L’azile

Yesterday, I attended the annual assembly of FACIL, a non-profit dedicated to the promotion of open source in Québec. It was fun as I got to see some people I had not seen in a while and I also got to put some faces on names I have seen go by on the FACIL mailing list or people with whom I had only communicated through e-mail until now.

It was a good meeting and it was refreshing to note what I got the feeling was real interest for an organisation. I mean that, for those of us involved in promoting one cause or another, we all go to annual assemblies in the course of those involvements and it often turns into a chore or, at best, an obligation. But yesterday, I felt that these guys were genuinely into it. And despite there being a rather touchy subject on the agenda (the future status of Linux-Québec) and differing points of view, it was all rather quite friendly and very respectful of each other’s positions.

Continue reading… fork in the road

When I was a teenager, I spent a lot of time in hospital and aside from the orthopedics ward, one department I ended up spending a lot of time on on a fairly regular basis was what we would call the teenage medicine ward (sounds better and seems more appropriate in French - médecine adolescente - but whatever). Among the regular types of patients on this ward were a lot of kids with severe asthma or cystic fybrosis. It was often the same ones being hospitalised over and over again throughout the years and they were usually very sick.

Of course, I only had a theoretical understanding of what they went through but for some reason, I always felt especially bad for them. I would often see them being pounded on their chests several times a day by inhalotherapists (what they call chest percussion therapy and what we here, in our grand tradition of using English as slang, called “clappings”) in order to loosen the mucus in their lungs, or having to sit there and breathe through something called a ThAIRapy Vest, or just coughing and coughing for what seemed like forever in an incredible effort to expulse some of the deadly mucus from their lungs and hopefully gain a few hours of peace. I found the whole thing rather tragic and, always having had an inexplicable fear of not being able to breathe or of choking (indeed, dying out of breathe seems to me like one of the worst ways to go), I would not have traded my condition for theirs no matter what (though, to be fair, I have rarely heard of any person with a disability ever seriously wanting to trade their own condition for another).

Continue reading… breathless

This expression has always amused me in its conceptual representation and I find it unfortunate that it can not be directly translated into French. I have never been amused however by what it stands for.

It has now been almost a month since I had my hip surgery and while convalescence has been challenging at times, in the last week or so, I think that things have indeed gotten better. The pain is much more manageable and the long incision left from the surgery is for the most part healed. In principle, in a couple of weeks, I should be able to start rehab.

Continue reading… phoning it in