Other What currently makes your life awesome?

Had a conference call with the solicitors, their barrister and medical expert this afternoon. In all the consultations with doctors, consultants, surgeons and pain specialists in the 4 years since the first operation, this teams meeting today has been by far the most informative. And that's with the added complication of the legal dance of 'you have to ask lots of questions to get the answer i could give you directly without provocation in 15seconds'. The conclusion of the 2 hour call is that during the first operation, the surgeon damaged my genitofemoral nerve. The symptom of mind bending cataclysmic pain that I experienced immediately after the operation is apparently a dead giveaway, and any competent medical professional that deals with laparoscopic surgery would have known this. So much so, that it would be cause to consider immediate reopening of the patient to verify and try and remedy if possible.

Now there is the small matter that the release form I sign prior to the operation does have some sort of variation of "nerve damage" as a possible complication of the surgery, even if it is written in doctoral hieroglyphics v3.2. BUT, says the medical expert, even though they disclose that nerve damage is a known complication (because it is) a competent surgeon would know to stay away from that nerve or the area in which it resides during the operation, and damaging it is still sub standard care and negligent. My pain being completely ignored and dismissed and being turfed out the hospital without so much as a "shall we get you a wheel chair" the icing on the cake of dumbfuckery.

The expert did advise that we should drop the "missing, possibly never inserted mesh" aspect, as even if that were the case, it would be incredibly difficult and very expensive to prove. And even if you could get a scan that showed the mesh to not be where it should be, doesn't mean it wasn't there, and sometimes they just don't show up. It's kind of annoying because that's what I'd been lead to believe, but I know now that's because no one ever really stopped to truly listen to me and jumped to assumptions without ever really considering the root cause, that being that my nerve got messed up in that first operation.

I'm hopeful, but the records aren't in my favour. My GP's notes in particular are severely lacking in detail, the highest confirmation of the hell I was going through simply "patient complains of pain". Apparently I come across as believable and am "a really good historian" according to the barrister. Now just have to wait while they weigh up the odds Vs cost and see if they're willing to pull the trigger. But it's probably one of the only true external acknowledgements of what I've been through, and that brings comfort.

 

Little bit of money from the ALCS in the September distribution, including one line-item which caught my eye: 19p for photocopying of the Raspberry Pi User Guide Fourth Edition... in North Korea.

Good to know everyone's favourite pariah state pays its photocopying fees, I guess!

 

I may be buying one of these soon, Is there a way to purchase it that benefits you the most financially?

 

It's fees collected by the Authors Licensing and Collection Society (ALCS). It's kinda woolly, really: The Copyright Licensing Agency sells licenses to places like universities and colleges which allow them to reproduce parts of books - something which would usually be a breach of copyright. It is, to my understanding, a flat rate, and then somehow someone figures out what percentage of that rate should go to which particular authors and/or publishers.

There's also the Public Lending Right, which pays out every time a book is loaned from a British library (and there's an Irish equivalent). International lending fees are handled by ALCS again.

From my perspective, it's basically (nearly) free money: all I have to do is tell 'em what I've written (books and magazine articles published in the UK) and they pay me money twice a year. The March distribution is normally pretty decent - four figures - and the September distribution, which is I think more focused on the work of scriptwriters and illustrators, is usually a couple of hundred quid.

Can't say my stuff does well in libraries, though: not sure I've made it to a tenner lifetime payout from PLR yet...

Very kind of you! I don't get royalties, tho', so it makes no difference t'me. If you borrow a copy from your local library, I get... I think 4p each time you renew? So, that.

EDIT:
Oh! I forgot, there's a thing called AuthorSHARE which Bookbarn and World of Books set up: the first scheme to give authors a royalty payment on the sale of second-hand copies. It's pretty neat: I get, like, 7p for each copy sold - nearly twice what I get for a library lend!