Not a Bill

Today, I almost thought I got my bill for my hospital stay over two months ago. It turns out that it's not a bill though, and just a statement of what I'm being charged. After about a 90% reduction thanks to insurance, I'm left with exactly $2561.28 in expenses.

I'm not going to lie; it is a lot of money. Fortunately, I've always made sure that I kept some money in savings, so I will be able to afford it. It's just... after 9 years of college and grad school, I've only managed to save up about $7000, and now over a third of that might go to this one expense. I say "might" because I probably won't actually have to pay that much. The statement (which is "not a bill") came with an insert that says the following:

University of Maryland Medical Center meets or exceeds the legal requirements by providing financial assistance to those individuals in households below 200% of the federal poverty level and reduced cost-care up to 400% of the federal poverty level.

I'm 100% certain that I'm under 500% of the poverty level, since that's what's necessary to get Gleevec for free from Novartis. Thanks again for that, by the way, Novartis. I'm pretty certain that I'm under 400% as well. If I'm not under 200%, I'm not much higher than it. Such is the life of a grad student. I guess, though, that I should be grateful for what I have rather than regretful of what I don't. Besides, I can't complain, because I think that in the end my education will be worth far more than what I've had to pay for it, even if you factor in costs such as missed opportunities. As much as I complain, my education is really going to be worth something when I finally get out of here.

Speaking of my education, our Sigcomm plans are starting to come together. I'm pretty sure we'll have a decent submission. I almost regret my paper last year about a distributed, privacy-preserving online social network called Persona; while I certainly don't regret winning Best Student Paper, it's almost impossible to follow-up on the paper because it solves so much! Every time we think we have a problem, we realize that Persona solves it almost trivially... almost so much that we couldn't possibly get an entire paper out of it. It's a little frustrating because I feel that there's a bit less to do in the area of privacy in social networks, but that's most likely going to be my thesis topic so I need to come up with something. Our current idea feels a little weak, but that's probably only because I've always set my bar too high. I just get tired of reading papers that design a system exactly as you'd expect if you were to just sit down with the problem for a few minutes.

In other Carmichael news, I've been having some trouble socially. Some of the people involved either do read this blog, might read this blog, or have a reputation that I wouldn't want to tarnish with my minor annoyances. My problems are two-fold. First, I'm supposed to drink in moderation, so even if I'm out having fun I only have one or two drinks, not enough to even really get me buzzed. Ordinarily I wouldn't really care, since I don't really enjoy drinking that much. However, I really don't like being out with a bunch of people who are drinking without me, because I think the social dynamic gets thrown totally off-kilter. Plus, since I don't really drive anywhere, I'm not even able to be the designated driver, so I can't even do some good by being sober. I'll just say thanks, Bender, for driving on Saturday, and leave it at that.

My second problem is that, as much as I would like to, I can't forget about Carmichael. It's bad enough that my alarm goes off at noon every day reminding me to take my pill and that I almost have a side effect of some sort (currently it's back muscle aches, joint pain in my legs and feet, and occasional numbness in my right big toe). Tangent: I wonder if I can deal with side effects better if I think of them more like status effects in an RPG? Anyway, the thing that really gets to me is that someone who shall remain nameless is having an even harder time with Carmichael than I am. That, and I can often tell that when he looks at me. That, and when he's drunk, his inner monologue becomes an outer monologue.

And now, before I finish off this post, I figured everyone might want to see how my Mo is doing! Enjoy the pictures.

And don't forget to check out my Movember page if you want to donate some money for the fight against testicular and prostate cancer!

Forbidden Fruit

I really like this blog entry's title, but to explain why I will have to take a slight detour before I get to the main point of tonight's post. Bear with me.

When I was 15 or so I kept a "blog", only this was before they were called blogs. This was before LiveJournal, heck, it was before OpenDiary. I actually made my own online diary and didn't share it with anyone for a really long time, and it was incredibly helpful during the coming out process because it really let my friends know what I was feeling. It's ironic that I am so open and honest online (and was so even that long ago) when you consider that my area of expertise is now in privacy in Online Social Networks. After writing in my diary for years, my friend Kara discovered OpenDiary and we both started using that. Then I discovered a hole in their security that allowed me to steal anyone's password, sent them a helpful e-mail to let them know that they had a serious problem, and promptly got my account deleted. Including all of my diary information that I had, by that point, lost all of my local copies. That was my first experience with losing data in the cloud, so you'd think that I would have learned my lesson by now. Google has treated me well, though, so I'll continue to use their services.

Anyway, getting back to the title of this post, I distinctly remember that I used this title before in my old diary when referring to a straight guy that I had a crush on. (I still have crushes on straight guys from time to time, but I certainly don't obsess over them the way I did in high school, which is why you won't see such an entry in this blog.) I find the title of this post so funny because it applies very literally to my current circumstances.

Grapefruit.

I bought several food items from Bytes cafe -- the shop in A.V. Williams, the Computer Science building at UMD -- both this morning and this afternoon. Both times I grabbed a bottle of juice. The shop has basically four selections for juice that I would drink: orange, strawberry kiwi, cranberry, and grapefruit. I tend to favor orange juice and strawberry kiwi, but I get the other two occasionally. Or rather, I used to. One of the very prominent warnings for Gleevec is that I'm not allowed to have grapefruit in any form. You'd think it wouldn't bother me much, since I'm not really that big of a fan of grapefruit juice, but every time I open that refrigerator there I get this terrible craving for the drink that I just can't have.

Incidentally, there are a number of other things I'm not supposed to have, such as Vitamin E and St. John's Wort, but they're mostly easy to avoid (though I tend not to get Naked juice anymore, which is good for my wallet). There is one more thing: garlic. Garlic has been shown to (note: I'm paraphrasing from my understanding of the science behind it) affect the ability of the body to metabolize the Gleevec, so I'm supposed to avoid it as much as possible. This is of course nearly impossible since there's garlic in everything, so I've mostly stopped worrying about it. Grapefruit, however... I'm just going to have to suck it up.

As a final aside for tonight's post, even though I've been feeling great the past few days, I've had a few side effects. There's something strange going on with the pressure in my ears, and it comes and goes, but it's no big deal. I also have a little sore on the side of my mouth, and I had a nose bleed today. I was actually kind of glad for the nose bleed, honestly, because it confirmed my suspicions. I mentioned to Katrina on Monday that I was feeling great and jokingly said that I was thinking of cutting myself to see how quickly I healed (I think I freaked her out with that one a bit) because I suspected that my blood cell counts were trending toward normal. My nose bleed healed very quickly today, so I think my platelets are doing great. I feel like I have much more energy and that I'm more awake, so I bet my red blood cells are hanging in there too. And now I'm (successfully) fighting off the cold that Ted's trying to give me, so I think even my white blood cells are working! I'm actually kind of looking forward to my doctor's appointment next week after all, despite learning today how expensive my hospital stay really was.

I'll just say this: it cost more than I make in a year, and my health insurance is covering most of it, but based on my understanding of the statement from the health insurance company, it looks like I'll be expecting to pay a few thousand bucks. It's a good chunk of the money I've saved up over the past 8 years, but it's a small price to pay to take good care of my health.