The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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Notes -
A lot of things happening. So if some of you remember I was on dialysis (kidney failure) for like 10 months, decided to change career from vehicle engineering to basically finding a solution. Now I am in University Medical Center Utrecht, started a day after the transplant, trying to do just that. Its hard of course, creating a bio-artificial/engineered kidney. Harder still when you are so resource constrained, money being sprayed around in consortia with all sorts of other different ambitions and capabilities. But I feel like we are at a position to give a good crack at it. I say bio-engineered because there will always be some degree of bio-engineering, currently that might be simple, but in the future, maybe more extensive.
The current aim for me is an implantable hemodialyser, so something that can be implanted that will dialyse the patient without the need for an external blood circuit and so without the need for needles. This is like an intermediate point, half way line. If we can get this, patient mobility will increase, treatment quality also. More patients will be able to dialyse at home for instance, which is good given how pressed the nursing situation is!
I want to develop a minimal prototype by May 1st. So a lot of hours in the lab, I feel like with the printers and resins we have, we are in a good place to do this. But it requires a shit tonne of optimization and bashing ones skull in to the printer casing I feel. Just the other day I moved the printers in to another room, and physics stopped working. I had prints come out good at first, then wonky later. Turns out that I was not in the grips of delirium, but the lights in this room were emitting too much UV and poisoning the resin. Took quiet a while to figure that one out, now I am mainly in the dark :D
This is all happening in the background of a fundraiser/awareness campaign I am planning for the summer (May 15- October 15). Where I will be doing 41, 4000m peaks through hard routes. I have also invited other people to do their own challenge, hike, climb, walk, cycle, whatever it may be. The idea is inspired by my own experiences in the mountains and the National Donor Monument, which is called 'The Climb' the website is www.climbagainsttime.org. In any case, naked advertising aside, it took quiet some time to knock this together, not on the code side (gpt helped a tonne), but the communication side. Its very hard to communicate things via the web form I find. Presentations I can do, but web, its hard to give enough information but not too much. In any case, now comes to hard part of getting people involved, networking, social media presence etc. So quiet a lot of stuff, because in the end, I at least want to make some noise, money is nice, but not essential.
And also, if I am putting my neck on the line (or spine in this case), I want it to have some pay off, high-risk low gain isn't too desirable. But I do remind myself of the Scottish song 'Will ye no come back again' from Alastair McDonald, he says 'although the cause was ill fated and hopeless, the sentiment is noble and chivalrous and self-sacrificing ' referencing the Jacobite uprising. So I take some solice in that!
I will try to keep updating here on the progress and other details. I said I would keep a dialysis diary here but only managed like 3 weeks, so lets see how far this one goes
Sounds rad, looking forward to summit reports.
Videos and reports! I want to document everything. The thing I really want to do is keep an alpine diary but its always hard to write while you are on 'tour' because you are one of: tired, eating, sleeping, or climbing and nothing else :D
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