Acute cholecystitis and biliary pancreatitis also uBraids

 

You heard what I said. Acute cholecystitis and biliary pancreatitis.

Cholycystis is the fancy word for gallbladder, "gall" being bile, or the "coleric" humor in the old Humorism concept of human health. Gotta have those humors in balance, right?

Biliary pancreatitis is where your pancreas gets irritated, inflamed, basically super pissed off. The pancreas is the chemical plant of the body, it makes insulin, pancreatic polypeptide (????) and something called pancreatic juice.

Why "juice"? I don't think of "juice" as a medical term. I guess it is though.

What happened? Well, my gallbladder filled up with stones, and from time to time, one of them got passed through my Main Bile Duct, and when it was a difficult passage, it made me feel gross. My tummy would hurt and my pancreas (I know now) would get upset and hurt as well.

A gall stone got stuck in that main bile duct sometime before Christmas Eve, causing my whole digestive tract to give up, shut down, say "NOPE" as clearly as possible, so anything I ate or drank came back up the way it went down (except much more unpleasantly.)

I got more and more uncomfortable, until my wife drove me to the emergency room and they admitted me to the hospital, calmed my extremely intense pain down with opiates, palpated my abdomen, gave me two IV antibiotics as a preventative (?????), passed my torso through the opening of a CT machine, and declared that I would need my gallbladder yeeted into the biohazard bin.

I asked so many times if I could keep my extracted gallbladder but everybody said no. I wanted to make it into a hacky-sack. Turns out though, the "stones" aren't actually mineral stones, they're made of cholesterol or bilirubin or blood ewwww and I bet it smells bad, so I'm okay with them just throwing it away.

It was big, though. I have a "four inch" (less than three inch real measurement) incision right below my lower right rib cage where they had to pull out the gallbladder.

The pain before and after the surgery was intense. Worst pain of my life before, even worse pain after. Somebody mentioned within my earshot post-surgery that my uncomfortably bloated abdominal cavity was filled with "a straw-colored fluid" which (in my imagination) became pancreatic juices and enzymes eagerly trying to digest my liver, intestines, bladder, kidneys... as though somebody had inflated the muscle/skin balloon surrounding my guts (this happened -- they use carbon dioxide gas) and rubbed Frank's Red Hot all over my entrails. Ow ow ow ow. Plus, the bloating was severe and got worse, making it impossible to take full breaths.

Well anyway, that was two weeks ago. I'm weak, skinny, exhausted, but basically pain-free using OTC pain meds (severe family history of opiate abuse so No Thanks, Prescription Painkillers!) and as of today I'm allowed to lift more than 20 pounds (9.071847 kilograms exactly) so I can get myself back in shape.

Some of you will have donated to my "Fix Juanito's Tum-Tum" fundraiser to help pay medical expenses, and for that, thank you so so much. Mutual aid is a grimly heartwarming bandaid for our extremely broken, abusive system of paying for medical care. Thank you again.

 

Also, if you've read this far, or watched the video, I HAVE A M4TM VERSION OF uBRAIDS!!!!!!! I woke up from general anesthesia Very Worried about how many expensive surgeries I was going to need if I kept designing and building synth modules.

Anyway, the one uBraids I've built so far works for the most important part, where it makes noise and responds to the knobs as expected. The display will take a lot of coding, since I'm using a different OLED display than the OLED used by Magpie Modular's design, and I didn't know that I2C pins were hardware pins so I used the wrong ones. I can "bitbang" I2C signals using an Arduino library, but that will just take more figuring out which is FINE, I enjoy coding, and probably it'll work perfectly.

Features of my uBraids: 

• little OLED display showing a somewhat more modern and pretty version of the Braids 14-segment LED displays
• ...which is run by an onboard Arduino which decodes the module's display output and transforms it into something showing on the OLED. This means end users can upload alternative firmwares and update the module using like, an AUDIO SIGNAL??? I have heard this is possible but I'm like no way that's ludicrous Emilie is a freaking genius
• three clear-shafted JuanitoPots with addressable RGB LEDs under each one to show what the signal is doing in relation to the potentiometer position
• I have experience creating modules that pick up noise from attached Arduinos and OLEDs, so I know what NOT to do. So what I did was make a separate lifted ground plane for the OLED subcircuit. Separate power supplies for the DSP/audio section with heavy filtering for the power supplying the Arduino/OLED
• No 10V LM4040 since those are expensive and nearly impossible to source. I use a $0.05 Zener diode which gets close to the reference voltage, and really who cares, the "top" of the potentiometers is where this reference voltage goes, so it's not tuning-critical or anything like that, it's just that Emilie (praise be her name) didn't want to get a reference voltage off a divider from the probably-noisy power rails like you see in lesser designs.
• every part can be SMT assembled from JLCPCB at least. The parts are "extended" which is to say there's an associated fee for like a dozen of the chips and even some resistors, and it's a four-layer board. I do NOT know how Magpie Modular kept the board 2-layer, besides that I chose to use chips with giant ground pads under them because they were smaller and cheaper but impossible to route "through".
• the layout is a different from other uBraids out there. It's no bigger than other uBraids designs, so it's also cramped, but my layout makes more sense to me, so I hope it makes more sense to others as well 

Okay I think that about sums it up. I got really sick, they fixed it by ectomying my cholecyst, I'm mostly better, and I have my own version of my favorite macro-oscillators that will hopefully be available in the next few months from our store!