Random Thinking

We found out some interesting things about Michel’s doctor, Thomas H. Milhorat. First, he is THE MAN when it comes to Chiari Malformation and syringomyelia. You can read more about it here, but in 1999, Dr. Milhorat redefined Chiari. His research changed the way everyone looked at the disease. He is a founder and director of the Chiari Institute.

His father, Ade T. Milhorat, was also a famous neurologist/scientist/researcher. He was one of the founders of the Muscular Dystrophy Association, the organization that you know from the telethons run by Jerry Lewis every year. The elder Milhorat was one of the leaders in researching Muscular Dystrophy. He died a few years ago at the age of 98 and was still doing research. He published a reserach paper with his son on Chiari and syringomyelia when he was in his 90’s!

I would say that we were very lucky to find Dr. Milhorat.

As you can see, Michel’s head is healing very nicely. The stiches are out and there is no swelling or sign of infection. Michel is also doing much better neurologically. She can now stand straight with her eyes closed without falling over. She also felt pain in her hand when she touched something hot for the first time in months. She still can’t walk a straight line but things are definitely looking up.

Michel is getting better every day. We were worried that she wouldn’t be up to going out for Christmas but she felt OK so we went to her brother’s (Jimmy) house. She lasted quite a while before she ran out of energy. Beth had a great time with her cousin Tracey and Mikey was reasonably well behaved (at least for Mikey). He did manage to break two china plates but we will blame that on Kathleen (Jimmy’s wife) because she took her eye off of him for a minute. Mikey got the first season of Sponge Bob on DVD. He spent most of Christmas watching that and playing with Beth and Tracey. Beth got a bunch of games for her PlayStation 2. Her favorite so far seems to be Final Fantasy X. She has had Final Fantasy X-2 for a while and has finished it but she didn’t have the first game.

Michel is going to the doctor today to have her stiches taken out. Our friend, Cindy, is taking her. Every day is another step on the road of recovery. So far things are going well and we are hoping Michel can be back to her old self soon.

SWT/JFace in Action
by Matthew Scarpino, Stephen Holder, Stanford Ng, Laurent Mihalkovic

SWT and JFace are the graphical libraries developed by IBM as an alternative to Swing to improve performance of GUI applications (specifically Eclipse) written in Java. This book offers a thorough introduction to SWT/JFace. The authors avoid getting into a Swing vs. SWT/JFace debate although they do provide a comparison of the two libraries.

The book starts with a look at writing a program in SWT and then rewriting it using JFace. The authors compare the two approaches and give a good description of why you would want to use one over the other. The next few chapters look at the basic widgets, layout managers, event handling, and graphics contexts. Later chapters cover more advanced widgets such as trees, viewers, tables, menus, dialogs, and wizards. The last chapter looks at GUI development using Eclipse’s Rich Client Platform. The appendices cover development within Eclipse and integrating SWT/JFace applications with OLE and ActiveX.

Overall this book does a great job of explaining SWT/JFace at a good level of detail. The book includes a reasonable amount of code samples as well as UML diagrams that help explain how these libraries work. The authors should have chosen a better sample application to demonstrate use of the libraries and there aren’t enough screen shots included which may leave you wondering what some of the widgets look like. Other than these two minor complaints, this is an excellent book to learn how to use SWT/JFace and I can strongly recommend it.

This earned 4 stars on Amazon. The book is published by Manning.

The review can be seen on Amazon on My Amazon Reviews page.

I brought Michel home at about 7 PM. Her potassium levels were good and she had no fever so they decided to let her loose. It’s good to have her home. I just want to add at this point that everyone at North Shore Manhassett was wonderful. The staff there was as professional and as dedicated as you would ever hope for.

Beth’s ear wasn’t too bad. The NP gave us a prescription for anti-bacterial cream and orders not to wear an earring for a few days until it heals. When it gets better, Beth has to wear hoop earrings for awhile to give the ear a chance to fully heal. Not bad considering the horror stories that we heard about infections so bad that the earring had to be surgically removed.

The picture is Beth at the doctor’s office and no, she is not playing the air guitar!

Michel wasn’t released so we are hoping for tomorrow. She has been running a fever and has a sore throat so they might keep her until Wednesday. She has her IV out so she can walk around without lugging the pole with her. They removed the bandage from the back of her head so you can see the full incision now. I have provided it as a link so the sqeamish can avoid seeing it. Overall, she is feeling pretty good and we are looking forward to having Michel home.

I should add that I printed the picture of the Christmas tree and brought it to the hospital so Michel could enjoy it. it is amazing what a good picture you can get from these digital cameras.

Meanwhile, Beth had her ears pierced a couple of months ago and one ear has always bothered her a little bit. It looks like she has a nice infection going now. She is probably going to need some antibiotics so I will be taking her to the doctor tomorrow if it doesn’t look any better.

I only got to see Michel for about 30 minutes today. I had hoped that Michel’s brother would be able to watch the kids but they had plans so they could only watch them for an hour which gave me about 30 minutes at the hospital. Michel wasn’t feeling well. She has a cold and has been running fevers on and off. Her potassium levels were low again so she had to get more IV’s. We walked three times around the floor and she wasn’t worn out. Cindy had complained about the IV stand because the wheels wouldn’t turn so they got Michel a new one. It was much easier to push it around the floor when the wheels actually move. We are still hoping Michel will be getting out tomorrow but with the potassium levels and the fevers we aren’t overly optimistic. Michel’s parents should be back tomorrow.

The picture is of our Christmas tree that my sister put up yesterday. Laura and Beth helped decorate it. Thanks Barb! The cat underneath the tree is Kokie.

Michel has been running slight fevers off and on all day so she doesn’t feel quite as well as she did. The doctor came in and he said that she is doing very well and is on course to be booted out on Monday. We walked around the floor twice while I was there. Our friend Cindy dropped in to see Michel. And Eileen’s flowers finally were delivered… and they weren’t dead. Actually, they were very pretty.

My sister, Barbara, came over, cleaned the house, decorated for Christmas including putting up the tree, and watched Mikey while I went to the hospital and did some shopping. The house feels like Christmas now. Barb’s daughter, Laura, took Beth Christmas shopping since Michel isn’t going to be doing any and I am not the right person to be picking out clothes for Beth. Michel’s parents went back to Brooklyn but they will be back on Monday.

I visited Michel after work. She is doing great. I brought her some chicken soup and a bagel. It is amazing how quickly she is recovering from the surgery. She said the pain is very mild. The worst pain is that she had to get an IV with potassium and that apparently burns like hell going in. She has a fat lip. Apparently the anesthesiologist screwed up and Michel bit her lip during the surgery. Michel’s surgeon, Dr. Milhorat, was not pleased.

Michel now has three zippers in her head. The big one is under that bandage. She got up for a little bit while I was there and we walked around the hallways. Michel’s sister, Eileen, sent flowers but they got lost somewhere in the hospital so we looked around for them. No luck. There were some dead flowers at the nurse’s station but they weren’t from Eileen.

I spoke with Michel on the phone and she is feeling pretty good considering what she has gone through. She has normal post-operative pain but none of the chiari pain that she has been living with since July. I won’t get to see her until tonight because I had to go to work today.

Since I haven’t been to the hospital yet today, here is a picture of the hospital that I took yesterday. Nice blue sky!