Jaymis is a visualist, director, writer, and technolagistador based in Brisbane, Australia. Co-founder of CreateDigitalMotion.com, he spends his days filling video with more awesome.

Jaymis Minus Spleen: 29 Days and Counting

In November 2005 an ultrasound displayed a kind of benign tumor in my spleen, most likely a splenic hemangioma. At the time it was rather small (about 3cm), so I went on the waiting list for an outpatients appointment at a public hospital. As this isn’t at all a serious, life-threatening, or even noticeable condition, the waiting list to be told “it’s all cool, you’ll probably never even notice it’s there” was rather long. So I mostly forgot about it, except for replying to the occasional “would you like to remain on the waiting list” letter from the hospital.

Jaymis.SplenicThingy, 2005

In January this year I received a letter informing me that my time had come, that I had an appointment at the urology outpatients clinic at the Princess Alexandra hospital. Because a little over 3 years had passed I thought it would be good idea to get a new scan to see if anything had changed, so I went to my local dodgy bulk billing GP and got an ultrasound referral.

Spleen.Massive, 2009

The ultrasound found that my cute lil toomer had grown up big and strong, and was now about 10cm long (or the same size as a normal adult spleen) and instead of having a spleen with a tumor, now I had a tumor with a spleen. This isn’t a problem in of itself, but if I was in a car accident or, say, “accidentally” fell over hard while snowboarding, it could explode messily, and dump my blood supply into my chest cavity, which is apparently a Bad Thing.

So I went to my outpatient appointment. There the friendly urologist quickly referred me on to the hepatologist, who had me go in for a CT scan on Monday. The scan was super cool. Medicine direct from The Future. I had a giant white whirring torus passed along my body, and ten minutes later I was furnished with a disc of images showing what I look like inside. So obviously I had to turn them into an animation of what my skeleton looks like.

Yesterday Rachgirl took me to the PA for my appointment with Dr Kellee Slater, who was super friendly, professional, and thorough. We discussed the cause of my Splenic Embiggenation (not a technical medical term), which is most likely due to: a) Weird shit happening in my body or, b) My repeatedly falling over very hard while snowboarding. Either way, our options were to wait and see, or take it out.

Waiting could be dangerous, as the aforementioned accidental sharp blow to the torso could leave me filled with bits of spleen, lots of blood and on the way to dead-ish. I would also need to stop doing fun things like snowboarding and go-karting, and I wouldn’t be able to commence fun things such as paragliding.

Conversely, having Spleenzilla removed would obviously require a stay in hospital, where one of my internal organs would be removed. That’s quite a serious thing to happen, but afterwards I would be able to lead a normal life, and get up to any number of silly and dangerous things. Apparently the only real day-to-day-life change required after splenectomy is to be more careful of bacterial infections, and to take prophylactic (precautionary) antibiotics if traveling in 3rd world countries. Also, I’ll have more stomach and lung capacity, as I won’t have a spleen the size of a house brick pressing up against them.

So we ended up deciding on the course I had expected we might take: I need to part ways with my Giant Spleen. Kellee whipped out her blackberry and said “How’s the 9th of April for you?”, and it was decided.

Then Rach and I remembered that the 9th of April is our anniversary. What a fun way to spend our romantic day! “5 years prettygirl! I have tubes stuck in me and I’m unconscious. Happy anniversary!”

Semi-meaningless milestones aside, it’s all happened very quickly. From the initial “Wow, your spleen is pretty huge” scan, until “Good morning, hope your feeling ok, here’s your spleen in a bottle”, less than 2 months will have passed.

Queensland Health has been copping a huge amount of bad press over the past couple of years, but I’ve found the system to be fantastic. It’s extremely well organized, with letters and phone calls before each appointment, and every person I’ve dealt with has been friendly and professional. The initial wait was obviously quite long, but that was for a condition which displayed no symptoms, and is rarely even noticed by people afflicted by it. Once it was decided that there was actually something slightly dangerous going on, everything has moved extremely rapidly: I was booked in for a CT scan and specialist appointment within a week, and surgery less than a month from then.

Obviously the deed hasn’t been quite done yet, so I’ll have to hold judgement until I’m several kilograms lighter. I am feeling very positive and confident about the whole thing though. So we’ll see what happens in 29 days.

Tuning SBS using MythTV and a DVICO Capture Card on Ubuntu in Brisbane

I’ve been fiddling around with Ubuntu + MythTV for a while on the Small Form Factor machine I’d previously been carting around the country for gigs. After a reasonably excessive number of reinstalls, I finally got both MythTV and Boxee working, with the caveat that I couldn’t tune SBS, Australia’s second-best TV channel behind ABC.

It turns out that MythTV’s channels.conf file doesn’t quite work for some people. After Googling around multiple times in the intervening months since installation, I finally discovered the solution for various people has been to slightly change the frequency that MythTV searches. For Brisbane it changes to 585791667.

To edit this, open MythTV Backend Setup. Go to Channel Editor > Transport Editor

My MythTV setup shipped with 5 transports.

585500000 is for SBS in the UHF frequency band. Unfortunately, this wouldn’t tune for me. So it needs to be updated to 585791667.

After saving this and re-scanning, I got SBS1, 2, 3, 4 and HD showing up in my Channel List! Superb.

The Red Mullet

The Red Mullet – 2006 Shiraz Grenache Mourvedre Tempranillo. Very lovely.