The Struggle Has Ended

Greg Hewlett passed away on January 17th after nearly eight years of battling colon cancer. While we grieve his loss, we are comforted to know that he is with his Lord.

If you would like to leave your thoughts on Greg, please see this thread.

If you would like to make a charitable donation in Greg's honor, please see this thread.

Thursday, October 18, 2007

A Week at Sabolich - Wednesday

home.jpg

This is the room they call "home". Every patient who is here for an extended amount of time is assigned a home where all the work is done, but also where they can sit comfortably while the prosthetist is back in the lab. Another feature of this place is the length they go to make you comfortable during all the waiting. The couch is good for napping. (For those who are in between chemo appointments!)

Wednesday was a day where we went several steps forward, one step back, and got stuck on another step. Bill went through a few rounds of adjustments on the test socket. We were experimenting with a vertical concave channel down the right side of the socket. The idea was to increase the stability of the femur at the point during gait just after I step down. I have never had much stability at that point, but I started getting it with his adjustments. The last stage, however, it was apparent that we went to far (We're talking fractions of an inch here). With the last small adjustment, all the sudden problems cropped up in other areas of the containment. "Everything affects everything else," Bill reminded me. When I left, it was not fitting very well and he assured me he could just "undo" that previous step. (ah, if this process could have Emacs' ctrl-shift-_) We'll see in the morning. It's still uncertain we can pull this off by Friday.

On another front, the computer was acting up and we were not able to talk to the knee via blue-tooth. Nor via the old-style USB cable (where Bill walks along side me holding the laptop tethered to the knee). Nothing seemed to be working with the computer. Whatever was wrong seemed to be infecting everything - their internet connection in the building got slow, and other patients C-Leg's stopped talking to the computers. I was recruited ("nerd in the building!") to help out and I could not figure anything out. COM ports, USB drivers, device manager, blah blah blah. It is remarkable how whether you are designing televisions or working on fitting a prosthetic socket, all the problems come down to Microsoft.

So all the fitting work we did Wednesday was not ideal because while you are adjusting the fit, you also need a good gait. All parameters have to be tuned together. So we did the socket adjustments while being stuck in one place on the gait. It wasn't too off, so we made good progress. The Nerd Herd guy is coming in Thursday morning first thing. Hope he can figure it out.

The laptop-to-C-Leg setup
bluetooth_setup.jpg


3 comments:

Doug McCammish said...

Hard to believe that you couldn't displace the Nerd Herd person. I'd have bet on it. You're an amazing "kid" and that really has nothing to do with your being a nerd but a lot to do with Christ in you.
Hang in there.
Doug

Kurt said...

Be sure to read and be inspired by that copy of Oprah before you leave!

Willeyne Berger said...

Very interesting to read, Greg. Thinking of you and your family and cotinues prayers. Willeyne