Sun employee & fanatical motorcyclist Mike Belch's Weblog Biker Mike's Weblog

Today's pictures of D-Day commemorations in France remind me of our own family trip on June 6th, 2002. My American cousin, his wife and two children joined my wife and our two children for a three day visit to Normandy. We stayed in Bayeux and on the anniversary of D-Day itself we visited a number of memorial sites and cemeteries. It was very moving and I hope a real education for the four children who where then aged between 6 and 13.

After a long day (although not as long as the day experienced by those on June 6th, 1944)  we retired to a quayside restaurant in Port-en-Bessin. We sat, four adults on one table, four kids on the other, and looked through a menu chock-full of typically French seaside fare. Some time later a veteran, wearing a beret and proudly sporting medals on his blazer, came in with a lady who looked to be the same age and was shown to the table next to our children. As the kids were noisily chatting to each other, I went over to the couple, who weren't talking to each other, to apologise. It was then that I learned of their incredible story.

The man had been a British soldier in World War II. He was a sergeant and he and his men had sought shelter at a farm during the fighting on D-Day. She was the farmer's daughter and had willingly given the soldiers food and drink, making them feel very welcome on that traumatic day. Rested, they left and he never saw her again. In his later life he had told some of his British Legion colleagues about the farmer's daughter and unbeknown to him they did some research and found her. So, for the 2002 D-Day memorial, they arranged a surprise reunion, which included at the end of the day a meal for the two of them in the restaurant that we were eating in. The only flaw in this wonderful plan was that he didn't speak a word of French and she didn't speak English, so they just sat there at the table just looking at each other and smiling. So began a wonderful evening where I used my basic French language skills to act as an interpreter. All of us gathered around the table, eager to hear their stories and do our little part in helping them get to know each other after all that time. I don't remember a thing about what we ate in that restaurant, but I won't ever forget the events of that evening.

The power went off at home today for four hours. It was planned and it was all my fault - I live in a village where all the power and phone lines are overhead on tall wooden poles and last month I reported that one of the poles was leaning at a dangerous angle. So today, after two weeks advance warning, the power went off along our whole street so that the pole could be replaced. It wasn't a problem, I had planned ahead, my phone and laptop were fully charged, we had my camping stove to boil water for tea, I was all ready to survive that modern horror - no electricity. Pretty much on schedule the power went out and what hit me almost immediately was the silence. Sat in my office - why I don't know because the Internet was off and I had no phone - I could hear birds twittering, three snoring dogs and the old wind-up clock ticking two rooms away. But that was it. Nothing else. Silence. It was wonderful. Then the power came back again, my laptop started charging and the fan kicked in, the printer came on, the two external disks on my desk spun up, the TV went on in the lounge, the fish tank filter started pumping and the air stone started bubbling. It was deafening. I couldn't believe how I could live normally with so much background noise. Anyway a few hours later and I don't hear the noise any more. Maybe I'll turn the power off for a few hours next week when the family are all out and get that silence back.

b.t.w. I got a nice bonus from the electricity company - they gave me the telegraph pole, which is now sawn, chopped and giving off a wonderful heat in the lounge as it burns in the fireplace. Oh, and I discovered that I can be disconnected from the Internet for four hours without the world coming to an end.

One year ago today I was admitted to hospital. Lying on the couch in my family doctor's surgery, with the hiss of the oyxgen mask that had been placed on my face, and listening to her make an emergency call for an ambulance was a scary experience. So began a two month break from work with four weeks in hospital and some really painful surgical procedures. One year later I'm fit and healthy and all that is a distant memory.

What is interesting though is the number of hits my original blog post still gets. Checking my Sitemeter statistics, it seems like half the hits on my blog are people searching Google for information on gall bladders, gallstones, bile, peritonitis and abdominal pain; and frankly I'm surprised that my blog entry scores in the top ten of so many of those searches. I do hope that people take it for what it is, a personal account of a medical "adventure" and don't look on it as some definitive work on gastrointestinal surgery. My medical expertise is limited to watching episodes of "House" and playing the odd game of doctors and nurses! If anyone does read my original post then I hope that whatever symptoms they are suffering are soon resolved and maybe this new post will reassure them that a year later their current problems will be all but forgotten.

Three weeks ago I gave platelets for the first time in 8 months due to major surgery and then some business travel. During the last few minutes of the session the machine flagged up a high blood return pressure alarm - an indication that the machine is struggling to return the blood back to your vein after the platelets are removed. Today's donation session was abandoned after just a few minutes because the machine gave alarms for both a low pressure draw (trouble getting blood out) and high pressure return. As I was not able to  receive the blood it took I am now left on the bench for the next two months to allow my red blood cells to recover. I also suspect that the daily intravenous antibiotics, pain killers and blood tests (sometimes up to three times a day for each) during my month-long stay in hospital last year mean that my veins might now be unsuitable for platelet donation. I'll try the other arm when I go back in March but I'm not hopeful.

During the holidays I made my 50th blood donation. It took me a long time to get there - I started donating in college when I was 18, but frequent business travel to the USA and a recent month-long stay in hospital meant that I have often been barred from donation. However, it has been worth the wait. My dad died two years ago of leukaemia and lymphoma. During his two years of treatment he received around 50 transfusions of red blood cells and platelets, so I now feel like I have paid our family's debt and everything from now on puts us in credit!

I learned a couple of days ago that my neighbour Ted Mercer was buried last week. I was deeply shocked as I didn't know that Ted had died. I knew he was ill because he was in hospital, on the same ward as me, when I had my gall bladder problems earlier this year. 

Ted was more than just an old man who lived a few doors away though, he was Lancaster Bomber pilot in 44 Squadron during World War Two. He was also a decorated hero - as Flying Office E. Mercer he was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross in February 1944. After the war he flew commercially as an airline captain, including a spell flying Boeing 720 jets in remote parts of Africa - a really "hot ship" as Ted called them. As a former pilot I was always happy to talk about flying with Ted and he had some great stories. He had four daughters, lived a full life into his eighties and seemed remarkably happy and upbeat right up until I last saw him shortly before his death - despite his obvious medical problems. I always found it odd and slightly uncomfortable to see Ted going around the village on his little electric wheelchair/scooter, a real comedown from the big aircraft he used to fly, but Ted was happy to be out and about on it and would stop to talk with everyone. Cheddar village is now a little emptier without Ted Mercer. I shall miss him.

When I checked in with British Airways in Denver for my flight home on Friday I was surprised when the lady at check-in told me they had some lost property for me. I left three boxes of Harrods tea bags in the overhead locker on my outbound flight and hadn't given them a second thought, assuming they would be lost forever. So thanks to BA I enjoyed a cup of Harrod's Blend No. 14 English Breakfast this morning.

In my earlier blog post about getting FastTrack treatment at Heathrow with British Airways, I joked that it would be nice to get moved further forward towards the pointy end of the plane. And that's exactly what happened. At the gate my boarding card went "beep" when scanned, was torn up and the already good seat I was assigned (14A) was upgraded to the supremely comfortable seat 3D.

I have no frequent flyer status with BA, having recently lost my Silver card, so I like to think that today's upgrade was awarded because I was nice to the staff. BA may just have gained a new customer from Virgin Atlantic.

This morning I woke up dreading today's flight from London Heathrow to Denver. It's not that I am afraid of flying, far from it - I am a qualified pilot, it's just that I really didn't relish the prospect of flying with British Airways. At the moment I am in Starbucks in Terminal 4, having already dropped my bags and gone through security, yet I only stepped off the rental car shuttle bus 20 minutes ago. There was just one person in front of me in the line to check-in so my wait was just 30 seconds. The lady at the counter was very nice so I was nice back to her. Clearly that counts for something as she gave me a FastTrack security sticker allowing me to bypass the normal security queues and use a more exclusive line. She told me that too few people are nice to her these days. What a sad state of affairs.

So let me apologise to British Airways. I had set expectations of the service that I was going to receive today, yet your efficient check-in system and wonderful staff mean that I'm enjoying my coffee much earlier than expected and with none of the usual pain and anguish associated with Heathrow. If anyone from BA reads this before my flight departs at 15:45, I'm in seat 14A and wouldn't say no to being moved further forward in the aircraft! (Well if you don't ask, you don't get!)

I just discovered Wordle. It generates a cloud based on the words contained within a body of text or a web page. I think it is one of the coolest web 2.0 applications I have seen so far. 

This is the Wordle for my recent blog entry "A belly full of bile", in which I described my gall bladder operation and subsequent complications. 

Despite my jibes yesterday about the timing of the software release for download day, I must say that the wait was worth it. Firefox 3.0 is superb on my Mac. Good luck with the record attempt, which runs until 17:00 GMT today, it is well deserved.

Just as the World Series of baseball only involves the USA and Canada, it seems the same is true of the Firefox 3.0 Download Day world record attempt that is to be held today, Tuesday June 17th. My sources tell me the software will be released at 10:00am Pacific summer time - at which point it will be 6:00pm here in the UK and for anyone east of Dhaka it will already be Wednesday. So the 57,871 people from Japan who pledged to download Firefox 3.0 on the 17th will be disappointed, as will the 28,255 in Australia, the  6,600 in the Philippines and many others across the globe.

I really like Firefox, having been a user since it was launched, but I am disapponted that once again the USA forgets there are other people and countries beyond West Quoddy Head.

Until recently I never appreciated the phrase "a belly full of bile", which I had always assumed meant a person was angry. The truth as I now know it is that a belly full of bile will make you sick. Really, really sick.

On the evening of April 16th I was sat on a conference call. Half way through I had to apologise to my colleagues then drop off the call because of pain across the top of my abdomen. The next day I saw my family doctor who wasn't able to identify anything specific but told me to go home, rest and come back if things got worse. By the second day I was really bad, the pain changed from a broad-based pain to a very narrowly focused, sharp pain located on the right side of my abdomen just under my rib cage. I was also hot and had very little strength. I went back to see my family doctor and although it is only 300 metres from home my wife had to take me in the car. When my doctor took my temperature, blood pressure and heart rate she told me to lie down on the bed in her surgery, she then put me on oxygen and dialled for an emergency ambulance. At this point I was quite scared. My wife was called in from the waiting room and seeing the shock on her face didn't help me at all. We live in a small village about 8 miles from the nearest ambulance station so it took a while for the paramedics to arrive. Eventually two smiling paramedics bounced into the doctor's room and I was relieved to see that one of them was a friend of mine, a fellow volunteer with the Freewheelers blood bike service. This put me at ease, in fact the 11 mile drive to hospital in the ambulance was a great laugh. I thank them both for putting me at ease during a stressful episode.

In the hospital's accident and emergency department I didn't have long to wait before I was given a thorough examination by a junior doctor who quickly identified that my gall bladder was inflamed, something that was confirmed by ultrasound scan and a consultation with one of the gastro-intestinal surgeons. Interestingly the scan didn't show any gallstones, exactly the same result as a scan I had back in January when similar pains pointed towards possible gall bladder problems. From the start this made me an unusual case as most people's gall bladder problems are caused by gall stones. I should have taken this as bad omen number 1.

As I was admitted on a Friday and NHS hospitals in the UK only do emergency surgery at the weekend, I was told I would have my gall bladder removed on Monday. The trouble with this situation is it builds up a queue of patients for surgery on Monday and as it happened I got "bounced" off Monday's surgery list by a patient with a ruptured appendix - something that apparently trumps a gall bladder! On Tuesday I got my operation, a laparoscopic cholecystectomy - keyhole gall bladder removal to you and me. When the surgeon came to see me she told me it had been a very complicated and messy operation as my gall bladder was stuck onto my liver and other organs as well as the internal walls of my abdomen. I should have taken this as bad omen number 2. After the operation the medical staff continued to monitor me and grumbled frequently about my odd liver functions revealed by the daily blood tests. Bad omen number 3 maybe...

After a week in hospital I was sent home, complete with antibiotics and dire warnings that I should come straight back if I began to feel unwell. I was also told that I should have a blood test after two weeks to check my liver function was improving. As it turned out, I didn't need the blood test because exactly one week later I started to get really ill. Bizarrely I had the same strong pain in the same place accompanied by the high temperature, fast pulse and low blood pressure that cause my family doctor to send me into hospital the first time. Being a man an idiot I tried to be macho about the pain and so didn't do anything about it for 24 hours. However, the next day I couldn't stand it any longer so back I went into the hospital

For the next 17 days in that hospital I went through hell. I had a terrible infection which gave me fevers of almost 40°c and as a consequence I had IV antibiotics pumped into me 3 times a day for 16 days. It turns out that a set of freak circumstances meant that the 500 ml (1 pint) of bile produced each day by my liver wasn't travelling through my bile duct into my intestines, but instead was venting straight into my abdominal cavity. The symptoms that put me back in hospital were due to that bile, which is corrosive and thus very painful, getting infected. The complicated and lengthy nature of my first operation meant that the surgeons were unable to check my bile duct for blockages. Although I didn't have any gall stones big enough to be seen on an ultrasound scan I did have some very tiny ones. Some of these had gone into my bile duct and blocked it. My surgeon told me it is not uncommon for people to have congenital deformities in their bile ducts - extra branches known as accessory bile ducts. In my case, such a deformity had produced an easy escape route - a path of least resistance - for the bile to vent into my abdomen rather than push past the gall stones and out into my intestine. As a result I had to undergo two more surgical procedures. The first was a hugely painful procedure, without anesthetic, using an ultrasound scanner to help guide the surgeon to insert a drain into my abdominal cavity to drain off all the bile. The second, called an ERCP (Endoscopic Retrograde Cholangiopancreatography), involved sending a scope down my throat, through my stomach and duodenum to reach my bile duct. The surgeons injected die under pressure into my bile duct which was then x-rayed to reveal the full extent of my problems. They were then able to clear out the blockage and weaken the muscle which keeps the bile duct closed to create an easy path for the bile to drain - meaning it shouldn't go out of the abnormal extra exit which my bile duct had. This was also done without anesthetic, although I was given some morphine as a pain killer and  pethidine (meperidine)  as a sedative so that I wouldn't remember much about the procedure. In the end all I remember was them saying "good work, let's get the scope out" and then feeling the scope snaking through my stomach, up my throat and then out of my mouth. Yeuch.

After 24 nights in hospital (with no Internet connection!), following an operation that detains most people for just 3 nights, I finally got to go home. I still felt ill, had huge amounts of pain due to nerve damage caused by the drain tube, and was weak as a kitten, but I was home! After 10 days I am improving but still weak and still in pain. The good news is that I lost 34 lbs (15 kg) weight, something that was frankly overdue. My new, no gall bladder, low fat diet-for-life now means I stand a good chance of not putting that weight back on and maybe even lose a bit more. So now I have the joy of seeing my motorcycle leathers fit exactly as they were meant to, but the disappointment of not being able to get on my bike because I just don't have the strength or even the will to do it. I don't blame the medical staff at the hospital for anything. They didn't do anything wrong. My freaky sticky gall bladder meant they weren't able to check my bile duct during the first operation. My freaky mini gall stones meant that I was the one-in-a-thousand that gets a blocked bile duct after it isn't checked. And my freaky bile duct deformity meant it was easy for 500 ml of corrosive bile to vent into my abdomen every day. And all of this from a stomach pain that came on in a matter of seconds during a conference call over a month earlier!

My Japanese colleague Akira Ohsone just posted a blog entry about his recent business trip to the San Francisco Bay area. Unlike me, who used a gas guzzling SUV rental car, Akira decided to travel between the airport, his hotel and the various Sun offices in an environmentally sustainable way. His blog makes very interesting reading. I salute his initiative and care for the environment.

I wonder if Eco-Travelympics could become a new sport to rival conventional Travelympics i.e. trying to travel on business with the lowest environmental impact. Hmmm....

I am on my third week of business travel. This week I am in Madrid. For the previous two weeks I was in the San Francisco Bay area. I have previously blogged about the concept of Travelympics, which is the competitive process of travelling in style and without interruption or problem.

My trip to San Francisco started good when I was assigned an emergency exit seat on the flight giving me unlimited legroom. When I sat down I was pleased to discover that I was sat next to a Sun Microsystems colleague, Mark Hayden. After peaceful, uneventful flight with a couple of good movies I passed through passport control with no queue - having got off the plane first by merit of being right by the exit. My Travelympics score was severely dented though when my bag, which took ages to arrive, was badly damaged. Through negotiation over the next two weeks Virgin Atlantic baggage services representative at San Francisco Airport, Chris, agreed to refund up to $200 towards the cost of new cases. Prior to the flight home I managed to book a miles-upgrade to Virgin Upper Class so I arrived at the airport in good spirits. A nice meal in the Upper Class lounge and a few drinks with some Sun colleagues lifted my spirits higher, so Chris visiting the lounge with an envelope containing $180 for my bags was the icing on the cake. I slept for a full 7 hours on the shorter than usual flight after I had my massage. Arriving in London the only thing that dented my spirits and Travelympics score was the realisation that I had left Chris' envelope on the bar counter in the lounge in San Francisco. Luckily a colleague had picked it up and is arranging to reunite me with the money. In all a high scoring Travelympics trip.

After just 40 hours at home it was time to depart for Madrid. Luckily my flight was from Bristol which is just 10 miles from home. Heathrow is 135 miles and the drive can take up to 3 hours. I was apprehensive as I was flying EasyJet, a low cost UK airline, which is not known for its high standards of customer service. However, a short check in queue and pleasant helpful staff changed my mind. EasyJet don't have assigned seating so you sit wherever you want to on the aircraft. Consequently boarding can sometimes be a free-for-all. I had the foresight to pay $5 for priority boarding and got a high Travelympics score by being the first person to board the aircraft meaning I got another emergency exit seat. Strong tailwinds got us into Madrid early - another Travelympics positive - but then I lost out when I couldn't find a working ATM at the airport to get my Euros. Points were again lost when the taxi driver had problems finding my hotel, and again when the hotel told me that they didn't have irons and ironing boards meaning I had to pay to get my shirts pressed. So I'm in Madrid for the next week looking forward to some good meetings and, like any other business trip, I suspect the real business will take place during our evening trips to local restaurants and hostelries.