Doom, gloom and failure.
Since it is now 3 to 6 months since the implants were placed in my jaw, I went yesterday for them to cut open a portion of my gum again (albeit a significantly smaller bit than last time) to expose the implants. Unfortunately when the consultant came to unscrew the cap which covers the top it became apparent that one of the implants had not “taken” and was just spinning in the socket they had drilled for it. As a result the implant had to be removed, and I’m now left with a hole which has been packed by some crazy medical material.
The other implant is fine and exposing that one went to plan. I’m now left considering whether to re-try the implant route (which will now involve referal to yet another hospital and a bone-graft operation) or to have a “reversible bridge” (which can be removed if I later decide to retry the implants). Having spent the best part of 5 years undergoing this treatment I am very disappointed it failed like this. I am now leaning to the bridge option as it will most likely take a month rather than another year, or more, of treatment although it will probably be less robust and may fall off in years to come.
I saw my third year project tutor this morning and had a productive discussion with him about the likely technical difficulties which may arise giving my presentation. As a result I went to see one of the system programmers who suggested that I e-mail the unix help address and requested a project account which can be allocate a small port range I can use to run my projects listening server on the undergraduate server and connect to it from both my Laptop (which will be running Windows, for the purposes of the presentation) and the provided Red Hat system. This sounds really promissing.
Development as always is progressing, but perhaps not quite as quickly as I would like. As I am now pouring almost all of my free time into the project there is not much I can do to speed things up. That said, I am more-or-less on my (revised) schedule for implimentation and am confident about having it complete in time for the presentation.