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  • More on the Lung

    After my bout with acute rejection I woke up to find myself in the ICU again. This was a kind of weird time for me. The medications they gave me to fight off the rejection/possible infection scrambled my brain a little. Between that and being cooped up in the ICU I was more than a bit confused. For a while I pretty much forgot I’d had the transplant.

    For the next week or so everything snapped back into place and I remembered where I was and what I was there for. But it was so strange to look back and and my thinking still makes sense. There is a condition called ICU Psychosis what is experienced by some people, and we think I had a touch of that added in. I remember having lots of really odd dreams, which I guess had me speaking out loud too. My parents and sister have all kinds of stories of me talking about too many countries and leprechauns.

    After close to a week I was moved back to step down. At this point I’d barely eaten in weeks and my weight was down 35 pounds. So the next week was gaining strength, starting to walk again (with the help of a walker). Getting used to eating again (which took some time).

    After just over a week of that I was ready to head home. I was going pretty crazy with boredom and got to leave just in time.

    So far things at home are going well. I get better at going up and down stairs every day. It’s amazing how hard even little things like that are still.

  • The Other Big Thank You

    I wanted to have this thank you be on its own. I would like to thank Emily for keeping this blog updated. I’d asked her to do it for me years ago and was glad that she was able to do it. My friends and family have all be so impressed with it. And it really helped keep information flowing.

    Thanks again Emily!

  • The Thank You Post

    There’s so many people to thank for their support with my ordeal. At the very top of the list is my family. My parents, who were there for me every single day without fail, are the best. Even while I was a bit out of my head with ICU Psychosis. My sister, who came up from Louisiana and also watched over me. It was good to have her nearby.

    Next are all the people who sent me cards and presents. I’m not even going to try and name everyone because there are just too many and I’m sure I’d forget. But at the top of the list would be Bree and Ellen.

    And finally, a big thanks to all the nurses and doctors at Brigham & Womens. They were all so amazing. Even when I felt like I must be bothering them too much they were always there for me.

  • On Breathing

    I’ve been meaning to do a lung update for ages. Since everyone keeps asking how things are going. For those of you just joining us, I have something called Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis (IPF). The Pulmonary Fibrosis Foundation has a pretty decent web site on it if you want more details. But in general it means this:

    Pulmonary Fibrosis involves scarring of the lung. Gradually, the air sacs of the lungs become replaced by fibrotic tissue. When the scar forms, the tissue becomes thicker causing an irreversible loss of the tissue’s ability to transfer oxygen into the bloodstream.

    I’m not sure how I got it or even when exactly I started feeling the effects of it. In hindsight it was quite a bit before I saw a doctor about it. To put it bluntly, it sucks. I’m the kind of person who used to walk everywhere, go out dancing till the wee hours of the morning, and just be active all the time. These days I take things much more slowly.

    I’ve tried various treatments and none of them seem to have done much, except maybe stabilize my condition. I haven’t gotten any better or worse in a few years. So, the current step is waiting for a new lung. So, not much has changed. I’m definitely towards the ‘top of the list’, but that is all due to change when some new regulations go into effect that will make them order the list by ‘need’ in another month. Bah.

    So I’m now opening this up for any questions you may have about it all. Ask away, I’ll do my best to answer.

  • Finding My Muse

    So I finally got my turntables set up again. It’s been over a year since I spun. And pretty much all of my records are stashed away still. So I’ve decided to celebrate with a mix. This morning I went down and just randomly grabbed records from the ones that were easily accessible and I’ll see what I can do with them.

    The interesting thing is that a lot of what I spin has changed since I first started. There’s a lot of old progressive trance in there that I probably wouldn’t touch these days. Some of it is pretty good, but I’m sure there are more than a few things I picked up over the years that are trash. So it is definitely a tossup as to the quality of the tracks I’m working with. I guess this is a good time to go through and weed out any of the records I’ll definitely never spin.

    Hopefully I’ll have a new mix up within a few days.

  • Snow Snow Go Away

    It’s snowing again. I wish it would just stop. Normally I probably wouldn’t mind, but I’m already feeling cooped up and alone since my parents are out of town for a few days. Hopefully we won’t get so much that I can’t get the car out of the driveway. Bah.

  • Phone Support Hell

    Today I was calling my cell phone company to make a payment since I realized I’d spaced on paying that one online. Upon calling I discovered that they now have a voice driven menu system. So, first I had to say “I’d like to make a payment”, then say every little bit of information that was needed. First, saying this with any kind of cough is difficult, took me two tries for my credit card number. Second, it was slow.

    I could have been done with the phone call in about 1/3rd of the time if I hadn’t had to say it all. It’s a heck of a lot easier to key in all that stuff. The sad thing is that I bet this will become the norm because it is ‘cool’.

  • Happy Thanksgiving, a few days late

    Turkey!

    Happy Thanksgiving everyone! I’ve been a bit slow posting lately, so I’m just finally getting around to posting about my Turkeyday. It was a great holiday this year. My cousin and his family came to visit. Which was nice because I always like it when there is more family around. We ate lots of food and followed by passing out. They also brought their dog, which was great and reminded me how much I think we should get one.

    And as for things I’m thankful for:

    • My parents. These past few years they have been wonderfully supportive. And if it weren’t for them I don’t think I’d be able to handle this whole lung thing.
    • My friends. They always seem to be there when I need them. Especially when I need stuff carried for me :).

  • What I Hate About This Time Of Year

    One thing I’ve been finding lately is that I just don’t watch quite as much TV. I blame it partly on the TiVo. I like being able to record something and watch it at a later time. The thing is, this is college basketball season. And since my parents, dad especially, is a UConn Women’s Basketball fanatic that takes priority over anything else on TV. Including the one hour of prime time TV that I watch (Joan of Arcadia). I think what is most annoying is that I end up having to watch it in real time, suddenly having to run (er well, my version of run) to the third floor at the last minute. Oh well, at least whining always makes it not seem so bad.

    And Joan was good this week. I hadn’t gotten to watch last week’s until this afternoon and it was a bit harsh to say the least. The show needed and episode that ended up an up note like this. This season has just had quite the dark cloud over it.

  • Just What *IS* flickr Anyways?

    About 2 weeks ago I received a Nikon D70 Digital SLR camera in trade for some computer work I’ve been doing for a neighbor. I’ve long wanted an SLR of any type and this has helped energize the creative side of me a bit. It also means I’ve been putting pictures online more and making much more use of Flickr. Which has also led to many of my friends asking “so what’s so great about this Flickr thing anyways?”

    Flickr is a photo hosting/sharing service from ludicorp that’s been in beta for a while now. I think I first started using it around 8 months ago, but didn’t really get into it until the new camera. I’d fiddled around with running my own photo gallery software a few times, tried a few other services, but nothing really jumped out at me until Flickr. Flickr is all about finding ways to organize and ways to share your photos. Like most other photo hosting services you can upload pictures, create photosets (albums), etc. It also has a bit of social networking type stuff built in so that you can choose to only share photos with your friends or family.

    But where Flickr has really hooked me is with some of the other features. The biggest of which are tags. Tags are keywords you can add to a photo to provide more data about it. For instance, in this photo that I uploaded there are a bunch of tags. I can then choose to look at only pictures of mine with the tag ‘squirrel’, or I could see all the public photos on Flickr that have the tag ‘squirrel’. You can also put notes onto a picture that show up when you mouse over a certain area. Oh yes, and they also have it set up so that you can post your pictures to your blog or LiveJournal from within Flickr and they accept photocam posts too.

    One thing the tagging system has done is that some tags have a following. People will take pictures that can be tagged with a certain keyword. One of my favorites is squaredcircle, where people post pictures of circular things in a squared image. This one has enough of a following that someone has created a group for pictures like this (groups are things you can join which have their own photo collections).

    The other thing that made Flickr my choice for a photo hosting service was that someone wrote a plugin for iPhoto so that you can export your pictures straight from iPhoto (instead of saving them and uploading with the web site or one of their uploading tools). When it’s this easy I can’t help but want to post stuff all the time.

    Flickr is currently free, also also has a Pro option. With a free account you can upload 10MB of pictures a month, have 3 photosets, and people can view the 100 most recent images you have uploaded. The Pro account offers quite a bit more, you can upload 1GB per month, there’s unlimited storage, unlimited bandwidth use, unlimited photosets, and permanent archiving of high-res images. In the future Ad-free browsing will be added to that. You can check out their FAQ for more info.

    The last thing I have to say about Flickr is that it has really inspired me to really learn more about taking pictures and to actually get out there and take them. The other day someone invited me to a group called ‘sky‘. For the next few days I was on the road and everywhere I went I kept looking for good shots of the sky (and I finally got one I really liked). It really ends up being quite addicting after a bit.

    Oh, and no, Flickr isn’t paying me to rave on and on about how I like them. I just think it’s one of the cooler sites out there and want more of my friends to use it.