I seem to be mostly recovered? Fever is gone. My appetite has been gradually returning. I still have a nasty cough and walking up a flight of stairs leaves me winded. But that seems to be getting better as well. And as MrsGF pointed out this morning when I was complaining, it hasn’t even been a week yet since I was diagnosed and it’s going to take time to fully recover from this. I’m no spring chicken, after all.
The most troubling symptom I had were the panic attacks. I’ve had those before but never so often or as severe as they were during this bout with the flu and I wonder if it was due partly to the Tamiflu antiviral they had me on. Apparently there are some rather nasty and thankfully very rare neurological side effects to the stuff and one of those is an increase in anxiety issues with some people, including panic attacks, hallucinations and other nasties that nobody warned me about when they put me on the stuff. Within about 24 hours of stopping taking the stuff it was almost like someone flipped a switch. My thinking seemed to get more clear, the panic attacks began to disappear, I started to get my appetite back and generally started to feel like a human being again.
Can I absolutely attribute the panic attacks and other mental issues I was having to the drug? No. Of course not. But at the same time it seems more than just a coincidence that within 24 hours of stopping taking it there was such a drastic change.
But enough of that. I’m on the mend, nearly back to normal, and am enormously grateful to that and to MrsGF for putting up with me. So let’s get on with this.
Laser stuff: Needless to say I haven’t been doing any work with the lasers during this time. The last thing I needed was the possibility of stray fumes from the lasers getting into the air and irritating my already very angry lungs and respiratory system.
I do want to talk about CNC machines, though. Right before all of this nonsense started I picked up a cheap, desktop CNC machine. Emphasis on the “cheap” part.
I’d wanted to experiment with CNC machines for many years now but two things have held me back. First was the cost. A good CNC machine is not cheap. A decent ones were always several thousand dollars or more and I just couldn’t justify the expense. The second thing that held me back was the mess. These things spew dust and chips everywhere. It’s the nature of the beast and unless I could also afford to buy or had the ambition to build an adequate enclosure for it, I wouldn’t want one in the house because of the mess.
But these little fully enclosed desktop style machines take care of the mess, mostly. That left just the price. But that’s come down too. This little beast up there was only $400, cheap enough for me to be willing to take a chance on it.
Now that I’m starting to feel better I’ll have a chance to set this little beast up and play with it and see what we got here. From what I’ve seen online this little unit doesn’t seem too bad for the price. It is far, far from the best on the market. Not even close. But it’s probably going to be good enough to give me an idea if this is something I want to pursue without breaking my budget.
Now I need to start to catch up on all of the stuff I had to postpone while I was sick. I was supposed to get together with the owners of the brewery in Milwaukee to deliver a new batch of coasters and other goodies and that fell threw. I didn’t want to take the chance of passing this along to them. And in any case I wasn’t fir for human companionship for a while there.
I was cleaning out stuff and found a whole box full of wooden handled bottle openers. Where they came from I have no idea, but we’re thinking of doing some kind of promotional thing with those so we were going to discuss that. There is apparently another brewpub that wants to pick up my line of joke coasters so I need to see if they would object to that.
Damn, it feels good to being able to think straight again!
grouchyfarmer 