My Sudden Trip to the Hospital
What a long string of days. I recently had to get my appendix removed quite hastily due to complications What follows is a long post about my trip to the hospital, my first surgery ever, and the events that transpired through the days. I am still recovering and unfortunately will have to miss a week of classes. I wrote this post up for my own sake and for anyone interested in my experiences. I cannot stress the importance of health insurance and friends and family.
Thank you to everyone who helped me get through this nightmare. On early morning this Wednesday, after spending my night like usual, working on my projects and school work all the way into 4:00 AM (I should really stop that), I headed to bed, proudly finished with my goals. Enjoying a dream about sailing through the air, I was awakened by the strongest and most painful stomach ache ever conceived.
There I was, withering in pain at 6:00 AM, hoping the horror would end, laying in fetal position for hours. The pain knocked me out cold. After the worst night of rest ever, I woke up to find that my right side of my stomach was not too happy with me. I quickly used the internet and found what’s called the McBurney’s point and pressed my finger on it and sure enough, it was tender. I freaked out and called my dad to help me relax.
After the phone call I wanted to still get some rest as I had a long day ahead of me for school. Unfortunately my stomach was in disagreement with my decision and decided to form a rebellion and siege war against my side. It was then that I struggled to get up and drive myself to the Evergreen hospital in Redmond. I was quickly rushed into the ER and nurses started to poke me with questions and needles. They were really nice and tried their best to distract me while they hooked up IVs and did blood work to me. After a very easy CT scan, they confirmed my fears, I had appendicitis.
They booked me for surgery in less than an hour and drove me over to their other sister hospital in an ambulance. They told me I’m staying for the night.
This was my first ambulance ride and soon my first surgery ever. I was scared and alone.
They prepped me up for surgery and I called my parents. My parents got the last plane out of Austin and would arrive to help me at midnight. Before I knew it, I was put asleep and the doctor went to work on me. I got an appendectomy. The doctor was a pro. I awoke double vision and three new cuts in my belly. Luckily, the appendix did not burst.
While dazed and shell shocked, the nurse told me that I had a visitor. My best friend Zak worked his way to visit me after my surgery. That made my night. He stayed with me and kept things lively. A good thing too, as there was nothing on TV and I couldn’t sleep because of the constant checks of my blood pressure and the pain. He kept me from thinking and worrying too much.
Oh, when they moved me on to my bed for the night, they used a hover pad and slid me over gently off the stretcher. Yes, this entire hospital facility is the future.
Time flew by and my parents landed and got settled in with me. I dozed off and on, but things were looking up. The doctor let me know that my white blood cell count was improving and that I would be able to leave the hospital by noon the next day. Most of my time was spent waking up, falling asleep, and getting up painfully to use the restroom.
My friends and family helped me through it all and I was very happy to get home and rest some more.
Until… my mom started bleeding and my dad had to rush her to the hospital as well. Freaking out and unable to help, I had to just rest and hope my mom would be okay. Luckily she was given proper treatment just as I did and she was home and back to normal. She almost has a blood transfusion which would had been incredibly bad.
To make matters worse, I also got a message from Ry (Mr. Sunabouzu) who told me that his mother was also rushed to the hospital for blood loss. She is in critical care as of now and my condolences go out to him and his family. Yeah, a lot of bad things happened on Thursday.
To wrap this up, because I really should be resting right now, I have to point out once again the importance of family.
It’s near Thanksgiving and my 23rd birthday is this upcoming Tuesday. I am so grateful for my family, friends, teachers, nurses, and everyone on Trello who helped me get by these awful times. I am recovering very fast and I hope to be in full health after the Thanksgiving break.
I hope everyone has a lovely break this Thanksgiving and will spend all their time with their family and be glad for everything this world offers.
So I have been busy working on GMod Tower during summer, and it’s finally available to the public once again!
Including that, I have posted a video of my latest game - Zombie Massacre.
Thanks to Massaki for the trailer video.
I’m Sick
It’s been awhile since I’ve updated my blog, that’s mainly because of finals and mostly because of negligence. Those go hand in hand. Eitherway, I’ll try to keep this old thing going considering I’ve been getting a few new followers. Thanks everyone.
As my title says, I’m sick at the moment. Visited my nephews for the holidays and they gave me a wonderful gift - a cold. Or it could have just been the temperature of my room. I need something to blame for this dreadful sickness.
Programming Final (platforming game)
I’m working on a multitude of projects. My latest work was for my programming final, which you can play here. I got inspiration from Diamond Hollow 2. The assignment took me about four days. The engine was provided for me, but I changed a lot to make the game play as it does.
Secret Project: Elevator
I’m also working on a project called Elevator. It’s a secret project that me, Foohy, and Mr. Sunabouzu are working together on. Sun’s been in charge of doing all the art assets along with Foohy. I’ve been handling the coding (not much to code, though). Because of its secreticy, I’ll be able to only provide a few public images we’ve put out. All art is credit to Mr. Sunabouzu, who did an excellent job.
The game, a GMod gamemode, should be coming out pretty soon.
Verlocity Update
Recently I’ve been doing a lot of work on Verlocity.
I’ve optimized the engine and really polished it out nicely. I added a new physics forces system (which after release I’ll continue to add more features like actual physics bodies).
I redid pretty much all of the core engine parts mostly due to bad design choices I made in the past. Don’t worry - it’s all moving along nicely. I just haven’t had the time I had in the past. Luckily the holidays have been kind (other than the sickness) and I have had time to work on it. You can stay up to date on Verlocity here or on www.verlocityengine.com.
Couriette, and other projects
Lastly we got a team together, the guys who I worked with on Opus and Sunabouzu and Foohy. We were working on a adventure platformer called Couriette. Sadly, due to the set back of the engine - we’ve had to put that project on hold until Verlocity is ready.
Particles!
Recently, I had a class assignment that told me to make a particle system. So I went full blast at it. Turned out great!
Went waaay above and beyond the assignment requirements, but I loved making this.
Basically I’m doing a bit of particle pooling, creating all of them when you first load it, then just recycle the dead ones (the ones that aren’t being rendered anymore). This allows for a really efficient particle system. I also used the linked list structure for the particles. Then I went ahead and created emitters and a lot of different features, which are noticeable in the demo below.
I learned a lot from making this, and as such, I’m going to be remaking it from scratch again and creating a new component for Verlocity: verParticles. It’ll have support with sprites and some other planned features I wasn’t able to create for the above demo.
This is my fan made music video of Jeesh’s amazing Nemo remix. I just loved the track so much I had to make a video to go with it.
You can find more about Jeesh by following his Soundcloud at:http://soundcloud.com/jeesh/
You can also find his Nemo song at: http://soundcloud.com/jeesh/nemo
Verlocity Engine Website
We now have a website for Verlocity! Here’s all the links to become part of Verlocity’s community:
Verlocity Wiki, Verlocity Forums, and Verlocity Code.
I’m still working on the main website and also the Wiki. Mind you the engine isn’t yet released, but you can easily track when that will happen very soon. I’ve also published an ‘indev’ version of the engine (on google code) if you want to go try it out before the official release!
Big thanks to my friend Foohy, as he has been helping A LOT with documenting Verlocity and its Wiki.
One of the coolest 8-bit songs I’ve heard in awhile.
A screenshot of my latest mapping project for Phoenix. It’s a large, new-age condo.
I’ll have some more updates on Verlocity later in the week. It’s gotten quite far - one of the reasons I haven’t been updating my blog is that it has been taking a lot of my time.
The demo previously mentioned now in video form.
Switched to Away3D yesterday, have been playing around with the engine for a bit.
Away3D is completely open source and also has a ton more features than Alternativa3D.
What you see in the picture above is Verlocity’s 2D layering system working with Away 3D.
