Day +7 12-July-06(Wed)

My Blood Count Today:
Red Blood Count (RBC) 93 (Normal 130-180)
Platelet 12 (Normal 150-50)
White Blood Count (WBC) < 0.1 (Normal 4 - 11)

Sorry for the "Siaran Tergendala...(Broadcast Interrupted...)".

While I was in the midst of red blood cells transfusion, I started to shiver at about 12:00am. The nurse suspected it might be due to the reaction to blood transfusion, but I have no history of such reaction due to blood transfusion. I personally know that I am getting fever. The shivering lasted for about 6 hours. I am not allowed to take panadol as it will affect the accuracy of body temperature measurement.

Whenever I started to shiver, I dictated Psalm 23 and Psalm 121, which stopped the shiver miraculously. However, when I rise to pass urine and then lie down, the shivering started again, and I started to dictate the two Psalm chapters again and the shivering stopped. These was repeated many times until about 6:00am, the shivering stopped. I really thankful to the night duty nurse who took great care of me during the difficult time. At 5:00am, the temperature went up to 38.8°C, they called this a "spike".

The normal procedure initiated, the doctor in charge was called in to take blood samples from the 3 catherters from the neck and from one of the arms. No blood samples were taken from the 2 catherters lumen from the right arm. May be because they are not in use.' After the blood samples ware taken, the nurse started to administer iv antibiotics called Tazocin to me. Chest X-Ray also be taken. Then later of the day another iv antibiotics called Vancomycin, which was redrawn the next day when it was confirmed that some types of bacteria were not found in the blood culture. Therefore, I am now receiving Tazocin only. The antifungal, most probably Cancidas will be used only after second "spike". Hopefully this second "spike" would never happen. I was given another single donor pack of platelet.

I was weak and bedridden throughout the day. No appetite to eat. My sister and my wife prepared some home cooked barley drink for me.

At night, I gained some strength which I thought should be enough for me to blog something. When I turned on the notebook computer, I notice that it was also down with some kind of "fever" which make it unable to boot up successfully. It is suffering from "perpetual-booting" syndrome which means, it try to boot up, when the Windows XP logo appeared, it then showed me a blue screen with a lot of description in less than one second and then started to boot again. How could we human read such a lot of information in less than one second? Microsoft must be joking! At least leave the message longer enough for us humand to read or let us pause the message by pressing "break" or "space" or "p" keyboard button. But I tried so many buttons it still just flashed the message to me and then go into its business of next cycle booting.

It is really like playing a reaction game. I have to stare at the screen and once the blue screen appeared, I quickly hit "break" button and only found out that this "break" button does not work. Then I waited again, try many other possible buttons including the space bar - because that is normally used to shoot in computer game, but it does not work as well. It is really frustrating, if there is a "reformatting" button, I would definately press that one to end the story. I guess the engineer who design the boot process must mistakenly thought that the message is for machine to read. But the common sense is, if it is for the machine to read, why show it to us :-( However, the engineer must not be blamed, it must be my ignorance of handling this situation.

The next big question is how to stop this "perpetual-booting" syndrome. I press the "Power" button, it did not work. I disconnected the notebook from external power supply, the notebook carried on its booting business happily. I thought I would just leave it until the rechargable battery get exhausted, then it would stop. But when I thought of this notebook doing this crazy thing, I could not sleep. The next thing that I could do was to pull out the battery and it would sure stop. If it still continue doing the crazy thing when the battery was pulled out, then it would not be frustrating anymore, it would be a big discovery, a discovery of a "Perpetual Machine" - a machine that could generates energy from no where. Anyway, this type of machine had been proven impossible to construct long time ago.

I suddently remembered that if I needed to shutdown the running notebook by force, I should press the "Power" button long enough until it shut down. And you know, it worked and I went to sleep peacefully.