Pop Bone Marrow Biopsy

I got the results from my CT scan.  My GI tract has healed; I could have told you this because my bowel movements have been nice and solid recently.  Unfortunately, the CT scan also revealed that my spleen is growing again. This could be a sign that the leukemia is coming back, so the doctor decided to do yet another bone marrow biopsy. Unfortunately, the doctor either didn't care how or didn't know how to make the bone marrow biopsy as painless as possible; it really seemed like he wasn't even trying. It was hands down the most painful thing I've ever experienced, though gout still reigns supreme as being the most painful for the longest amount of time.

In any case, depending on the bone marrow biopsy, I'm not sure what's going to happen.  The doctor said that there's a chance they might remove my spleen.  Apparently the spleen acts as a sponge for blood cells, so my enlarged spleen is part of the explanation for why I've been needing platelets and white blood cells recently.  Removing the spleen would help with this, and I guess the liver will pick up the slack, according to the doctor.  Still, I hesitate when the doctor suggests removing an organ; it sounds like such a permanent solution to what could be a temporary problem.

Naturally, Mom and Dad are freaking out about this. What's worse, they're telling other people. They don't understand that it's not unusual for leukemia patients to have their spleens removed, so they think this is much more serious than it is, and they've convinced everyone else that that's the case too. That brings us to the party.  I got to see most of my family on Saturday at a huge pre-wedding party for my brother Bobby and his fiancé Hillary.  Everyone expressed that they were concerned for me and that they were praying for me.  Most of the family started out by saying that they heard that I got some bad news recently.  I had to repeat about twenty times that things were going well and that it really was just some routine tests.

And really, things are going very well.  I feel great.  I went in to work three of the five days this past week since I was at the hospital the other two days.  I got myself organized, including upgrading to Ubuntu 10.4 on my work, home, and laptop computers -- I have to say that I am quite pleased with it, though they need to fix some of the bugs with Gwibber.  I started working on my proposal document, and I have about 8 pages there so far, though a good chunk of that is basically lifted from the Persona paper and needs to be condensed.  All in all, I feel great, I'm being productive, and I'm happy.  I don't think I could ask for more than that.

Oh, and even better news: because my GI tract is good now and because there's the concern that the leukemia could be coming back, the doctor dropped my steroid dosage drastically and continuously.  I'm nearly off the steroids at this point, and today is the first day in a long time that I've actually eaten roughly like a normal person.  I'm still a little hungry, but for a change I don't feel that I need to eat.  As far as I'm concerned, that's victory.

Racing heart

Well, I did manage to finish installing and configuring Ubuntu 9.04 last night around 5 AM. I think in the long run I'll be happy that I had to install from scratch. The system is running very smoothly and I'm pretty satisfied with it.

After finishing, I tried to go to sleep, and had a lot of trouble. I had been retaining water all day, and my legs felt very odd. Laying down was pretty uncomfortable, and I noticed my heart was racing. I was especially nervous since Ted wasn't around to help if I had a problem. I made it through the night, and Ted returned today.

Whenever my heart races, I can't help but feel nervous. Right now all of my blood cell counts are low, and I worry that if something did go horribly wrong that I wouldn't be able to tell that it was coming. This just makes my heart race more, so I had to really focus last night to calm down and keep a steady beat going. Eventually, counting my heart beats put me to sleep, and I made it through the night. Around 8 AM I got up and turned on the TV, then fell asleep again on the couch until 10:30. After that, I was fine, and a lot of the fluid retention was gone. I'm still retaining a bit though; I've been drinking a lot of water all day long, so hopefully that will help.

I'll try to give some updates on the progression of my blood cell counts after my appointment on Thursday. I will be very interested to see those results, and I hope that they've gone up from last week.

I need to do some work tomorrow; hopefully I'll finish cleaning up the camera ready version of my HotNets paper, I'll write my part of the quarterly report for the GeoMAN project, and I'll pick out and read a paper for Syschat on Wednesday. These all kind of depend on when my medicine arrives tomorrow; I'll wait until then to explain the deal with my medicine. In any case, I'm going to bed now to try to fix my sleep cycle. Goodnight!

Screwed up my sleep cycle

So I did something stupid last night. I decided that now would be a good time to upgrade from Ubuntu 8.04 to 9.04. As a result, I stayed up until 2 AM, and it still wasn't done.

Then the upgrade process was interrupted by a family gathering. It was nice to see the Baden side of my family, since I don't get to see them often and I hadn't seen most of them since I started hanging out with Carmichael. After our lunch together, I went back to my brother Billy's house and spent some time with my niece, Betsy, and nephew, Drew. We all (even the kids) ended up taking naps for whatever reason.

Fast forward to tonight. It's now 3 AM. I had a perfectly working version of Ubuntu 9.04 in time to watch Saturday Night Live, but I wasn't content... I wanted to clean my system up a bit. I ran baobab and noticed some file duplications. What I failed to notice was that during my upgrade today, I tried to install boxee, which involved a hack to run the 32-bit version, which created some hard linked directories... Long story short, I practically did rm -rf / (FOR THE LOVE OF GOD DON'T TRY THAT AT HOME), effectively ruining both all of the progress I had made and bricking my system. And people complain when GMail is down for an hour.

Fortunately, I didn't have anything too important on there... I'm mostly living in the cloud these days, after all. I don't know what I'd do with out Google. Cry, probably.

I'm thinking I'll just not go to bed tonight and instead take a nap in the afternoon. That should reset my sleep cycle, right? Ted gets back tomorrow evening, and he'll get to see my brand new side effect: fluid retention! It's pretty gross. My legs feel like plump hams right about now, and I have really weird things going on around the edges of my clothes. Still, here's to another day. :)