My recovery took an unexpected turn today as persistent heart rhythm issues necessitated additional intervention - the implantation of a permanent pacemaker to replace the temporary external device I've been carrying since the valve replacement surgery.
Days 2 and 3 on the normal ward were remarkably similar, establishing a new routine whilst the medical team continued to fine-tune my treatment.
Tuesday, 8th October 2025 - My first full day on the normal ward brought different routines and expectations. The focus shifted to increased mobility and continued monitoring of my heart's adaptation to its new hardware.
Saturday and Sunday, 5th-6th October 2025 - Days 2 and 3 after my aortic valve replacement surgery were remarkably similar, with continued progress in my recovery. From early morning monitoring through to standing up and eventually taking my first walk.
Today I was admitted to hospital for aortic valve replacement surgery. After years of monitoring my bicuspid aortic valve and watching the stenosis gradually worsen, the time has come for the operation I've known was inevitable since childhood.
Most people are born with a tricuspid aortic valve - that's a valve with three leaflets that open and close to control blood flow from the heart's left ventricle into the aorta. I was born with a bicuspid aortic valve, which means mine only has two leaflets instead of three.
I was reviewing one of my old sample projects codebase which makes use of asp.net Identity for storage of users and passwords, in the startup I noticed the following code:
I wanted to understand more about how ChatGPT and Co-Pilots like those from GitHub and Pieces work and how I could do something similar including private content, whilst reading around the topic I read the article Demystifying Retrieval Augmented Generation with .NET and thought it described what I wanted to achieve so decided to follow along. The first challenge I encountered was that Azure OpenAI Service is only available for "eligible customers and partners" which, for my personal projects, I do not qualify. That is not a problem though as Stephan explains in the post it is trivial to switch to OpenAI which offers a free quota of $5 per month. Next issue was that the code examples did not compile, this seems to be because the Semantic Kernel library has moved on from version 0.24 to 1.0.1 since the post was written. Some of the the changes are covered in the post [Saying hello to Microsoft Semantic Kernel V1