elizilla

The next gadget after the nerve zapper, is the Hypershell Exoskeleton. This is something completely different. There is a frame that belts around the waist, and metal struts connect it to cuffs that buckle above each knee. There is a little electric motor on each hip, powered by a battery in the shape of a fanny pack. It is controlled by a phone app. It detects what the wearer is trying to do, and helps them.

The manufacturer insists that it is not a medical device. They market it for recreational use. They suggest that if a couple enjoys hiking but one is not strong enough to keep up with the other, this can even the score so they can enjoy hiking together. Or if you just want more range, or to carry more stuff. Not a medical device! But there are end users talking it up online, for MS or Parkinson’s. I would guess there are two reasons the manufacturer disclaims medical use cases. One: Companies aren’t legally allowed to make medical claims without doing peer reviewed studies and a shitload of paperwork. Two: Liability blah blah blah.

Since it is not a medical device, it’s much cheaper. Not dirt cheap, but at under a grand it is a pricey toy, instead of something people mortgage their house for because the insurance denied it. And there are no medical gatekeepers. But I still think caution is in order. If I were more fragile it could get pretty risky.

So, how is it?

I don’t feel like a marionette or anything. The software is really good and my movements feel quite natural. Things are just easier to do. I notice I hold myself more upright when walking with it. It doesn’t make any noise. Great that I can wear it outside my clothes, and there are no electric shocks.

The fit could be better. I am at least six inches taller than an average woman and most of that extra height is in my femurs. If the exoskeleton were longer, it would have more leverage on my body. I am also a bit over the official max weight. It isn’t uncomfortably tight, but there isn’t any extra room either.

It has a bunch of modes for walking and running and stair climbing and stair descending. I wish it had a mode for standing around but it doesn’t, so standing around is still hard. It also doesn’t do anything for foot drop.

I like it and I am trying to walk a little with it each day. More about that later.

Nerve zapper:

I sent the new nerve zapper back. It did not fit me properly and would not stay in place. On to the next gadget!

Solar:

We got our March DTE bill. We generated slightly more than we used, in March, but still drew down our excess generation bank a little bit. Our balance stands at $9. We should see our bank grow next month, so I guess we have gotten through the winter for free despite our month long outage!

Our local installer is really good. Since SolarEdge was unresponsive, they ordered an inverter from a local wholesaler for us, and installed it Monday. Despite it being the correct part number, it did not talk to our battery, only the power generating and grid tie stuff worked. The service rep came back Tuesday and worked on it some more, and got SolarEdge on the phone, and eventually discovered that it was mislabeled and not the right part. Then he learned that without telling any of us, SolarEdge had shipped the warranty inverter and it had just arrived at his office. So he went back to base, got it, brought it out and put it in, and it worked.

We are back up and running.

The warranty inverter must have already been shipped, even while SolarEdge was refusing to say when they might ship it. Our installer had their time and money wasted, getting the mislabeled new inverter from their wholesaler and installing it here only to swap it again the next day. I hope they can get some compensation from SolarEdge for their trouble, but I have been enough of a squeaky wheel already; I will let them duke it out without my input.

Our smoke detectors have been chirping intermittently at night for the past several days. They are wired and when one goes they all go. New batteries did not help. And every time you try to do anything to any one of them, they all go off. It has disrupted Scotty’s previously perfect litterbox record. He is terrified and has been hiding in the smallest places he can find to crawl into, but there is no escape from the sound.

The internet says that this unstoppable chirping can be due to age. Apparently smoke detectors reach EOL at ten years. Our house is ten years old.

So this afternoon, Scotty and I are sitting in the car while Steve replaces all six smoke detectors. It is warm here and we can’t hear the alarms.

The new ones have a ten year battery, and claim to be less susceptible to false alarms.

Here’s hoping Scotty won’t ever have to hear another alarm.

Update: Unfortunately Scotty suffered two more rounds of alarms last night. One when Steve was disposing of the old alarms. And a few hours later the damn chirping started AGAIN. We had missed a CO detector. It’s no wonder so many people don’t have smoke detectors. The mystery chirping that is so hard to troubleshoot, the disturbed sleep, the poop cleanup. It sure is hard to remain committed to them.

Remember the nerve zapper I had, about ten years back? It was a cuff that fastened around my leg, that gave a tiny electric shock to a nerve that controlled the muscle that lifts the front of the foot, making that muscle fire. Because MS is a disease that damages neural pathways, and my gait troubles are due to my brain not being able to send impulses down specific neural paths, like that one.

That nerve zapper actually helped a lot with my walking. The problem was, the way it determined when to fire, was using a sensor in my shoe, which irritated the heck out of my foot. It was like having a rock under my heel. The spot where it had to be placed, got all inflamed. I was never able to devise an insole that allowed the thing to work, without irritating the skin on my foot. And it was a hassle working with their one representative, who made house calls across four states with her proprietary firmware editing machine that was needed for every tweak. I stopped using it.

I keep an eye on the new technology coming out, but these type of adaptive devices are always many thousands of dollars (nonrefundable) that insurance doesn’t cover, and knowing how small difficulties can make them useless, I haven’t been willing to roll the dice again.

Well, technology, fintech, and the disease have all marched on. I have multiple troublesome nerves now, but the worst are still in the left leg and foot. A device has come out that zaps multiple nerves to work multiple unresponsive muscles, and does not have the problematical shoe sensors. In our increasingly app-controlled and telemedicine and subscription world, they are promising more finely tuned control using a phone app, and more support (remote of course), and instead of paying thousands up front it is a couple hundred bucks a month for a subscription that includes the device, the supplies, service, and upgrades. No long term contract, cancel if it doesn’t work and the monthly payments stop.

I decided to try it. If it works well enough for long enough that I spend more on monthly fees than I spent up front for the last device, I will call that a win. If not, well, I won’t have to regret the massive sunk cost. There were a few hurdles but they weren’t too rough. No one had to come to my house from another state. I had to take my own measurements, send a video of my gait, and get my neurologist to sign a prescription.

I got email, my device has been programmed for me and will ship next week. Wish me luck!

(I wonder if the ultimate form this technology will take, is that it will get much tinier and be surgically implanted? I bet the zaps could be much smaller and less, well… shocking, if they were right on the nerve instead of having to pass through the skin. Maybe someday I will be a bionic woman, for real.)

Better late than never. I got my Covid shot yesterday. I am being very careful to avoid falling today. So far so good.

7:47pm: It’s amazing how hard the post-vaccination malaise hits, and how suddenly it passes. As usual it is not even a whole day. Suddenly I can feel the malaise lifting. This is how it always goes. I had the jab at 3pm yesterday and was fine yesterday evening. I felt the malaise hit, not long after I lay down in bed last night. Tonight I will be fine.

Most importantly, I avoided falling. Victory!

Wow, I haven’t posted in ages. What has happened since July?

The mosquito traps worked well. The CO2 didn’t seem to change much. We have put them away until spring.

When we bought the lot behind our house, we agreed to leave it as a pocket wilderness. But I didn’t think that would last, and it didn’t. Steve spent the whole summer cutting things down. So I ordered 400 bulbs for him to plant, and he did. Then I ordered a lot of native wildflower seeds, which are supposed to be spread on frozen ground so they can cold stratify. We will see what we get, next spring.

My dad went on a cruise and came back with a nightmarish wound on his foot. I was afraid he would lose the foot, it was that bad, but it seems to have healed, whew! He has also had other health adventures. A melanoma on his face, and a thyroid nodule that they say is cancerous. Getting old is not for sissies.

Clara had a bladder infection and had to take a course of pills. We got through it and it cleared up. Carmello has become reluctant to spend much time outside, now that the weather is cold, but he still hasn’t visited the litter box in the basement. He hasn’t made any messes indoors, but until he shows he knows where the box is, we have to chase him out a couple times per day.

We had two more freezer-not-closed incidents and lost a lot of food. We got a new fridge. It’s an inverter compressor which should be quieter. And we got a new mattress. And I bought a new mobility scooter that can go over bad ground. My credit card bill is huge and I need to not buy anything more for a while.

We have a basic refrigerator with a bottom freezer. Twice in the last two weeks, the freezer has failed to close properly. The first time we discovered it relatively quickly, and only a few things seemed to be affected. But last night, we discovered it when everything was a squishy soggy mess. We ended up pitching almost everything.

The cleanup was exciting too. The evaporative tray overflowed and we had to sop up a lot of water from the floor, then open the back to sop up the water inside. At least we discovered it before the floor took any damage.

Then we went out to eat since our meal planning was hosed.

We could not find any damage to the seals or latches. We are hoping that after our careful cleaning and re-leveling, this won’t happen again. We have had this fridge since 2016 and never had this trouble before.

While cleaning up the evaporator tray, we discovered (and removed) a large reservoir of cat fur and other debris in a spot we hadn’t realized was trapping it. It seems to have quieted it down a bit and will no doubt save energy, so, yay for that at least.

The road closure at the corner was supposed to last three weeks. It has been four months and the street is more torn up and blocked than ever. There are two barricades with big signs saying ROAD CLOSED TO THROUGH TRAFFIC. However the sidewalk is still open and the bicycle/pedestrian traffic through there is heavy. I think there are a lot of people like us who enjoy watching the construction, and others who hope to walk/pedal a route with fewer cars, so they choose to come this way.

The other thing we are seeing regularly, are huge tractor trailer rigs that come down here, passing both the ROAD CLOSED signs, only to get stuck. It’s quite a show watching them struggle to back up, around a curve and a 90 degree corner, past parked cars, on a narrow tree lined street. There was one rig that was probably the maximum legal size that can travel without an oversized load banner, that got stuck in here for four hours. Poor bastard had two giant trailers. Eventually some other guys arrived to help him drop one trailer and guide him as he backed the other out, then come back to pick up and back the second trailer. And while this was going on, the library was hosting an event with free ice cream, so he was backing up while hundreds of kids were swarming around. Yeesh!

So I have been wondering… Y’know those mapping apps, like Waze or Apple Maps or whatever, how they track phones moving around to find routes? I wonder if they are tracking phones carried by pedestrians and bicyclists, traveling that sidewalk by the hundreds? And sending other users down here because, based on the mobile phones that go by, the road looks like it is open?

Maybe this is why those big rigs keep driving past the signs.

I bet the other streets coming into Main from this side, which are open to cars, have no more phones than we do, moving no faster. It is slow crossing this neighborhood, in that direction, even in a car.

Last Friday we signed the papers to buy the landlocked vacant lot behind our house. We have been hoping to buy it for years and it finally became available. It’s just a quarter acre, and with no street access it can’t be built on by anyone who isn’t a neighbor.

It has been neglected since long before we came here, so it is like a pocket wilderness right in the middle of town. We don’t plan to clear it, but Steve has now bushwhacked a path through it, and punched through to the alley behind. The alley dead ends back there and the last hundred feet are even more neglected, no one could drive through there. But when Steve pushed through, the back neighbors all came to meet him, so now we know people over there that we never met before.

Based on the topography, we had already guessed there is some fill back there. But Steve is learning more about the type of fill. I suspect we will be putting more in our trash can, every week.

This is how we became gun owners, yesterday. I don’t think it’s a serious gun, or in a repairable condition. But we will drop it off at the police station and let them deal with it.