Down Offline And Online

You might be wondering what happened to me this past few days. No blog updates since Friday. Absent on Wordcamp despite the fact that I registered. Lots of downtimes on this blog. So, what really happened?

Offline Life.
I’ve decided not to attend the Wordcamp to give way for my wife’s first check-up to the OB-Gyne in Batangas. We agreed that the baby must be born in Batangas since the hospital services are much cheaper there, besides, my parents and relatives could help us on those times. It’s our first baby, so we don’t want to make mistakes.

What seems to be a simple trip to the OB Gynecologist became to be an uneventful one. After examining my wife using the ultrasound, the OB-Gyne informed us that the baby is no longer on her womb and she needs to raspa (I don’t know the English term) my wife to end the bleeding she’s experiencing. The OB-Gyne informed us that the baby had an incomplete abortion which could be caused by an “unhealthy” egg or sperms. She said that she cannot longer save the baby since it’s no longer there. Nakunan na sya. She just need to raspa my wife to clean her womb and remove the placenta that was left in there.

So, instead of going to the mall after the check-up as what we planned, we ended up going back home, packing things up, and checking in to Bauan Doctors General Hospital. This was my wife’s first time getting raspa, so, she’s nervous. The doctor informed us not to worry because everything will be okay, and after a month or two, my wife will be ready to have a baby again.

The operation lasted around 30 minutes only, but we stayed in the hospital till next morning. The nurses constantly checked her blood pressure and gave her medicine. We checked out the next day at around 11:00AM. Hospital bill: Php 13K. The doctor prescribed her 3 medicines which she need to take for 3 days, after which she’ll have another check-up. So, tomorrow, we’ll visit the doctor again. Hope everything will be fine then. I informed our company about what happened and they allowed me to have a 7-day paternity leave.

Online Life.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the planet, while we’re on the hospital, my blog went down. I just noticed that I cannot connect to it while using my wife’s 3G phone. So, I just sent a support ticket to Dreamhost and just hoped that it will be back online. The blog went back online after the support blocked the Yahoo bot and Google bot and asked me to slow down those bots before I remove the block (which I did). The next day, it was down again. I sent another support ticket which took them more than 43 hours to respond. They found out that one of the plugins was causing the error since disabling all the plugins sent it back online. After my investigation, I found out that the WP-Cache plugin is the culprit. After fixing it, the blog went back online until this morning, where it went down again. It went down because Dreamhost finally approved my request for a Virtual Private Server and did the upgrade themselves. After the DNS propagation, now, this blog is up! And hopefully, it will not go down again since I’m already on a virtual private server.

So, that’s what happened. We lost a potential lawyer/blogger. We lost a hefty amount on Google Adsense due to those downtimes. This was the first time in my life where I was down both offline and online.

But hey! We are still alive. Learning from our mistakes. We’ll just make a cuter lawyer/blogger next time. And we’ll be careful not to have miscarriage again.