MacKay Hospital, BSA 1954, my eyes

My Eyes 

I had laser treatment on both eyes this past Thursday and that will probably be the last treatment. This is because my next scheduled visit is at the end of January. So after having 1 or 2 treatments per week for the last month, we are now going to let nature see how it can improve on what the doctors have done already. Great!

I still have a bubble of gas in my right eye but it is getting smaller and should be gone in a week. It is kind of like the bouncing ball in the old cartoons which ended in a sing-along song. "Now let's all following the bouncing ball ..." I realize that those cartoons were an early form of karaoke.

I wish I had measured how bad my eyes were and then I could measure how much they are improving. I can now do computer things without much trouble but I still need magnification to read the newspaper.

One thing I do notice an inprovement on is reading the walk/stop signs at intersections.

Initially I couldn't read any of the seconds that I had to cross the street safely. Now I can easily read the numbers across narrow streets like ChangChun and JinLin. I almost can read the numbers across medium streets like MingShen and ZhongShan. My goal is to read the numbers across the wide streets like DunHua and RenAi.

MacKay Hospital

The neighborhood hospital that I walk to for treatment is MacKay Hospital, a private Presbyterian hospital founded by the Presbyterian missionary Dr. George Leslie MacKay in 1912.

(I wrote about the Presbyterians in Taiwan two years ago:
 
 http://mikeess-trip.blogspot.tw/2011/03/presbyterians-in-taiwan.html

) 

Mackay Hospital is a teaching hospital and part of the Taiwan National Health System.

 I doubt many people going to MacKay know what this kind of Christmas display is about. But just like me, sick people just want to get well.

  

1954 BSA

One sure sign that my eyes are doing well is that I can recognized motorcycles on the street. This is the oldest motorcycle I've seen in Taiwan. Although it isn't working there must be a good story on how it came to Taiwan.

BSA stands for Birminghan Small Arms Company, besides making pistols rifles, ... , this British company made bicycles, motorcyles ... In 1910 they started making motorcycles, around 1970 they stopped.

I remember that while I was in highschool we use to go to the drag strip races and this was the most popular motorcycle in the unlimited class. Although Triumphs were also about 650cc and raced, this one was the One. I think the Harleys were at 1200cc but they were too heavy and not raced. (They didn't call them "hogs" for nothing.)




.

IM

Christmas

Christmas in Taiwan

Christmas is all over Taiwan, but I think it's mostly an excuse for stores to change their store docorations. This includes Christmas music, it's quaint hearing the traditional music, I remember them from the nonstop Christmas music my mother played around Christmas time.

For Christmas, I made spaghetti, red sauce, green basil and parsley and white noodles. Red, green and white, the Christmas colors.

Although there are not real Christmas trees in Taiwan, but plenty of artificial trees. Here are some from arround Taiwan.

From the Taipei Main Train Station lobby.

From the restaurant in the Regent Hotel

 From a store in TaiZhong made with pieces of wood cut to look like books that matched the library motif.

A Tree from the Flower Expo in Taipei.

And from the lobby of our building.

My Eyes

My eyes are getting better, I had laser treatment on both eyes. With the laser treatment, the small tears in the retina are melted by the  laser and then the melted edges fuse together. The retina will gradually regenerate, a few months out. I still have a bubble of gas in my right eye but it is getting smaller and doesn't effect the laser treatments. Because of the optics of the eye, I percieve the bubble as being at the bottom of my eyeball but I know from its bouyance that it floating around at the top of my eyeball.

Onr of the disconcerting effects is to focus on the tiles in the bathroom. The horizontal and vertical lines are jagged in spots where the retina had been melted together. But with my magnifying headset I can now read the newspaper.

I'm scheduled for more laser treatments on this Thursday. It's a lot like being at the dentist's with cavities but there is no novocaine and they're working on your eyes. You want to sit still because he's using a laser on your eyes, but it still hurts.

12/18 Supplemental - Stolen Identity

2012 hasn't been a good year for me so far.

1. Early in the year, the Nigerians hijacked my
          yahoo account.
2. In the Summer, I was knocked down by a car in 
          Ballard.
3. In the Fall, my eyes started to fail.
4. And now before the year ends, someone has 
          stolen my identity.

A month ago I got some strange emails and mail from Chase Morgan about opening an account with them. I contacted their fraud division and told them that was not me and don't open an account in my name. At Florence's urging, I signed up for CreditSecure, a monitoring program from American Express, to monitor my credit reports. Sure enough, a few days ago, credit card accounts were opened with Chase Morgan(CM) and Capital One(Cap1) in my name. Alerted by CreditSecure, I contacted CM and Cap1 and got the accounts canceled and my credit report has a hold on any activity without a call to me.

Some fraudster got my social security number and collected enough information to fill out credit card applications. Then with false documentation, they opened the accounts at CM and Cap1. Probably the documents were no better than what college students use to buy alcohol.  Both Cm and Cap1 checked my credit report so that I wouldn't cheat them. But their own criteria for identification documents was at fault. Maybe I'm in front of it now, but I'm sure my credit rating will take a hit. And reporting the whole mess from Taiwan hasn't been easy. But that probably helped convince CM and Cap1 that I didn't open the accounts in the US, as I've been in Taiwan since October.    

Reporting this to the authorities is just a waste of time. Law enforcement in the US is more concerned with harassing pot smokers and evicting the Occupy Movementm rather than enforcing gun laws or prosecuting identity fraud. 

From Randy Neuman's "Faust":

"It's a great big dirty world, if they say it's not, they're lying ..." 

12/12-19 My Eyes, Eye Charts, Lottery

My Eyes

The treatments are going well. At a checkup on Thursday, I got laser treatment on both eyes. This means the gas bubble in the right eye worked its magic and pushed the flap of detached retina back against the back of the eyeball. Since the operation on the previous Friday, I have had to lay face down most of the day and night so that the buoyancy of the gas bubble rises to the back of the eyeball. But now we're on to laser repair of the retina tears in both eyes(so the end is in sight(haha)).

Actually at this last checkup the doctor said that once the retina tears are fixed, I'll have to do cataract surgery. My optician mentioned this 2 years ago, but this is much sooner than I expected. So it just goes on and on.

Eye Charts

Once in awhile, I get an vision test at the hospital, but my eyes are so bad now they have given up for awhile, I think until the treatments are done. They do not sue this chart because not everyone here knows this alphabet.

  They could use this one, but still too English-centric.

 The one they actually use is this one. With your fingers you point in which direction the circle has a break.

 We're pretty good at studying for exams here in Taiwan, but it's probably counter productive to study for this one.

The Lottery

One of the few things I could do while face down the past week was listen to the radio through the internet. I probably listened to more National Public Radio in the past week than I ever had. Some of the news stories I heard more than once.

One thing I don't get is: Why so many people don't want to raise taxes on the Rich?. I tried to think of who I know that makes more than $250,000.00 and I can't think of anyone.

Sure, I know the arguments about the "job creators", but until 10 years ago, the only "creator" I knew of was the one in the Book of Genesis. Maybe the Rich are trying to be God-like by association. I think a lot of people have money as their God and rich people as their saints. And to be without enough money must be a sin and so because there is never enough we all must be sinners. 

The other reason I came up with is that lottery players are all against paying higher taxes whether they are poor or rich. This because their life plan sees them winning the lottery, so they of course, don't support having the Rich pay higher taxes. If they didn't think that they would eventually win then why play? This is my favorite cartoon.

 

Maybe the math teachers of America have failed to teach that it is stupid to be a gambler.

  

12/5-12/11 Stats, Xmas, Coconut, eyes

Stats

I use the blogger interface provided by google to enter the posts of this blog. At one time, I thought the interface allowed me to enter a table, but I can't find that option now. Here is a table I extracted from the CIA's world factbook of country profiles.
these are estimates for 2012. (https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/).  If you ever want a good summary about any country this is the place to go. Here is what I selected from 3 countries in the factbook.

                                 China        USA        Taiwan
Population                1,343K        313K        23K
Population growth(%)     .48              .9          .29
Sex ratio at birth(M/F)    1.3          1.05        1.08
Per Capita GDP ($)        8.4K      48.3K     37.7K
Life Expectancy Male    72.8        76.05      75.66
Life Expectancy Female  71.1       81.05      81.53
Median Age                     35.9        37.1         38.1
Infant Mortality             15.9            6             4.6
Literacy (%)                   92.2           99          96.1

(Infant mortality is in deaths per 1000 in 1st year)
Notes:
1. Look at the effect of the "one child policy" in China on male/femail ratio.
2. Why US infant mortality worse than Taiwan's?
3. US population growth is about a quarter from  immigration, China and Taiwan have very little immigration. 

Xmas

According to the CIA World Factbook, only 4.5% of Taiwanese are Christian. But there seems to be tons of Christmas trees, lights and decorations in Taipei. Along Chang An Street in Taipei, there are several stores selling Xmas decorations exclusively, mostly lights(LED) and trees(artificial).

 But this provides a good background for a group picture.

 Eating on the Streets

There are plenty of food options in Taiwan. Unless you are into something special like organic or extremely cheap, there's little reason to cook at home. Young people in the US today rarely know how to cook, in Taiwan it's probably the same.

I can't cook better food than what I can buy from the street vendors in Taipei. But once in awhile I get a surprise. Today a bought what I thought was a meat bun but it turned out to be a bun with coconut paste inside(at least I didn't pick the bun with sweet red beans inside!)

This reminded me of a story. In the 1950's, when I was less than 10 years old, I was a "good eater", meaning that I wasn't a "picky eater". When parents scolded their children for not cleaning their plate, I was not one of then. Parents use to admonish their children that to waste food was a sin and that we should all consider how lucky we were because we weren't starving like the poor children in China and Korea.(Taiwanese often use to tell children that if they don't clean their rice bowl of every grain of rice then they will marry someone who has had smallpox and whose face will look like their dirty rice bowl.)  

Anyway, even though I was a good eater, I saw that some of my siblings, who were not good eaters, were getting a lot of attention because they were picky. So I chose coconut as the food I disliked so that I too could get that attention. I didn't have anything against coconut and we rarely had it, I just didn't what to be perfect. 

My Eyes

On Thursday I had another appointment, the left eye got more laser treatment and the doctor says it is good. The right eye detachment is not improving on its own so I had surgery on Friday to inject gas into the eye to push the detached flap against the back of the eyeball. The surgery used only local anathesia and I was sent home afterwards.  That went well and now I am scheduled for a check up on this coming Thursday and might start laser treatments on the right eye then. I have to lie down  lie facedown for a few days to get the gas treatment to work. Everything is going well.
 

11/28-1212/4 Eyes, cellulitis, monitors

My eyes

The treatment for detached retina is going well. I received the 3rd laser treatment on the left eye. That might be the last treatment for the left eye. The detachment in the right eye will be checked this Thursday to see if the attachment is proceeding or whether the gas treatment is needed. I am happy with my doctor and confident that he is doing the right thing.

When the attachment treatments are done, then I will get a new prescription to correct the vision in both eyes. I think for now, the doctors just look at the eyes to see how healthy it looks, then glasses will fix the final corrections. We'll see in a month or 2 what my ultimate vision will be.


New topic

This past summer I was treated for a case of celluiltus, which is an infection under the skin. Again, I don't know where this came from.. There was a lump on my face along the top of the jawbone from about the ear to the cheekbone. It was treated with augmentin 3 times a day for 5 days and the lump and tenderness went away. Augmentin contains amoxicillin which is same drug we used to treat Eli and Ely's ear infections 25 years ago.

When I noticed the lump and tenderness it was Sunday morning and I  went into the University of Washington Hospital Emergency Room for treatment. Five hours later, I emerged from the Emergency Clinic with the prescription  for $20 of augmentin which cured the infections.

What took 5 hours and ended in such a simple treatment? Showing up at the ER, they checked my insurance and when it all checked out the race began. I got: ultrasound, Xrays and a CT scan. I was treated by 2 interns, their supervisor, an Eye, Ear, Nose and Throat specialist and numerous nurses and technicians. It would have been a slow Sunday afternoon in the ER if I hadn't shown up, I believe in the five hours there, there were less than 12 other patients. All through the afternoon in bed , there was no worry on my part because if it was a serious case then there would have been a sense of urgency and there was no urgency in my treatment.

The best part of this story is that a month after the visit to the ER the bills from the hospital and physicians came in. $7500.00 in testing and diagnosis for something that was cleared up with $20 of amoxicillin.

Later in the Summer, I went for a perfunctory checkup to have my high blood pressure prescription renewed. I related the story to the young new doctor. He seemed to be quite impressed that such a simple case of cellulitus produced so much income for the hospital. He explained that patients with insurance are overcharged to compensate for those without insurance. He said there is a game of "chicken" going on between doctors and hospitals versus the government and insurance companies. Doctors will pump up their services to see if they are called on it by the government and insurance companies.

I feel conflicted by my doctors who are willing to shade the truth to make money but on the other side they are supposedly totally honest with their patients. How much does money effect their treatment? In pursuing two goals at once, at least one  goal is suboptimal.

Historically the American Medical Association (AMA)  (.i.e the doctor's union) has fought "socialized medicine" so hard that their credibility in the national healthcare debate is suspect. Despite how doctors are portrayed on TV in movies,  nore than ever I have a suspicion that they are in it for the money.


Monitors

With my bads eyes, if I can't control the font size I don't even try to read the text.  Most computer programs have some ability to increase the font size so on the computer I'm OK. 

On the hardware side the size of the monitor is another barrier. Cellphones are out for me now. Even a laptop screen is too small.

One solution is to hookup the large TV monitor to the computer(42 ubches).

Both the monitor and the computer usually have high resolution but the ports on the computer side and the monitor side are usually some variant of the old VGA standard. So the final resolution is something like 800x600. Certainly good enough for programing and email.

The most worthless key on the keyboard? Answer: the caps lock. It was certainly a holdover from the manual typewriters and it might have a use when the programming languages were FORTRAN, BASIC, COBOL, ... but we all have moved on since those days. I like to remove the cap lock key from my keyboards so I don't accidentally hit it.

11.20-11/27 Laser treatment, Life of Pi, XP usage

On the last two Tuesdays I have had laser reattachment on my left eye. There is still one laser treatment on 
the left eye this coming Thursday. Hopefully that will complete the treatment for the left eye.

The right eye detachment is still too large for laser treatment but is getting smaller. There are 2 options:

1. Wait for the attachment to improve and then use laser.
2. Do an operation that injects gas into the right eye that with push the flap of detachment against the back of the eyeball. Then at a latter date, use the laser to reattach can repair small tears.

The result of today's checkup was to wait another week before deciding among the 2 options. I's good that I am retired and have the time to wait.

Both eyes are still being squeezed by the belts placed around them in the first surgery. These belts will deform the eyeballs and I will probably be more myoptic than before. So when all the treatments are completed I will definitely get a new glasses prescription. We estimate that the process will last another 2 months. Patience, try to possess it.


New topic - XP Usage

Taiwan has lots of small businesses copy shops, drugstores, stationary stores, restaurants.  They use a computer for billing, inventory, email ... and they all seem to be running Windows XP. While Microsoft(MS) is pushing Windows 8, most of these uses have skipped Windows Vista and Windows 7 and will probably skip Windows 8 too.

I think most of this is due to the existing hardware and Windows XP being adequate and additional features from MS or extra speed and memory of new hardware are not needed. Also as long as the hardware is adequate, upgrading the OS will just slow down operations. MS has never been good about preserving the user's investment whether hardware or software. On the software side "backwards compatibility" is not in the MS vocabulary.

Question: What features of Windows Vista, Windows7 or Windows 8 can't you live without?

Question: What is the most useless key on the keyboard?

New Topic - "Life of PI"

This past Sunday a group of 10 of us went to see the movie "Life of Pi" which was directed by the Taiwanese director Lee Ang. I couldn't see much of the details, but the story was good. I think the second story of the survival is the real one, the one of the movie is the one to make life beautiful. I don't see how the story can make one believe in God. I do believe that we invent our Gods to make life more beautiful that it is. I recommend the movie, I plan to see it again when my eyes are better maybe I missed something.

The cost of "The Life of Pi" in 3D was about the equivalent of $11 US. The per capita income of US is about $48K versus $20K for Taiwan. So going to the movies is more dear in Taiwan than in the US. For the time we were there, it seemed that going to the movies was more like a date, with many couples dressed up.

Cheap Haircuts

100NT haircuts are pretty common now in Taipei. Here i am with my barber. The machine next to us is a dispenser. You put in a 100NT bill and you're given the next number in the queue.

11/13-11/20 surgery, magnifiers, apartment

Florence and I went to the emergency ward on Sunday(11/11) morning for the eye surgery. The operation lasted about 4 hours(so they tell me). Both eyes were wrapped in belts under the eye muscles, The belts are tightened to increase the pressure within the eyeball. Hopefully that pressure would push the flap of detached retina against the back of the eyeball. The left eyeball had the worst detachment and so a bubble of gas was injected into the left eyeball. When lying prone(face down) the bubble would rise to the back of the eyeball and hopefully push the flap of detachment agaisnt the eyeball. This was all done under general anesthesia
so I wasn't really there.

The bandages came off Tuesday morning. Although the doctor had warned me, my vision was less than what it was before the surgery. I could see blobs of light but no details, this was depressing. But after 2 days the vision in both eyes improved and I was discharged from the hospital. I still could see the gas bubble in the left eye and the bubble had correctly pushed the retinal flap against the back of the eyeball.

I left the hospital with a boatload of pills, drops and sauve. Puffy eyelida and red eyes. They say that at the Battles of Lexington and Concord the colonials were told to hold their fire until "You see the whites of their eyes." If I had been a soldier for King George, I could have walked right through their lines as the whites of my eyes were gone.

I could not read or use the computer without a lot of magnification. I blewup the icons on my desktop to be the size of a cellphone display. I used the high contrast Desktop settings, I used the onscreen magnifyer, I bought a black lettering on white keys keyboard(that helped a lot). I could stumble my way through email.

I now have an impressive collection of magnifyers:

The best is the handsfree unit:

In the meantime, our apartment is in good shape. We have the same apartment and landlord as last time. We have a good relationship so the landlord has really made some improvements. We are still in the Redlight district but close to Florence's relatives and now the MacKay Hospital. We have new windows, new curtains, a microwave, a new flat screen TV, a new couch and maybe even the same pigeons.

11/6-11/12, lost wallet, first lesson, single payer

This week something happened that I can't see happening in the US. Florence lost her wallet out of her fanny pack. The zipper was open and it just fell out. In the wallet there was a bankcard and maybe $150 worth of Taiwanese money. The bankcard has a 8 digit pin so the account was safe but then there would be all that hassle of reporting a lost card, waiting for a new card, new pin number ...

Then Florence got a call from the bank saying someone had turned in the card and that we should come to the bank and pick it up. It seems someone had found the wallet and turned it into their local bank. Then when we picked up the found card, the bank called the finder and the finder came to the bank with the rest of the wallet. We tried to reward the finder but she wouldn't take any money. She actually thanked us for showing up because otherwise she would have to go to the police and go through the hassle of reporting the found wallet.

Wow, in the US the wallet would be in the trash can and the money long gone!

This week I had my first class as an English teacher. My student is a manager at HSBC and a friend of one of Florence's nieces. We meet for one hour a week and concentrate on English conversation. But on my way to our first class I couldn't find her office! The street numbering in Taiwan is different than that in the US. I have written about this before:

http://mikeintaipei.blogspot.tw/2012/05/convenience.html

In Taiwan, the streets are on a NS/EW grid like in the US but the road that marks the boundardy between N and S and E and W is not always the same. Also the numbering is divided into even on one side and odd on the other. But in Taiwan, the numbering includes a "section" and so the house number rarely goes above 500 before a new section is begun.

So on my first day of class, I had the correct house number but I forgot that there had to be a section number. When I realized that I didn't have the complete address, I called the student and eventually got the complete address(it was Dunhua South Road, #199, Section 2). So when I called the student, she asked me where I was, I was so far in the wrong direction that she didn't recognize the local landmarks. One of the landmarks I thought she might remember was this one.

This "sculpture" encloses the Walk/Don't Walk LED display. This whole episode made me feel like a "horses's ass." That phrase is one of my mother's favorite, I had to look it up on the web, and yep it's exactly what I thought it meant.

Last year when Florence and I were in Taiwan, I applied for the Alien Resident Certificate(ARC). being the spouse of a Taiwanese citizen, I got it. It was a lot like applying for a Green Card in the US. The hardest part was collecting all the police reports, marriage certificate, ... and having them officially translated into Chinese. Then after 3 months of continuous living in Taiwan with the ARC, I applyed for the National Healthcare Insurance card. With the help of Florence and her relatives, it all went smoothly.

(The Taiwanese Healthcare Insurance Plan is a "single payer" system. That's one Obama almost immediately gave up on in his negotiations with the Republicans. Basically every citizen(or legal resident) pays a flat monthly fee,  currently the equivalent of $24. The government pays all medical bills and has a vested interest in keeping its citizens healthy. And the government can use the strength of a monopoly to weed out "bad apples" and providers that overcharge.)


So this time when coming to Taiwan I came as a legal resident not as a tourist or on a Student Visa. 10 days into our trip to Taiwan my eyes really started to fail, they had been gradually deteriorating over the Summer, but now I was becoming blind. I went in on Friday to the MacKay Hospital and they said it was bad, there was a followup exam on Saturday and on Sunday I was in Surgery.

10/29-11/5

I am back in Taiwan. This is the 4th year in a row that I am living 5 or 6 months in Taiwan.I put a lot of effort into the previous blogs but don't plan to spend so much time organizing and planning this time.
I reread my previous blogs at:

tainanchineseclass.blogspot.tw
mikeess-trip.blogspot.tw
mikeintaipei.blogspot.tw

now I am at:

mikeintaipei2.blogspot.tw

It's simpler to just do sequential weeks with random thought.

This week went fast, we got our apartment from last year and got setup quick.

Halloween was this week and although ghosts are popular in Taiwan, Halloween is not a big holiday. But there were a few in costume. Could be Riley's competitor.

As I've noted before English pronunciation has almost no rules, so in Taiwan you get some phonetically correct names that are propably spelling contest incorrect.

We went to a wedding last weekend, so many people taking pictures, I didn't get a good one. This was my best.

The wedding was setup for 270 people, you know with so many people the food can't be too good. But the

purpose of such a wedding is for socializing anyway. There was one new "wedding event", the bride chosse 10 of her friends and the groom chose 10 of his friends as teams in a drinking contest. Both had to drink beer from pitchers using a straw, the girls one pitcher, the boys two pitchers. I couldn't see who won.