It appears that I haven’t posted anything here for a year! There are some mitigating circumstances though.

TL;DR; I didn’t die and I have a new job.

The Build Up

Coincidently, about a year ago I started to struggle with my mental health. Initially I didn’t worry too much as the onset of winter and the clocks going back always adversely affects my mood, and living in Scotland makes this worse as it gets lighter later and dark earlier than when we lived further south. Normally, I would expect for my mood to pick up in the new year when the days lengthen and its safe to go outside again. But this year it didn’t, I don’t know why, maybe working at a university wasn’t as much fun as I had hoped it to a. Certainly it turns out that just being called a research software engineer didn’t make as much of a difference to my quality of life as I had hoped it would. I struggled on until Easter time (which was clearly a mistake with hindsight), when it became clear to everyone and even me that I needed to take some time off. So anyone who was hoping to meet up with me at GISRUK I’m sorry but I really couldn’t face travelling or meeting people. I spent much of April in bed sleeping while I waited for a bigger dose of anti-depressants to kick in (this can be between 6 and 10 weeks, on top of the fortnight to wean off the previous ones).

I also started taking Manjaro to help with my weight and diabetes along with a tailored exercise program, so by the end of May I had lost 10 kilos and was feeling pretty good about life in general. Then …

The Incident

As many of you will have heard I suffered a significant health issue in early June when my colon decided that it had had enough and decided to start bleeding unexpectedly. I went out for dinner one evening with some friends from university and the next thing I really knew was I was in a critical care ward with the staff explaining to me again and again that I was unwell. Between the loss of blood and morphine I was handling this information very poorly. This confusion wasn’t helped by the fact that I knew the Royal Victoria Infirmary (RVI) in Newcastle very well from my student days as we used to use its historic corridors as a (dry) short cut to and from the university most days. This hospital was clearly much newer and shinier than the one I remembered. It turns out the old one was knocked down and replaced by student flats some years ago.

I had to come to terms with a) having nearly died (though I don’t remember), b) no longer having a colon and an Ileostomy and having a scar from waist to sternum (held together with massive staples) and c) having a stoma bag attached to me (most of the time).

Anyway, after 10 days or so I was considered well enough to move to a normal ward, though I promptly let my blood pressure collapse and was moved back to ICU for some magnesium, but eventually I was well enough to transfer back to Scotland. I can’t say I recommend travelling up the M74 in an ambulance but it was good to be back near to home, especially for Lesley.

After another week on a high dependency ward in East Kilbride (since I had transferred from ICU as there were no “normal” beds available for me to take in Newcastle) I had to go into an HDU bed (I know). I was easting normally, finally, and could walk from one end of the ward to another (lying in bed for a fortnight really kills your muscle tone) and I was allowed to go home.

Early the next week I went back for a stoma clinic checkup and the nurses took one look at me and decided that maybe I should visit the ambulatory emergency unit (despite, or because, needing a wheelchair to get there). They promptly readmitted me as my blood pressure was down below 80, which explained why I wasn’t feeling too chipper. I spent a few more days in hospital being given IV magnesium and antibiotics to sort out my blood pressure and inflammatory markers. Things could have been worse, the guy in the next bed had a gall stone the size of a tennis ball taken out of his intestines as it had bored its way out off his gall bladder. The surgeons were very excited and had taken pictures of it to show him.

Recovering, took much longer than I expected though all the medical staff kept saying how tough an operation was. This meant that I wasn’t well enough to travel to Mostar for FOSS4GEU which again was a shame (especially since I had been organised enough to actually book travel and hotels in advance). So again sorry if you were hoping to catch up with me there.

The Recovery

My contract at Glasgow ended at the start of October, which was about when my doctors were becoming happy for me to go back to work. I had half heartedly filled out some applications for new university jobs and dumped my CV on various job sites. Though to be honest I was really looking forward to being able to say in January that clearly I was unemployable and should consider retirement. Sadly (or happily) I got a call from a recruiter who seemed desperate to hire me (but couldn’t really say why). He was offering a quite silly amount of money with the only catch being the need to incorporate. So, I agreed to an interview and it turned out to be with a system integrator who was working for His Majesty’s Land Registry (HMLR) who maintain the English and Welsh cadastral register. Quite why they were so keen to hire me was still unclear but I said yes to a six month contract. When I started at the HMLR it became clear why they wanted me, they are trying to update part of the register (the only vectorized part) from a proprietary format that was developed by Envitia (who I had worked for back in 2011-15) and were trying to convert to a PostGIS DB using GeoTools to build a Java tool.