Day: February 9, 2016

The other thing that happened yesterday was that our air-conditioning cut out, we think about 4.00 p.m. It was 42 degrees (about 107 F) at the hottest part of the day and we had been running all the rooms. I had just added the bedroom.

We thought it was the same problem as before where a part had to be replaced and took ages to arrive. We set in motion a backup plan (packed up to go to stay with Mum) and then switched everything off. We had rather a hot night again, though it did cool down in the morning. I set up the little evaporative cooler when I made our cups of tea.

Then, we switched on. And it worked. Such a relief!

The lesson learned is that for such extreme weather we need to try to not overuse the system. Today we were out until about 2.00 p.m., and had closed up the house and put down the blinds everywhere, and it wasn’t too bad when we got home. We switched on and it has been working this afternoon. We have closed the studies and the bedroom and switched off those rooms. We have always done this in the past when using the system to save electricity, so I don’t quite know why we were so blasé about it.

Of course, we are having about a week of extreme temperatures, although I notice that the maximum temperatures have been revised slightly downwards for the next few days.

Yesterday (Monday 8th) was finally the day for Stephen to see the neurologist, Susan Ho. She asked me to join in on the consultation so that I could give my take on what I saw happen. She said that she would not prescribe medication for a one off seizure as if he never had another one, we wouldn’t know if it was because of the medication or just that it was going to be a one off. She said that the scans from the MRI were too grainy for her to be able to make a diagnosis and asked Stephen to book in for another MRI and an EEG in the next couple of days.

She took a fairly detailed history and asked many questions. Basically, she established that there were no factors that could have triggered the seizure, such as extreme fatigue, heaving drinking the night before, or anything else.

After the consultation we went to a couch near her rooms and made the calls. We were able to book the MRI at Hollywood SKG and the EEG at St John of God, Subiaco. Stephen said that the EEG was much more thoroughly done this time, with several different phases and electrodes directly connected to his head. Like this:

 

Dr Ho was not able to offer Stephen a second appointment until the end of February. She checked the diary herself. She said that if she felt it warranted, she would contact Stephen sooner to make an earlier appointment. I guess it means she would have to work a longer day. She already looks like she works very long days.

After lunch at St John of God, we did some shopping and came home for a rest. I suggested that we not go to the Cabaret at St George’s tonight as it is going to be hot and Stephen should not risk the heat stress.

On Sunday I subscribed to a new photography site called PhotoTraces.com run by Viktor Elizarov. It included some free Lightroom presets and after installing them, I did some reworking of images from Stara Boleslav and Brandys Nad Labem taken on the day of Stephen’s seizure. We had completed a long walk across the bridge to the other village. I used a couple of the presets, HDR and Heavy Shadows. It is possible to adjust them to taste. One is used as the Featured Image for this post and some others are included below. These have been resized in ImageBucket, so I hope they are not too small.

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