Oof… what a week. I ended up in the emergency room on Friday, and things took an unexpected turn from there.
On Friday just after lunchtime, I got my first-ever migraine with aura, but not knowing what it was — couldn’t read anymore as the letters danced, and had trouble seeing my face in the mirror — I rushed to the ER. It wasn’t a stroke, luckily.
But as I sat in the ER waiting area after triage, I got quite nauseous. Fellow patients saw I was not OK and called the nurse. This incident turned out to be an occurrence of Wolff–Parkinson–White syndrome (WPW), which makes my heart beat so fast that it effectively stops pumping, depriving my brain of oxygen and making me pass out. Or worse.
WPW is what I had been seeing my cardiologist about for the last few months, but they weren’t able to find anything concrete. Here at the hospital, though, they saw it happen first-hand and could get all the detailed readings.
Tomorrow (Monday), I’ll get the final diagnosis and then also a (small) surgery to fix it, forever.
I need to underline how extraordinarily lucky I am to have had such severe WPW symptoms right in the emergency room, while visiting for a wholly different reason.
Last Sunday at the local Filmmakers and Movie Nerds meetup, I pitched the short film screenplay Respite (which I wrote about last week, in Weeknotes 2023 W39: Respite) and now there’s a director who’ll turn it into a short film. It’s a no-budget one (as far as I know — I’m not super involved), but I’m amazed that this is happening.
I was pushed to direct the short film myself, but I just have no time — especially if I am meant to be producer, too. I wouldn’t have had time even without the hospital visit. But I’m sure there’ll be a chance in the future to produce and/or direct a short film myself.
Also ironic: I wrote my first (short film) screenplay in exactly the week that the WGA strike ended.
Earlier this week, I found this gem of a street sign:
It makes more sense when you look the house numbers right below the street name. But still.
Entertainment:
-
My gaming PC now has an SSD (2 TB), which makes a huge difference in more demanding games like Cyberpunk 2077. SSDs are so easy to install, too. Should’ve done this earlier.
-
Cyberpunk 2077 is still buggy even with the SSD. Less buggy, but still buggy.
-
I’ve got tickets to see Sungazer in November! Come with me.
-
I picked up the book Drive your plow over the bones of the dead, by Olga Tokarczuk. It’s so nice. I’m going fast with it, so that I finish it before watching the stage adaptation by Complicité in Hamburg later this month.
Links:
-
⚧ LIBRE FONTS BY WOMXN, because typefaces have this tendency to be designed by men.
-
The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Must Know About Unicode in 2023 (Still No Excuses!) (Nikita Prokopov)