The second day of NTD had started just great with Alex's keynote about exploratory testing, microheuristics, and the general recommendation "notice what is it that you do" as a way to both improve (your own techniques as well as teaching others) and help others notice the expertise you've gained. You are doing everything besides "just clicking around". This keynote had everything a keynote talk should, dinosaures included.
After the keynote I missed (again) Bailey Hanna's workshop on feedback and communication in the workplace, and instead, evacuated myself to ER.
To cut a long story short - I fell from my bike a bit over a week ago, and until then I thought recovery was going fine, so I didn't bother checking it up. After all, it was only a bruise, and it is normal to have a bulge where a hit has landed. However, once the coloration was mostly gone and the swelling did not, I did the obvious thing and googled my symptoms the night before. The results - scary. I woke up that morning at 5:30 AM and couldn't go back to sleep, so I did the responsible thing and called a doctor from my travel insurance. I described the fall and the symptoms, and strictly avoided sounding my guesses or fears to the doctor (which, in case you wondered, is the correct thing to do if you did google your symptoms - don't interfere the professionals with your uneducated guesses). I wasn't very happy to hear that the doctor was worried about the same thing as I was, and he recommended getting it checked quickly. So I did exactly that. I asked the organisers for the correct place and took a cab there.
The Estonian medical system seemed to me as efficient as I could hope for - I was taken within 10 minutes to have my vitals checked and soon after saw a doctor. Upon seeing my injury, The doctor made one of the sounds you don't want your doctor to be doing, and sent me to do an ultrasound. Then I waited, and as I did, I checked my options of returning home sooner, hoping that the doctor will say it's safe enough to postpone a surgery until I'm home. Just one thing - finding out that you might be in a life-threatening situation is no fun, and doing that far away from your home & family is even less so, please avoid that if you can.
A couple of hours later, the ultrasound results were in, and at least as far as it seems from the scan, the real situation is not dangerous at all (though it might get complicated a bit). The treatment: rest, and take an off-the-shelf medication for the pain.
Cool, that left me feeling a lot better (it's amazing what fear can do to your general feeling), suffering only the effects of not enough sleep and no real food since morning, where for the same reasons (lack of sleep, fear) I didn't have that much of an appetite. Anyways, I got back to the conference just in time to catch the closing key note, where Erik Kaju told us about the engineering practices in transferwire. It was nice, even if I've heard such talks before. It is always nice to see that some companies are doing things a bit better than what we do back at home and we can improve.
After the conference I went to sleep for an hour, and then I joined Lisi and we went to eat dinner with Joep and Elizabeth. We tried some sort of an Indian restaurant, which was quite nice. Not as nice as the company, but still :) We broke off around 22:30 and walked back to the hotel (except for Elizabeth that was staying elsewhere). Somehow, we ended up talking at the lobby until almost 2AM, but then it was (well past) time to go to sleep.
Quite a good day after all.
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