The Treatment

I won’t dwell on this too much but it is quite interesting. The treatment is known as a hip arthroscopy, which means going inside the hip joint with a camera. To achieve this the hip joint has to be semi-dislocated, which is done using traction. Three incisions are then made to allow a camera and instruments to be inserted. I’m not sure exactly how they fixed the tear in the cartilage but I can imagine how they removed the Cam deformity!

Wounds - one still covered up

The Aftermath

I woke up in the recovery room after the operation in quite a lot of pain. I was dreaming and it was all a bit of a blur. I remember trying to turn on my left side to try to stop the pain which caused a few problems because I was attached by several wires (blood pressure and heart monitoring). This caused a bit of a kerfuffle and I felt quite embarrassed when I became finally with it. The nurse gave me some pain killers but they didn’t seem to have any effect so I had quite a lot of morphine. This did help, although I didn’t receive the wave of relief you see in the movies (just a dulling of the pain). They also have to inject other stuff into you to stop you being sick. At some point the surgeon came in and said that the operation had been a success. I realised I’d been in surgery for two hours which is longer than I expected. The nurse I was with was quite chatty and went to get me some water. I think she meant for me to only have a sip but I drank it all straight away (I was quite dehydrated as you cannot drink or eat for 6 hours before the operation). Thankfully I wasn’t sick! After about an hour in recovery I was well enough to leave and got wheeled back to the ward. The hospital bed wasn’t big enough and the porter still had a bit to learn — several times my right leg almost hit things on the way and then he smacked the bed into something whilst parking me. I spent a couple more hours on the ward sleeping and then was able to go home.

Hopefully my hip will now have free movement and I can start playing sport again. For the moment I’m doing physio exercises to try and get it moving again (currently I’m unable to get one of my socks on and off again, which is annoying). I’m managing to walk without crutches but getting in and out of bed and that sort of things is a little bit troublesome. It’s quite a weird feeling — effectively teaching my leg to do things again.

I’ll post more on what I’ve been up to since the op and also some of the things that I think the NHS could improve.

A few other things I need to cover. I’m having an operation on my hip next week which I’m going to try to blog about in more detail. I promise not to post any photos! I’ll be laid up at my parents in Sunny Berkshire for a week or so; if anyone’s about then feel free to drop me a line.

Before the operation I plan to redo my wordpress theme and start putting some photos in my posts to make them a little bit more exciting. I’ve got a couple of hectic days coming up Thursday I’m going to OpenSoho and potentially some other things. Friday I’m off to Minibar and then meeting up with a couple of guys I used to work with. Look forward to seeing you if you’re at either event.

There were several interesting talks about Twitter (focused on how some government departments are using it as a broadcast tool) and interesting discussion around consultations (I now know how to find consultations online, should I choose to do so). The most interesting talk I attended was on Open Data. Now this is obviously quite a broad subject but the heart of the session discussions were around how developers could use data that the government has to create mashups and the like. Any government has an incredible (and growing) amount of data (some useful, some not) sitting around ‘collecting dust’. As a developer and innovator I see lots of useful ways this data could be used to improve lives, save money, etc etc. For most people it isn’t such a great leap to see how crime data could be (and has been) plotted on a map (I’ve been told that when this was done in the US, crime was reduced because people in high crime areas did something about it). There were several discussions from both those inside government and those outside about the difficulties putting data online, trying to make sure it was in the right format and trying to get the licencing right (and there are some very good initiatives in this area). Of course there was the usual Postcode -> Latlong flamewar (help out here) which is always humourous.

Currently a big problem is that the government departments don’t have the resources to put all data online. And they’re not sure which data is useful and which is not. On the other side the developers don’t know what data is there! What about if we re-frame the issue.

What is the cost to the economy if the data is not made available. What would stop it being a legal requirement to publish all (non-sensitive) data to a web service? Cost of course, but think of the economic gain. Local and national innovation. A massive step up for the web industry. A chance to harvest all the data for the good of our country. One would be a fool to seriously suggest making it mandatory but there are definite benefits to this approach.

Let’s commit to Opening our Data and, as a nation (and as a world), reap the benefits.

Recently we’ve seen a groundbreaking US presidential election where Barack Obama sought to bring about a sea change in the way his campaign was run (part of this was using Twitter). The UK is now entering a very probably heavy recession with what some would argue is a disengaged electorate and a country that is fast running out of ideas. I attended a talk recently by NESTA where it was suggested that innovation could be used to kickstart the recovery of the UK economy. Perhaps Twitter has a role to play in this.

I have to admit I got a little bit jealous when I saw Pete’s blog with three posts and looking rather a lot better than mine. He obviously has far too much time on his hands. It will spur me on to write more and definitely improve my homepage.

If you’re reading this Pete, the whole point of tags is to be concise. You’re not trying to re-create your post using the tags.

Having said all this, I don’t think I could live there permanently. I think it’s something to do with the size of the place, and it’s definite quaintness.

All the top sites on google look like they got there by SEO and nothing else.

Can anyone recommend a good office chair that costs around £200?