I have a little bruising around the incision that has started to go down over the past couple of days.  He said it should be completely gone within a couple days.

Unfortunately, he said I would still have some swelling around the incision for another month.  Its not swollen that much right now, but it does bother me from time to time.

I am pretty much back to normal with very little pain.  When I wake up in the morning, or get up after sitting for a while I am a little sore but once I get moving I am fine.

Oh, and the doctor also told me that my hernia was pretty big.  He said it was no wonder it was bothering me.  He also said that I have had it since birth.

Unfortunately, I was/am still sore from my hernia surgery so that held me back from doing some things.  I go to see the doctor for the follow-up surgery on Tuesday this week.  I believe he will basically just look at it and tell me I’m good to go, but I will be sure to update you all on that.

I AM VERY PLEASED TO ANNOUNCE THAT THIS POST IS MY 200TH POST SO FAR ON MY SITE!!!  THIS IS A HUGE MILESTONE FOR MY WEBSITE IN MY OPINION.  I FIRST STARTED BLOGGING ON THIS SITE IN SEPTEMBER OF 2005.

I am hoping I am not too sore this weekend from my surgery last week so I can enjoy it.  Unfortunately, yesterday was probably the sorest I have been since I came home.

Everything went good before the surgery for the most part.  Of course I didn’t enjoy the IV part too well, and the antibiotics they gave me through it right before the surgery made my arm hurt a little bit.

I was in the outpatient recovery area for around an hour and a half before they took me upstairs to the Operating Room area.  There I waited for around 20-25 minutes before they took me out of there to the surgery room.  While in this room the doctor who did the surgery talked with me and answered my questions.  He also prayed with me which was kind of nice.

They gave me the option of either being put fully out or being left awake and put on local anaesthetic along with relaxing medicine.  I choose to be put fully out since I didn’t really like the idea of being awake for the procedure.

According to my parents the surgery took around 30-45 minutes.  The doctor told my parents that I had a pretty good size hernia and that it was apparent to him (somehow) that I have actually had it since birth.  The doctor said my muscles there were very strong so he didn’t need to use a mesh to repair it.

After I woke up I felt a little sick but was in pretty good shape.  I got out of surgery around 9:45 am and left the hospital around 1:20pm.  They gave me a vicodin pill to keep me pain free for the ride home and also gave me a prescription for vicodin.

Another cool thing they did was they gave me a medicine ball that had a long IV that went under the skin at my incision.  This thing gave me a pain killer at a steady dose of 2mg/hour for 2 days until we removed it per instructions.  The only thing I did not like about this was I had a huge ball taped to my side which made sleeping even harder.

After I got home I pretty much slept the rest of the day.  I was awake for a few hours around 10-12pm but went back to bed after that for another nice long nap till the afternoon the next day.

It really wasn’t till around Sunday night that I felt like getting up and moving around any.  On Monday I was starting to think I was getting back to normal but after I woke up on Tuesday I noticed the area around my incision was starting to become black and blue.

I was pretty sore on Tuesday and took it very easy.  I am hoping when I wake up tomorrow morning (Wednesday) that the bruising and swelling have gone down, or at least don’t get worse.

I have stopped taking the vicodin as of Monday and have been taking 2 Tylenol’s every 4 hours for the pain.  They actually said I could take 2 Tylenol’s and 3 Advil’s every 4 hours for pain after I stop taking the vicodin, but I think that is a little overkill (close to overdose) so I haven’t done that.

Well, that’s all for now.  I am going to attempt to go to school again tomorrow, but I am going to have my parents drive me.  Hopefully I am able to do that.  I should post here again in a day or so to update on my condition further.

Hopefully all will go well.  I will post again after the surgery as soon as possible, but I will probably want to come home and go straight to bed so it may be a while.

This will be my third surgery in my lifetime so far, and hopefully one of the lasts for at least a long while.

Well, I’ll probably post again in the morning right before I leave just to say if I’m nervous or not.  Hopefully, I will feel like posting after the surgery also.

I’ve had my blood taken for these type of tests so many times in the past that it doesn’t bother me at all really. After this, my surgery will be this Friday.

This will be my 3rd surgery, so I am not new to this whole ordeal. The only thing I do not like about having surgery is when they put that IV in you and start sending salt water (or whatever) into your veins. For some reason this really bothers me and is actually very painful (the water going in that is). Last time I actually almost passed out from it.

My first two surgeries were on my back to fix my scoliosis and the second was to remove a growth from my head.

They gave me a new/refurbished unit that looks great, and seems to be 100% new. Its works great and I am very happy with it.

They also gave me a 1 month free subscription card to Xbox Live as their way of saying sorry (of course Xbox Live should be free to start with).

Anyways, I guess this ends my posts about the Xbox 360 repair process. I hope any of you having to go through the same process have found my posts to be helpful.

CURRENT TIME SINCE I STARTED REPAIR PROCESS: 14 DAYS (FINISHED!!!)

I am writing this post just to alert you all of something they did that could affect others.  A day or so after they ship the 360 back to you, they will remove the link to the tracking number from their status page.  Therfor, I urge anyone to write this tracking number down once it is posted because at some point they will remove it.  Luckily for me, I had it in my history.

Again, this is the tracking number for when they are sending it back to you.  Make sure you write this down once its on the site, because after a day or so they will remove it.

Rather than that, this process is going very quickly and very nicely.  The status page shows they extended my full warranty on the 360 another 3 months which is nice.

CURRENT TIME SINCE I STARTED REPAIR PROCESS: 13 DAYS

UPDATE:

You actually can still get the UPS tracking number for the return I found. However, you have to go to that page where you enter the repair service number and your zip code. If you go to it that way, they will still give you a link to track it.

For the most part, my chest pain from my costochrondritis is gone, thank God.  I still occasionally have a little bit of tenderness that causes pain in my chest, but it is nothing like it was a few weeks ago when it was so bad I actually started to cry in pain.  My stomach is also not bothering me at all really anymore, and most importantly, no more diarrhea.

I also had some problems with my sinuses.  It felt like I had golf balls under my eyes because they were so swollen inside.  This has also went away.

My eyes seem to be getting a lot better also.  I was having some bad pain in my eyes and it was causing me headaches also.  They were very red on the sides and were very troublesome.  They are getting back to normal color now and I can see fine again…. Well, for the most part.  I do believe I have a slight issue in my right eye seeing things from a distance.  Mostly, I just can’t focus with that eye to read things far away like a road sign that I can see clearly with my left eye.

I think this means I might be ready for glasses and will probably go to the eye doctor sometime soon to have a checkup that I am, really, long overdue for.

My only issue now is I have a slight sore throat and it sometimes feels like I have something stuck in my throat which is also very annoying.  This has gotten better over the last couple of days though.

For the most part I seem to be back in good health, thank God.  My only obstacle now is my surgery next week on July 18th (a week from this coming Friday).  If you haven’t read or know already, I have a hernia that is going to be repaired.  This is an outpatient surgery and I should be back to normal after only a couple of days.

I will be sure to post probably right before my surgery and afterwards to say how it went.  This will be my third surgery I’ve had in my lifetime and I’m not really scared or nervous about it at all.  My first surgery was on my back to fix scoliosis.  The second was to remove a growth from my head.  This, my third, will be to fix a hernia.  Hopefully, this will be my last surgery I need for a long time.

This means My 360 (or its replacement) is already on its way back home!  I suspect though, since they did it so quickly, that they replaced it.  I should probably have the unit back by tuesday I think.

CURRENT TIME SINCE I STARTED REPAIR PROCESS: 9 DAYS

I understand today being the 4th of July though that they are probably closed.  Plus they probably don’t do anything over the weekends either.  So, we’ll see.  Their website status thing has not updated yet to say they have received the unit, but UPS has confirmed delivery.

CURRENT TIME SINCE I STARTED REPAIR PROCESS: 8 DAYS

It took them 4 days to get the box to me, which isn’t all that bad really.

CURRENT TIME SINCE I STARTED REPAIR PROCESS: 4 DAYS

Anyways, I restarted the system and it frooze again right off the bat before the game even loaded.  Restarted it again and it frooze with lines all over the TV, kind of like how the NES use to look on your TV after it would freeze up.  Rebooted again and this time, nothing.

I now have nothing displaying on the TV, and I have the infamous Red Ring of Death (RRoD) that seems to plague these consoles so much.  Luckily, this is covered under warrenty and I have already done the online process of getting it repaired.  Looks like I wont be playing my 360 for the next month.

Hopefully they send me back my same unit, all fixed, and not some refurbished unit as I have taken very good care of mine.  I’ll be sure to update later, probably in a month or so, on how this process went so others can know what to expect when this happens to them.

Last month I got really sick.  I didn’t feel like eating for days and was having severe stomach pain.  I thought it might have been related to my hernia that I have had for many years so I decided to tell the doctor about that.  That lead to me seeing surgeon who has scheduled me to have it surgically repaired on the 18th of July.

Anyways, sitting aside the hernia for now, when I was sick last month it led to them doing some x-rays because they thought it was my gallbladder.  Luckily, it ended up not being the problem, nor could they find any other reason.  After a few days I got better and pretty much just forgot about the whole episode.

Well, a couple weeks ago while sitting in church I started to feel sick again.  It wasn’t all that bad and I was able to sit through church despite it.  After church I seemed to be fine and didn’t feel sick again until Monday morning.  Then I started getting really sick.  In fact I didn’t eat for almost an entire week.  This led me to see the doctor which told me I had a viral infection and basically would just have to wait it out.  He told me if I was not better within a couple of days to come back.

I actually waited five days before going back because I still was not feeling good.  This time he ordered blood tests, stomach x-rays, stool samples, and a urine test. I complained to the doctor about diarrhea and chest pain so he gave me some Tylenol with codeine for the chest pain and something else for the diarrhea.

The doctor claimed my chest pain was probably from straining while coughing because of being sick, but I told him I had really not been coughing.  About a week later, and two or three days removed from taking the codeine, my chest pain started getting really bad again.  This time so bad I was crying.

I went to the doctor again that day because the chest pain was so bad and I told the doctor it was very sensitive to the touch.  He told me I have what they call costochrondritis, which is where the cartilage around my ribs and sternum become inflamed.  He gave me steroids, antibiotics, and xanax (to help calm me down from the pain).  For the most part, the steroids did a wonderful job of getting rid of the pain after a couple of days.

The doctor also ordered a EKG and a chest x-ray just to be sure it wasn’t anything more than costochrondritis that was causing me my pain.  Luckily for me, these tests came back good.  He told me prior to the tests that since the pain could be made worse by putting a little pressure on my chest that it wasn’t any internal organs, like my heart, causing it (although that is what I thought it was when I went in).

Well, today I went back for the follow up from last week.  Turns out now I have a sinus infection that is also causing my eyes to be a little blood shot.  So now I have been given prescriptions for eyedrops and more antibiotics to get rid of that.  This makes seven prescriptions that I have had in the last couple of weeks.

Basically most of this is just from a viral infection, but my costochrondirtis is something the doctor said today I may just have to live with.  He told me since my scoliosis that I have has my body all out of whack that it is probably going to cause off and on flare ups of my costochrondritis from time to time.  Luckily he said most of the time advil should alleviate it but I will probably end up back at the doctor again in the future needing steriods again for really bad flare ups.

This is also probably the reason I ended up in the ER about four months ago when I was having really bad chest pains.  So I am now kind of releived to know what is causing those.  Now I just have to hope this sinus infection goes away soon because it is really irritating.  Basically it is really swollen under my eye right now and feels like a golf ball is there or something.  Luckily though it feels more swollen that it actually is and is not really noticable unless you are looking for it.  The doctor told me that is normal that I would feel a lot more pressure, or swolleness, than is actually there.

I guess my next obstacle is my hernia surgery on the 18th of next month.  Hopefully I have no more reasons to go to the doctor before that.  Thankfully, all my tests I have had done came back negative for any thing, so although I have felt pretty miserable for the past couple weeks, I guess I am healthy and can thank God for that.

The only real bad thing about all of this is it caused me to miss almost two full weeks of school, and we just started a new quarter so I missed some pretty big weeks.  Hopefully I can make them up pretty easily.

I will have it fixed on Friday July 18th of this year.  I have to be at the hospital at 7am and the surgery is at 9am.  I am actually sort of looking forward to getting this fixed as it will be nice to no longer have it.  The surgery is an outpatient surgery and the doctor said I would go home between 1-2 hours after I wake back up from it.  The surgery I guess takes around one hour to complete.

This will be my 3rd surgery so far.  My first surgery was in 2002 to fix my scoliosis.  I had another surgery in 2006 to remove a growth from my head.  Surgery doesn’t scare me at all really, especially since my major back surgery I had.  Nothing can be as bad as having back surgery (at least I don’t think).  The only thing I hate about surgery is the IV they stick up your arm.  For some reason I tend to not react well to those fluids (I think it is just salt water) being put in me.  Last time I had surgery I almost fainted when they started that IV.

Anyways, I am also starting to get over being sick.  I have been pretty sick with a viral infection (according to my doctor) over the past week.  Today I really ate for the first time since sunday (6 days ago).  I had a really bad stomach ache, headache, diarrhea, and chest pain.  The chest pain I guess was from the viral infection.  I was given tyolnol with codine to help get that away, which also helped get rid of the diarrhea.  Although, it actually just constipated me instead.

Well, that’s all for now.

You could make your blog check my list when someone tries to comment on your blog and if they are present in my list, you can stop it before it appears on your site.  I hope this serves some purpose to some people.  Remember, this list will continue to grow every day.

Click here to view the list 

By clicking the new Site Info button at the top of the site, you can now view stats that are specific to my site.  These stats, however, only show minimal information.  Plus, these stats only include hits to my wordpress (what runs my site) portion of my website.  Therefor, it doesn’t include hits for like images, downloads, or other stuff.

I may eventually release this as a stats plugin for wordpress.

As of right now, if I only get my Associates I am now half way through.  I was advised to try to get a job by my school after I get that and hopefully whoever I get a job with will send me back, and pay for, my Bachelors.   Either way I want to get my Bachelors, unless I get a really good job right out of school and figure it a waste of time and money.

So far I am really liking ITT-Tech.  They have great teachers, a great facility, and I actually get to apply what I learn in labs.  This is a big step over Ivy Tech that I started at in 2005 which had almost no hands on stuff.   I know I get a lot of people landing on my site searching about ITT-Tech that are considering going there and I must say I recommend them.  I know a lot of bad stuff is said about ITT-Tech on the Internet but I haven’t found any of it to be true really.

Well, hopefully a year from now I’ll be posting about my graduation

Till next time…

Overall my site saw 40341 hits with 6274 unique hits!  That last part there is a new record! 

That means that 6274 different people visited my site last month.  Granted some of those are bots, like google, but most of them are real people.

I really don’t know the reason for the high success…especially since I didn’t even post in February … but I think this is good motivation for me to spend some more time updating my site.

The fees are bad but that is not what gets me.  The possible 21 day hold and the feedback thing is making me quit.  I will never ship an item until I have the funds available to me, so if I did sell and eBay/PayPal holds my money … simply put, I will not ship until its released.  Then there’s the feedback rule, basically you can’t do anything to the buyer anymore.  They can, and will, extort you anyway they wish.  Sad thing is, we have no way anymore to tell other sellers of these cases.

I hope I can find a good alternative to selling my stuff, maybe Amazon.com?

Click Here to view the site

If anyone has found this post via google and is interested in helping me out with this site, please do leave a comment and make sure to fill out your actual email address. I will get back with you. I need people to help with the site, documentation, and forums at the moment.

I have already hacked this thing, so now it has a fully function media player on it also.  It plays great looking movies and has excellent sound.  Supports tons of media formats.

Here are the complete specs of this device:

Here is an image of it