| Technical Support for Life |
|
|
|
| Monday, 21 January 2008 | |
|
I've been spending lots and lots of time feeding my cat. Approximately 1/3 of my life actually. He has an esophageal tube inserted into an incision in his neck and secured with sutures. Every three hours, I feed him for 1 hour. Last night, I missed two feedings. I guess the alarm clock has been sounding too much like the alarm clock and I've ignored it. That's a problem. The treatment for feline hepatic lipidosis is a large volume of food in a short amount of time. The prescription calls for 240ml of an antioxidant and development food, plus 200ml of water and a host of meds and supplements every day. The most I can inject into his feeding tube at any one time is around 5ml or he'll vomit. For the sake of the cat's survival, I decided this afternoon that I needed some help staying focused and efficient in the feeding. I run Ubuntu Feisty on my desktop computer and I have a bunch of tools at my disposal. Never having considered myself a programmer, but having some experience in administration, I went for a comfortable bash script. I used:
Basically, it works like this: At some time, the computer speaks: Thirty seconds pass and the message is repeated. This is loud enough to be annoying. You get up out of bed, rub your eyes, look at the clock. Groan. Walk over to the computer, respond "1" to the on screen prompt "Are you here?". The script proceeds to ask you what your name is, how many mLs of food and what meds and supplement are included in this little treatment. It then determines how long it will take you to administer that amount of food, tells you how long you're in for, and asks you to respond when ready. All of this information is written to a log file. When you say go, old old school videogamey beeps sound at 1000Hz 2000Hz and 1500Hz. mike again speaks: "Please give Snowball 5 milliliters of fresh water now" More beeps follow. You do as instructed. 4 minutes later, the food begins.
This repeats every 5 minutes until all of the food is gone. Following this is another request for water to flush the tube. The terminal asks to report any problems that were encountered during the feeding. For his finale, mike offers even more help:
Using 'at', the system schedules a time to restart the script and wake you again, just a little too early to allow you to hit rem again before getting up for work. Here's the code!#!/bin/bash #Set the volume using my "normal" script /home/sley/bin/normal #Set the logfile log=/home/sley/snowballfeedinglog clear msg=$RANDOM cd /tmp #Init a var to determine whether or not Steve is awake. present=0 while [ $present -lt 1 ] do #Say what time it is. Repeat while presence is something less than one echo "Its `date +%I`:`date +%M`. And its time to feed the kitty" echo "Its `date +%I` `date +%M`. And its time to feed the kitty" > /tmp/$msg.txt cat /tmp/$msg.txt | text2wave -o /tmp/$msg.wav lame --quiet /tmp/$msg.wav /tmp/$msg.mp3 mpg123 /tmp/$msg.mp3 2&>1 /dev/null rm /tmp/$msg.* read -t 30 -p "Are you here? [Type 1]: " present done #Get info and log read -p "Please type your name: " name read -p "How much food does Snowball eat now in milliliters?: " milliliters read -p "Are you giving the nausea medicine? [y/n]: " naus read -p "Are you giving the Amoxidrop? [y/n]: " amox read -p "Are you giving the Vitamin solution? [y/n]: " vita read -p "Are you giving the Baytril? [y/n]: " bay read -p "Are you giving the L-Carnatine? [y/n]: " lcarn echo "#########################################" >> $log echo "At `date`, $name said they are feeding Snowball $milliliters milliliters of food" >>$log echo "Medicines and Supplements:" >>$log echo "Nausea: $naus" >>$log echo "Amoxidrop: $amox" >>$log echo "Vitamin: $vita" >>$log echo "Baytril: $bay" >>$log echo "L-Carnatine: $lcarn" >>$log echo "........................................." >> $log #Figure out how long this will take. echo "#########################################" reps=$(( $milliliters / 5 )) echo That is $reps Reps duration=$((($reps*4)+8)) echo "You will be finished in $duration minutes" echo "#########################################" read -p "Press Enter When You Are Ready" ready echo "Ready and starting at `date`." >>$log echo "Ready and starting at `date`." #Request a tube flush, wait 4 mins. beep -f 1000 -n -f 2000 -n -f 2500 -n -f 2000 -n -f 1000 -n -f 2000 -n -f 2500 -n -f 2000 -n -f 1000 -n -f 2000 -n -f 2500 -n -f 500 echo "Please give Snowball 5 milliliters of fresh water." mpg123 --quiet /home/sley/waternow.mp3 >/dev/null sleep 240 while [ $reps -gt 0 ] do #Request a feeding. Wait 4 minutes. Repeat until the food should be gone. beep -f 1000 -n -f 2000 -n -f 1500 -n -f 1000 -n -f 2000 -n -f 1500 -n -f 1000 -n -f 2000 -n -f 1500 -n -f 1000 -n -f 2000 -n -f 1500 mpg123 --quiet /home/sley/feednow.mp3 beep -f 1000 -n -f 2000 -n -f 1500 -n -f 1000 -n -f 2000 -n -f 1500 sleep 240 reps=$(( $reps - 1 )) echo "$reps left" echo "........................................." done sleep 240 #Request more water. beep -f 1000 -n -f 2000 -n -f 2500 -n -f 2000 -n -f 1000 -n -f 2000 -n -f 2500 -n -f 2000 -n -f 1000 -n -f 2000 -n -f 2500 -n -f 500 mpg123 /home/sley/waternow.mp3 beep -f 1000 -n -f 2000 -n -f 1500 -n -f 1000 -n -f 2000 -n -f 1500 -n -f 1000 -n -f 2000 -n -f 1500 -n -f 1000 -n -f 2000 -n -f 1500 read -p "Press enter when everything is done." done echo "At `date`, $name reported that the feeding was complete" >>$log #Log any problems. echo " Please note any problems that you had during the process" read problems echo $problems >> $log echo "">> $log msg=$RANDOM cd /tmp echo "Please tell me what time you need to start next" > /tmp/$msg.txt echo "Please tell me what time you need to start next [HH:MM]" cat /tmp/$msg.txt | text2wave -o /tmp/$msg.wav lame --quiet /tmp/$msg.wav /tmp/$msg.mp3 mpg123 /tmp/$msg.mp3 2&>1 /dev/null #Find out what time we need to start next and schedule with "at" read next at -f /home/sley/feedingforat.sh $next echo "OK, I'll remind you at $next" echo "Next Feeding Scheduled for $next" >>$log echo "#########################################" >> $log |