28 September 2014

Installing PostgreSQL 9.4 beta2 on Mac OS X 10.9.4 via MacPorts

After reading the blog post from EnterpriseDB about how Postgres Outperforms MongoDB, and because I have always preferred PostgreSQL to other databases, I had to check out the document handling capabilities that PostgreSQL has added recently.

Because I began using a newer computer this summer, I had not yet installed PostgreSQL. So I pulled up a previous post about installing PostgreSQL using MacPorts and did some searches to find the latest PostgreSQL. Below are the commands I ran.

First, I needed to figure out what the latest version of PostreSQL is in MacPorts:

This allowed me to see that PostgreSQL 9.4 beta2 is the latest version supported by MacPorts. So I embarked upon an installation of this version:
This install went off without a hitch, so I created a directory for the database and initialized the database:
From the ouptput of the installation, I copy/pasted the startup command and sent it to a file. I did the same for both the start and stop commands so that I have scripts to start and stop PG quickly:
After starting up PG for the first time, I opened another terminal in another tab to watch the log file to see if the database was started correctly:
Then I pulled up the docs via the local install of them (file:///opt/local/share/doc/postgresql94/html/index.html) and started digging into the document database support to play around.

27 September 2014

I Can Sqeeze My Butt! :: Bruce Snyder's Status

Two weeks ago I awoke to the discovery that I can squeeze my butt again! Those of you who read my last blog post know that I have paralysis across my butt and down the outsides of my hamstrings and that in that post I said: 
'Even if the movement of my feet does not return, I really wish that I could regain the feeling in my butt and the ability to squeeze the muscles so that I could build them back up again.'
Well believe it or not, I got my wish! I could hardly believe it myself! I was still lying in bed on Sunday morning when I made the discovery. I was in such disbelief that I laughed out loud and woke up Janene. As she heard me she bolted upright, bleary eyed and said, 'Are you OK?' Still laughing I told her I can squeeze my butt and we both could hardly believe it. Even though it was a very small squeeze, it's a sign that the healing is starting to take place. 

Technically the muscles in the butt are the gluteal muscle group as shown in the diagram comprised of the glueus maximus, gluteus medius and the gluteus minimus. The ability to squeeze these muscles is controlled by nerves that connect impulses sent from the brain, down the spinal column to the muscle to cause a contraction. The fact that the nerves have healed enough to allow me to squeeze them is a really good sign, it means that my body is healing itself. 

The squeeze was very small and quite weak but it was a start. Because these muscles have basically been dormant for five months means that they are terribly atrophied and therefore extremely weak. But even in the two weeks since this movement returned, I have been working the muscles to build them back up and the squeeze has only increased. At this point, it's not a huge increase, but as my Mom always told me growing up, 'Slow and steady wins the race.' 

Who thought I would be so happy for such a minor thing. But when I experienced such a devastating injury that forever changed my life, I learned very quickly to be happy for what I still have, as I have mentioned before. Now it's just a matter of working these muscles regularly via rehab to bring them back to life. Speaking of rehab, I also made a big change on this front last week. 

Changing My Rehab 

Since being released from Craig Hospital in June, I have been going back to Craig for rehab. After all, it is a world-renowned hospital for spinal cord and brain injuries. When I was first released from the hospital, my Dad was still in town and was driving me wherever I needed to go including to rehab at Craig Hospital. At first, I was going to rehab at Craig three times a week. It helped a lot to be in close contact with my physical therapist and to continue seeing my friends there. But it didn't take long for me to really get tired of making the 90 mile round trip and sitting in traffic for 2.5-3+ hours each time we made the trip. Remember, this was when I was still exhausted all the time and this drive only made things worse for me. I also got wise to the fact that insurance companies only pay for a certain number of visits. So I decided to keep doing my rehab at home and only check in with my PT at Craig once a week to more or less maximize my PT visits. For a while this worked, but because I am now back to work full-time, even making the trip to Craig once a week sunk a lot of time and I didn't get a lot of benefit from a one hour appointment once a week. So I began looking into other options including the Boulder Community Health's Mapleton Center for Outpatient Rehabilitation and also a company what specializes in spinal cord injury (SCI) rehab named Project Walk

Project Walk was especially compelling to me because it focuses on rebuilding the muscle mass that SCI patients lose from the injury and hospitalization. The professionals at Project Walk help patients to design a workout specifically for them and their situation to focus on their own goals. My ultimate goal is to walk again without the need for braces and crutches, and although this is dependent upon my body and its ability to heal, there's a lot that can be done in the meantime to get my body ready for more movement to return. I applied to Project Walk and received a call back within a day and began talking to them. Everything sounded great and was very much in tune with the way that I have always enjoyed pushing myself in my physical fitness, but there was one catch -- they wanted me to come to their San Diego office for three weeks. The problem with this is that I am just too busy at work right now with recruitment duties for open positions and I don't feel like I can put this on hold for three weeks. Because of this, I decided to look into a more local solution in Boulder for now. 

Boulder Community Health has an outpatient rehabilitation clinic called the Mapleton Center. A dear friend of mine who experienced a spinal injury a couple years ago went here for his rehab and told me that they really helped him. So I paid them a visit and got an evaluation by a PT who worked at the Spaulding Institute in Boston prior to coming to the Mapleton Center. Spaulding is a rehabilitation clinic out east that is well-known for its SCI program. So this week I began doing rehab at the Mapleton Center to see if this PT can help get me to get on the road to a more rigorous workout that will help me work toward my goals. This certainly doesn't mean that I have ruled out Project Walk, in fact, it is still very much on my mind. 

In speaking to Project Walk, I have learned that this place is a premier rehab clinic for SCI patients. Based on 10 years of medical research and partnering with hospitals and universities, Project Walk is like not other rehab clinic I have discovered. And although they originally wanted me to come out there for three weeks, in speaking with them they suggested that perhaps we could condense it to a week and just work a lot more hours while I'm there. Furthermore, I also learned that they are opening a clinic in the Boulder/Denver area in March 2015. So I'm kinda thinking that I need to see how things play out at the Mapleton Center before traveling to Project Walk in San Diego. If I can attend PT in Boulder for a while and then go to Project Walk in San Diego, perhaps I can be ready to take on even more when the Project Walk clinic opens here in the Boulder/Denver area. 

Dinner With Gareth and Mike 

This past week I had dinner with my coworker Mike O'Donnell and his buddy Gareth who helped me as I laid suffering in the street right after the accident. Not only was it was wonderful to see Gareth again, but this time with a clear head, it was also great to have dinner with my co-worker Mike who I really like. I learned a lot about both Gareth and Mike that night and I really enjoyed our time together. Spending some time with Gareth in a social setting really clued me in to who he is and I discovered that we have a lot in common in terms of the way we look at the world. Gareth also told me about a fascinating book that I'm just beginning to read now. 

Books

Anyone who knows me knows that I'm constantly reading something. I'm always on the look out for new books to read and, in fact, I even keep a list of books in a notebook in Evernote (which I use for everything now). The book Gareth told me about is titled, Biology of Belief. This book is about how new research shows that our DNA does not control our biology, instead our DNA is controlled by our positive and negative thoughts. Certainly this topic is of extreme interest to me right now because of my medical situation. I don't have much to say about this topic yet because I haven't read the book yet. But suffice it to say that I am reading and trying everything I can get my hands on at this point to help heal myself. 

When I told Janene about this book, she said it sounded similar to one recommended recently by a co-worker titled You Are the Placebo. This book is about how one's brain and body are shaped by their thoughts, their emotions and their intentions, not the other way around. Again, a captivating topic for me right now so I plan to read this book next. 

Perhaps these two books will help me move from the hope of more movement to the real belief that I am going to get movement back and I am going to walk one day. After all, I did tell Project Walk that my goal is to walk, but my dream is to one day cycle and run again. 

20 September 2014

More Yak Shaving to Install Git Via MacPorts But With MacOS X Mavericks

After performing a fresh install of MacOS X Mavericks on two computers recently. Because of the reinstall of the OS, I also had to reinstall a bunch of other tools including git. In doing so, I realized that the configurations that I had in my old .bash_profile would no longer work correctly and so I had to update the location of a couple files. 

I blogged about this previously so I had already done some research about installing MacPorts on a computer and I knew that I'd need to install the command-line tools for XCode first. So I installed XCode first using the App Store and then followed the instructions to install the XCode command-line tools. Once these were installed, then I was able to proceed with the installation of MacPorts. 

So I downloaded and installed MacPorts, ran sudo port selfupdate followed by sudo port install bash to get the latest version of bash. So that the OS can make use of this newer version of bash, I added it to the On MacOS X, I added the path to this newer version of bash to the /etc/shells file. To actually make use of this updated version of bash, I had to make my terminal aware of it. I always use iterm2 instead of the Apple terminal, it's just so much more powerful. So I changed my profile in iterm2 to launch this version of bash by adding the bash login command to be run when iterm2 opens a new terminal, /opt/local/bin/bash -l. Now when iterm2 starts up, it logs in to this newer version of bash automatically for me. Now I'm ready to install the git tools. 

To install git, I run the following command in the terminal that I've always run to install git via MacPorts: 
Unfortunately this was unexpected, but the answer is right there in the error -- instead of installing git-core, just install git. So I ran the command again with a different name for git:
This got further but threw another error about the readline utility, so I had to force activate the readline utility. Beyond that, everything installed correctly.

However, the git bash completion didn't seen to work. I was seeing the following error from my .bash_profile when the bash prompt was getting set up:
bash: __git_ps1: command not found
It turns out, because the name of git in MacPorts was changed from git-core to just git, the paths to some of the git bash completion had changed as well. All I really had to do was update my .bash_profile from this:
/opt/local/share/git-core/contrib/completion/git-completion.bash
to this:
/opt/local/share/git/contrib/completion/git-completion.bash
and everything worked correctly.

13 September 2014

Discovering a New Normal :: Bruce Snyder's Status

I know it has been a while since my last blog post, but I've been rather busy lately trying to find my way again. I know I have said this before, but having such a traumatic injury has really changed my life. It's not only the physical changes of being in a wheelchair, but there are many other things have been affected about my life and my family. Because I have not blogged in a while (shame on me), this post is full of a variety of topic swirling around in my head right now. 

Family Leaving 

Since the accident back in April, my family was here in our house helping us with everything. My parents were here most of the summer and Janene's mom Susan was here for four months straight. We have had numerous other family members visit, but these were the mainstays. As of a couple of weeks ago, everyone has left including Susan. At first, I kinda felt like my safety net had been removed. She was always here for me since the accident, willing to help me with anything. But I have quickly discovered that although I do need help with tasks, if I take my time I can do many things myself. For example, yesterday on my way home I ran a bunch of errands and had to make five trips in and out of the house to get everything out of the car. Prior to the accident, I could have gotten it all in a couple of trips. It's just another adjustment. 

Air Travel 

Back in August, I was able to take my first trip involving air travel. I only went for one night to my company's office in Chicago. Everything went very well, but it was not easy to sit on the plane for two hours without moving much. Unfortunately I wound up with a middle seat so I wasn't able to easily get up and out of my seat, but I did shift around as much as space would allow and I made it successfully. It really made me realize how much I move around during the day what with standing, shifting around in my wheelchair, sitting in other chairs, etc. This was a good test as a first trip involving air travel. I'm certainly not ready to travel to my company's headquarters in Munich, Germany yet, but I will eventually need to build back up to making this trip. 

Driving 

Although Janene and I have always vowed not to buy our girls a car when they each turn 16, almost dying in a tragic accident can really change your perspective on life. While I was in the hospital recovering, Janene told me that I was going to need to buy a new car because our oldest daughter Jade was going to be driving my car now. My response was essentially, 'But what about what we talked about and agreed upon?'. To which she responded, 'Bruce, you were nearly killed in this accident. Life is too fucking short to hold back on such things.' This definitely gave me pause and has really shaped how I look at life now. This is not to say that we have thrown out all reasoned arguments and discussions, more that we believe as parents we should be developing an environment of trust for our kids rather than holding things back from them. Also, just to put this into perspective, my old car is a 2001 Nissan Maxima with ~150k miles on it. So we're not talking about a care that is even close to being new. 

Anyway, one thing that has really changed is the way I drive a car now. Being that I'm no longer driving my car and I still need to get a new one, in the meantime, we decided to have hand controls installed in Janene's car. When I was in the hospital I learned to drive with hand controls. After over 25 years of driving a car using the foot pedals for the accelerator and brakes, because I have no movement in my feet, I now have to use hand controls. It's a handle on the left side of the steering wheel and is easy to use, it just takes a bit to get your muscle memory to begin thinking in terms of the hand control vs. the foot pedals. Using the handle, you push to brake and pull down to accelerate -- it's really that simple. There's also a removable metal foot plate that keeps my feet from bumping the real accelerator and brake.

Since mid-July, I have been able to drive myself to work every day. The great thing about driving my wife's car is that it's Toyota Highlander, an SUV. This means that I can put my wheelchair in the back of the car without breaking it down (i.e., taking the wheels off of it, etc.). Because I'm lucky enough to be able to stand and I can now walk with the braces on my legs if I have something to lean on, I have taught myself to lift the wheelchair into the back of the car and then make my way along the driver's side by hanging onto the car and kinda shuffling along. It has been a liberating feeling to be capable of driving myself to work and running some errands around town.

The Fucking Health Insurance Industry

I know this is a bit off-topic, but it has been incredibly frustrating to navigate the insurance industry bullshit. In my life, I have been lucky enough to be a very healthy person and rarely ever needed to utilize my health insurance. Since this accident, I have been extremely grateful to have good health insurance. However, I have also discovered that there seems to be some super secret list of things that health insurance does not cover or that they are somehow required by some fucking insurance credo to give you a difficult time about. There's nothing quite like a hospital hounding you personally for a bill of nearly $400k because your health insurance keeps stalling. We had to chalk up the $2200 installation fees for the hand controls as an out-of-pocket expense -- and that's just one of the many costs that come out of own own pockets. I'm extremely fortunate to have a very good attorney to help me navigate the insurance industry. As he has explained to me, insurance companies get stuck between their own policies and the laws of different states. All I know is that without my attorney, I would be going mad right now.

Walking With Arm Crutches 

Several weeks ago, I got some new leg braces. This might not sound very exciting but for me it is because they allow me to balance so well that I can stand in place without holding on to anything. Taking off walking is still out of the question right now because I'm still weak from the muscle I lost from being stuck in a hospital bed and a wheelchair. So for now, I'm able to walk using leg braces and balance with arm crutches. I certainly won't win any races, but it is such a wonderful thing to be six feet tall again. I realized this before and even blogged about it, but because I'm six feet tall when I stand, I'm actually taller than many people. But having been in a wheelchair for a while now means that I have been much shorter than everyone around me. I can now be eye-to-eye with people again while speaking with them which is very liberating. I can also hug my girls and Janene again without the wheelchair being in the way. I'm not walking full-time yet but I'm pushing myself to do it more and more and have been standing up for longer and longer periods of time throughout the day. As nice as it is to be my full height again, it still sucks to rely on the arm crutches because I can't carry anything. Sure, I can wear a backpack and take, say, my laptop from room to room, but I can't just carry a glass of water or a dish of food to the dinner table. Hopefully one day.

At least now I can stand more easily and I'm getting stronger. This means that I can begin to cook some things again. Something that I have always prided myself on is cooking for my family. For years now, I have been the primary cook in our house just due to Janene's work schedule. I have really learned to love cooking for my family over the years and it is something that I have missed since my accident. I'm not able to cook a huge meal yet, but smaller things here and there. I'm hopeful that with increased strength, this will get easier. I'm also enlisting Bailey (11) and Jade (16) to help me with many things, especially cooking. 

Discovering a New Normal 

For those of you who have been following my blog posts, you already know that my spine is now crooked. To date, I have been able to alleviate much of this problem by putting a lift in my right shoe. But whenever I'm not wearing shoes I am crooked again which is rather frustrating because it throws me off balance entirely. I hope that as I continue to build strength that my body will learn to compensate more and more. But this is just one of many small things that I am learning to live with now.

I also have paralysis across my butt and down the outsides of my hamstrings. This paralysis affects all of the gluteal muscles so that I cannot even squeeze the muscles in my butt. The result is that I have no muscle tone in my butt and this makes it very difficult to sit on certain surfaces for very long. So I need to be very careful about the surfaces I sit on and I cannot sit on most chairs, even if they are soft. On my wheelchair, I have a special cushion that contains multiple chambers of air. I also have a thinner more portable cushion that I can use on standard chairs and in the car. Even if the movement of my feet does not return, I really wish that I could regain the feeling in my butt and the ability to squeeze the muscles so that I could build them back up again.

Another difficulty is the difference with my bladder and bowels. When you have a spinal injury, depending on the level of the injury, it's very common to have changes in the function of your bladder and bowels. My situation could be a lot worse, but still the nerve damage has affected both bladder and bowel control. Luckily I can feel when my bladder is full or when I need to go. This is great because many people with spinal cord injuries cannot. Unfortunately I cannot pee on my own, so I must use a catheter to drain my bladder. Furthermore, my bowels are just not the same as before the accident so I just need to be more conscious of when I need to go. So I have had to learn to manage this whole new set of challenges. 

Janene did a wonderful job of installing various ramps around the house so that I can get around on the main level of our home, but I'm still not able to easily climb stairs. So we had to move our bedroom to the main level until I recover enough to get upstairs. We have set a goal for end of the year for me to get back to our master bedroom and bathroom on the second level of our home. This goal is about gaining back enough muscle to be able to climb the stairs more easily than I do now. At the moment, it seems like a far off goal, but I have been surprised at the changes I have seen in the last three months.

To address the rebuilding of muscle, I'm also looking into some new rehab options now. I feel like I've been sitting and waiting, for what I don't know. So I feel that it's a good time to ramp up my physical therapy to focus on rebuilding the muscle mass that I have lost. Not only will more rigorous workouts encourage more healing of the nerves, but it will also prepare my body for the time when movement does return. Instead of having some movement return and still being extremely weak, my hope is to help my body rebuild itself to where it was prior to the accident and be better prepared for the movement to come back.

I think the most difficult thing for me has been the amount of help I need with so many things now. Previous to my injury, I enjoyed helping others with various tasks and I was extremely independent with anything I did. Now I'm the one who needs help. This has really been difficult because I went from such extreme independence to a fair amount of dependence. My family and friends are wonderful about providing me the help I need, but I have never been someone who needed help. I always enjoyed providing help to others. Now the shoe is on the other foot.

I still have some not so good moments when my emotions get the best of me. I guess I haven't been meditating as much as I did when I was hospitalized and I need to change this right away. I guess in the hospital I had the time to do so and now, being back to work I don't have so much time available. It has been amazing to me that having gone through such a life change you kinda go through a grieving process for the things you have lost. Anyone who knows me knows how physically active I tend to be -- cycling, running, hiking and general fitness was a big part of my life. Needless to say, this is all on hold right now until I determine if I will regain movement in my feet or not. It's really a wait-and-see situation because nobody can predict what will happen. Everyone's injuries are unique and everyone's body heals differently. I'm still very hopeful that I will regain movement.

There are many other small things involved in my new normal. Although my life is full of new challenges, I still feel very fortunate that my situation is not worse. I try to be as independent as possible and I continue working to rebuild the strength that I have lost.