand IV was used for the steady stuff, and the right was typically for injections. I mentioned that as the Valium was being administered, there was a stinging sensation that originated from the IV site and traveled down my arm. It faded after a few minutes. At the time we wrote that off as a side effect of the medication, but the next morning when the nurse was flushing the IV with some saline the same stinging sensation occurred. In the light, I could see with only that small amount of saline my skin was swelling up; the IV needle had lost the vein.

We had to take the IV out and put in a new one; now I had two in my left arm. It may be worth noting that I super hate needles, so this was very disappointing.

Foley catheter

After a few days the doctor says that they were going to take out my foley catheter. This was good because the thing was quite cumbersome and occasionally caused spikes of discomfort when I move around.

Getting the catheter taken out was highly unpleasant; that thing comes into contact with a lot of very sensitive stuff. The best analogy I can think of is; imagine what it’s like to hit your funny bone, now imagine that instead of being instantaneously struck, someone is just rubbing the nerve and continually (yet still irregularly) activating it.

After getting the catheter out, the doctor says I should start peeing on my own again. However, I don’t feel like peeing. Later the doctor says that not being able to pee on my own is a pretty common side-effect of having an epidural and if I don’t start peeing on my own, they will put the catheter back in! This was a very distressing development.

So I try hard to pee. I try moving around into every position I can think of in case it helps. It turns out that scratching my butt also makes me need to pee more. Eventually a few drops come out, which is very exciting to me. I’m hopeful that if I keep it up, I can get used to peeing and won’t have to get another foley catheter.

I keep working at it, occasionally able to get a few drops out. However, it never gets any easier and this is a very slow process. After an hour and a half of trying to pee I was able to get 250ml out. We asked the nurse how much I would need to pee in order to avoid getting the catheter back in and she said that what I had done so far was fine. I was super relieved to stop trying to pee, but in order to avoid getting another catheter taken out, I would have tried to pee all day if I had to.

Then the doctor gets back, measures that I have 1.5 liters of urine in my bladder and says the catheter goes back in. Now, when the first catheter went in, I was under general anasthesia so I didn’t know how bad this was going to be. The doctor reassured me that it was very high tech and there were numbing agents involved.

Getting a foley catheter put in without anasthesia was by far the worst experience of the entire trip. Similar nerves get fired off as having it removed, but more of them, over a longer duration, with much more intensity.

Why did they think it was a good idea to take the thing out in the first place if they knew this was likely to happen!? This was the worst!

Nausea

One of the goals within a few days of the surgery was to get my digestive system rebooted. To this end, they put me on a liquid diet. I ate 2 meals consisting of jello, juice, and a popsicle. I wasn’t feeling nauseous after this, but there wasn’t much indication of activity in my guts either. After sleeping that night, the doctors came in early the next morning to discuss how I was doing (doctors seemed to usually visit between 6 and 7 AM). They asked if I felt nauseous and I told them I didn’t. About 30 seconds later, I felt a spike in nausea, requested a bucket, and threw up in front of all of the doctors. Another few minutes later, it happens again.

For the same reason that coughing hurts a lot, throwing up hurts a lot worse. Turns out there are a lot of ways the abdomen can involuntarily react to things.

Leads

A few times when getting back into bed after a walk, I forgot to plug the EKG leads back in to the monitor beside my bed and the nurse would stop by and ask me to plug it in; all of the vital monitors were connected to the dispatcher so they knew when I was disconnected.

On one of the later days of my stay, someone comes in to perform an EKG using a different set of leads. When I ask why they can’t use the ones that are already attached, they replied that I don’t need those original leads anymore. We ask the nurse about this, who also seemed to think that I didn’t need them but there was some confusion. I’m not sure if I was supposed to remove them or not, but we took them off and the dispatcher didn’t complain about them being disconnected. A later nurse seemed to think that they still needed to be attached, but when we asked her to look into it I don’t think we got a clear resolution.

When we finally look the leads off there was some pretty serious skin irritation under the adhesive patches. I’m not sure if this was from some sort of alergic reaction, or just from being stuck to unclean skin for so long. Either way, it was pretty gross. Lots of whiteheads.

interruptions

There’s a lot of reasons you can’t get a good night’s sleep in the hospital. A set of reasons are the regularly scheduled interruptions that you need to wake up for. Here are the ones I can remember:

vital signs taken every 4 hours
A blood thinner shot administered to my abdomen every 8 hours (did I mention that I super hate shots?)
Status update with the new nurse every shift change (12 hours)
New lidocane patches (for numbing) every 12 hours (I later learned that this was optional
Daily doctor’s visit, usually between 6 and 7 AM

Also, once the epidural and second foley catheter were finally out, I was still getting administered fluids regularly via IV, which meant I had to get up every few hours to go pee.

Cleanliness

Looking back on my time there, one of the things that surprises me most is how little the doctors and nurses had to say on the subject of keeping clean. Pretty much everything we did to keep me clean was self-initiated. Considering how oily and sweaty my skin got sometimes, it seems like the staff would have recommended how and how often to wash myself.

Special Thanks

I got a lot of help throughout this process. My parents as well as Amanda’s parents were both there the day of and the days following the operation. They were a huge help when it came to taking care of things, making me comfortable, giving Amanda relief to get out of the hospital from time to time, and most of all seeing some familiar loving faces to make me feel better.

Amanda’s sisters Stephanie and Jennifer also pitched in a lot, visiting regularly, bringing meals, and taking shifts watching after me so that Amanda could take a break when the parents weren’t around.

But most of all, Amanda was there for me in a way I feel like I can’t do justice to. At a time when I’m the least fun to be around, the least funny or smart or even interactive and the most grumpy, when there’s nothing to do but sit in a dark smelly room waiting for something to happen, when she couldn’t get a full night’s sleep for interruptions, when she was constantly exposed to and asked to get involved with gross unpleasant stuff, she was incredibly patient, caring, tolerant, enthusiastic, understanding, and loving. Having here there with me the whole time made such a huge difference. I can’t thank her enough. Going through this experience with her highlights how lucky I am to have someone like that as my partner. I love you, wife!

Another half year gone by

Mon, 29 Jul 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Hey folks, It’s about time I write someting down about what’s been going on in my life. Here goes!

Got married to Amanda Daly!
We went on an awesome honeymoon in St. Lucia
We bought a new house together in Cary
Did a lot of home improvements (some with my dad’s help): ** Cleaned up the yard, bushes, trees and laid down mulch ** Stained the deck ** Touched up the paint on our screened in porch ** Had the hardwood floors sanded & refinished ** Had carpet installed ** Had blinds installed ** Got a new bed
The game I’ve been working on since Ratchet & Clank: FFA was completed has now been announced: it’s Ratchet & Clank: Into the Nexus
Probably plenty of other fine stuff, but since I only write once per six months, I can’t remember any of it!

See you again next year!