Item #89 entered by Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Wed Dec 24 16:13:05 2003
 Sindi Keesan's Lymphoma Journal Part 3

 Third and hopefully final part of a daily description of how I am being
 treated for 'diffuse large B-cell lymphoma', a cancer of the immune system
 which was diagnose in July-August.  I probably have two more chemotherapy
 treatments, having done six already.  Also discussions of life as a cancer
 patients  and lots of drift about how I am amusing myself while waiting until
 I feel well enough to go near other people and work again.

418 responses total.

#1 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Wed Dec 24 16:26:20 2003:
 Today I had my fourth CT scan, this one to check whether there were any
 changes in the size of lymph nodes or spleen masses since the last scan a
 couple of months ago (where nothing was enlarged anymore except the spleen
 masses).  They called yesterday to remind me it was today at 2 and not to eat
 or drink for 6 hours before and to come at 1.  I said I was not planning to
 eat after 6 am and would get up at 5 for breakfast.  Jim got up at 5 to cook
 for me and I ate and at 6:00 realized that 2 pm minus 6 hours is 8 am, so I
 ate again at 7:30 since I could not get back to sleep.  Jim forgot to eat.
 
 This sort of set the pace for the day.  We got there an hour early to pay off
 my hospital bill and discovered I should have brought the bill since they
 could only charge me for hospital expenses and I still have to pay for
 physicians' services, which I think I can do at the cancer center.
 
 We were 1/2 hour early for the CT scan.  They told me to sit down and fill
 out a form.  Am I wheezing?  Actually sometimes I am, with this cough.  I
 refused to sit down to fill out the form because it hurts to sit.  They let
 me sit in the hallway on something padded.  Then called me to drink 2 16 oz
 'berry' flavored barium sulfate suspension drinks.  The first time they gave
 me banana flavored, which stunk up my urine and sweat for 10 days afterwords.
 Second time they gave me refrigerated 'berry', which made me shiver and was
 hard to get down because it was so cold. This time they gave me a choice of
 flavors and temperatures.  They also said to save 1/3 of the second 16 oz
 bottle for use just before the scan.  Last time they opened another small one.
 First time I was there they forgot to have me drink something (actually they
 said it was not ordered) until after I got the IV for the radioactive iodine,
 then I had to wait 2 hours after drinking because they were busy, with the
 IV in my arm.  Ouch.
 
 This time they waited until just before I was scheduled to put in the IV. 
 I got the same woman who put it in the first time, and who redid it the time
 someone else botched it, rather than the woman from last time who had trouble
 and got blood all over my arm and the floor.  The IV went in right right away,
 and she taped it up, and 30 sec later the technician came to fetch me to get
 scanned.  First thing he said was that the doctor did not order the iodine
 this time so we did not need the IV.  He offered to take it out after the scan
 but I made him take it out first because it hurt and then I got to use both
 arms for the scan.  It was a lot easier with both arms.  This was a new
 machine that was about twice as fast as the old one, plus without the iodine
 it goes three times as fast - no need to inject anything and no need to repeat
 measurements with and without iodine.  He does not know if I will need an IV
 next time but I am going to make sure BEFORE they put one in.
 
 We recuperated by spending $50 on food at Jerusalem Market.  Yogurt is good
 for people who have had all their intestinal flora killed off by drugs and
 I got yogurt cheese as well.  Jim got pomegranates, figs, and a bunch of other
 things that I will probably not want to eat because most foods are tasting
 funny mow, especially fruits.  I got lettuce to put with the yogurt, because
 vegetables taste okay.  My knees started to feel wobbly again.
 
 Next Monday I get my blood drawn to make sure it is okay to have chemotherapy,
 and THEN they decide whether I need chemotherapy again (and if not, there was
 no need to get my blood drawn but that does not hurt much).  
 
 Today I made the mistake of wearing clothing with metal in it:
 a vest with a metal zipper pull that I had to take off, a hooded sweatshirt
 with a metal eyelet for the cord, which I had to take off, and sweatpants with
 a metal eyelet, which they let me keep on but pull down to my hips where I
 was not getting scanned.  I will check more carefully next time.  I would hate
 to have to switch to a summer-weight hospital gown in this weather.  
 
 The nurse who put in the IV told me to drink lots of fluids to wash out the
 dye, which they did not give me.  I wonder if I need to drink to dilute the
 barium sulfate as well.  Nobody mentioned that.  I will drink just in case.
 Last time nobody mentioned anything about drinking.  This nurse is competent.
 She is also the one who kept phoning Jim to come get me the first time, when
 he had accidentally unplugged the phone.  She remembered us both.  
#2 Todd(tod) on Wed Dec 24 16:33:09 2003:
 
#3 John Willcome(willcome) on Wed Dec 24 17:23:38 2003:
 I think Cindy should follow the example of Valerie Mates, who moved her
 on-line diary to a private place without facilities for rude people (tod) to
 post.
#4 Todd(tod) on Wed Dec 24 17:31:06 2003:
 
#5 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Wed Dec 24 18:15:31 2003:
 For someone who reads all my posts you have a funny way of spelling my name
 ;)  I don't get the correlation between metal eyelets and umbrellas.  I did
 not realize my sweatclothing had eyelets since I never use the cords.  The
 zipper on my vest is plastic but the pull is metal.  
#6 Jeff Rollin(twenex) on Wed Dec 24 20:24:52 2003:
 I seem to recall a while back you used to sign as C. Keesan, unless that
 wasn't you.
#7 Scott Helmke(scott) on Wed Dec 24 21:03:57 2003:
 (now linked to the Health conference)
#8 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Wed Dec 24 21:25:34 2003:
 C. is short for Sindi.  That was me.
#9 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Thu Dec 25 09:41:38 2003:
 The new machine was definitely faster.  According to the technician, I only
 had to breathe in and hold my breath for 12 instead of 17 seconds.  On the
 old machine I thought I might not be able to make it.  And the platform where
 you lie down is now motorized, which means they lower it for you to get on
 instead of asking you to climb up with a stepstool, using the arm without the
 IV in it.  
 	The technician also said sometimes they don't use the contrast dye
 (which is administered via IV) for followup exams, just original diagnoses.
 But I had it for the last exam which was not a diagnosis.  He also suggested
 that sometimes they use it every other time.  In either event, this is either
 8 or 19 fewer IVs over the next 10 years, and I cannot imagine anything nicer
 having happened to me yesterday.  The IVs for CT scans might be larger needles
 than the ones for infusions, since they hurt more and are harder to put in.
 They come with a syringe attached (containing saline solution?).  
 	Today I woke up sneezing but not coughing at 6:30 instead of 5:00 and
 my hands are hardly numb at all now.  Food tasted slightly better yesterday.
 I get to enjoy the next 4 days (it would have been 6 but I got 2 days behind
 schedule) until this starts all over again.  With luck, the cold will be gone
 (it has been 4 weeks now) before my immune system is knocked out again, so
 it won't come back in a week like it did last cycle.  
 	The berry stuff tasted a bit odd but much better than orange juice is
 currently tasting and I managed a whole 32 oz of it since it was not cold.
 The plastic mug that I brought to drink it with now smells funny despite
 repeated washings.  I wish that they had an unflavored version.  
 	Today if I stop sneezing we might attempt to walk all the way to Main
 St. (1 mile) and find some place warm to rest, maybe a Chinese restaurant,
 before hiking back.  Jim offered to make banana fritters for breakfast first.
#10 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Thu Dec 25 19:13:54 2003:
 Today we broke the one mile barrier!  It was downhill to Main St.  This is
 the day of the year with the least cars out so we walked on Liberty and looked
 at all the mid 19th century houses there and at what was on their porches.
 Lots of swings, fewer chairs and tables, and a few benches, and bicycles,
 hoses, etc.  About 10 sleds on the slope behind Slauson school.  We wandered
 around a bit and had a quart of soup at Dinersty and hiked back uphill.  There
 were a few other people wandering around downtown and one other open Chinese
 restaurant on Main St.  Now I know I can make it to the main library.  My
 world has enlarged again.  
 	Tangerines taste tolerable again, as does bread.  Not for long.
 I am still coughing.
#11 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Fri Dec 26 21:38:22 2003:
 Today Jim dragged me out for another walk, even though my legs are sore.
 Today's destinations were the hardware store and the dollar store to look at
 toilet bowl cleaner.  You can get it with hydrochloric acid (acts instantly,
 or dilute it if you want it to act more slowly) or sulfamic acid (whatever
 that is).  Phosphates are now a no-no so the traditional phosphoric acid is
 not used for removing 'lime deposits'.  Jim has to take the toilet up to get
 out all the deposits in the lower part, starting with a chisel or screwdriver
 on the thicker ones, but he needs to replace the gasket anyway.  I got tired
 by the time we reached the second store and sat on my folded up coat while
 he admired hose clamps.  We also got some pickled peppers (acetic acid, which
 would also work on lime buildups but even more slowly).  
 
 I am still coughing and washing a lot of handkerchiefs but my taste buds are
 nearly normal and my hands hardly numb at all today.  I have three more days
 to enjoy this.
 
 We are putting Linux on Jim's other computer so that I can use the first one.
 If you have a video chip that uses SVGA instead of an accelerated driver, and
 it is a fairly new one, what are the chances it will display more than 256
 colors?  SiS and Trio3D.  
#12 Jeff Rollin(twenex) on Fri Dec 26 22:41:35 2003:
 very good, depending on (a) how you define "fairly recent"; and (b) how well
 the particular video card is supported by XFree86; SiS cards seem to be a
 particularly large minefield
#13 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Sat Dec 27 11:02:41 2003:
 Most of the SiS cards on the list said not to run clock probe but this one
 did not say that.  They are all SVGA not accel. Thanks, we will try running
 xf86config today.  This is our newest computer, circa 1999.  I put linux on
 Jim's Win98 computer so that I could use the other linux computer while he
 learned to program in C/C++ with gcc/g++.  It also has the CD/RW drive and
 someone in the linux mail group just steered me to a site with THREE DOS Cd
 burner programs listed.  DOSCDROAST is available command line only, or in a
 much larger version (4.5MB) with mouse/gui support and it will copy music
 and data files, with or without a second CD reader, and play audio CDs and
 copy DVDs, and it is 0.85MB download without the gui.  CD Recording Utilities
 is shareware and is 1.2M download for DOS and does not do anything audio, just
 copies data from reader to writer, or via hard disk, and will finalize a CD.
 (I thought only music CDs needed to be finalized and it does not do those.)
 
 The linux group member suggested the DOS version (ported to DOS) of cdrtools.
 This is 1.4M.  I tend to start with the smallest download, which would be
 CDROAST in this case.  cdrtools might be gui.  DOSCDROAST (non-gui) is 0.85MB.
 
 You need aspi.sys in config.sys to use the writer.  
 
 I woke up again in the middle of the night coughing but in the morning am just
 blowing my nose.  Today I have a cold sore starting (herpes simplex) on my
 lip.  I have not had those for years.  I hope it is gone in less than a week
 before my resistance is gone - anyone remember how long they last?  This cough
 has been two days short of four weeks now.  
 
 
 I can feel but not see my eyebrows.  I look like Mona Lisa.
#14 klg(klg) on Sat Dec 27 22:13:07 2003:
 One good thing about losing your hair:  It's exciting when it starts 
 to grow back - even in places it hadn't been before the chemo began.
#15 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Sun Dec 28 10:05:24 2003:
 Last night I did NOT wake up in the middle of the night coughing, and I am
 not coughing this morning.  I am sneezing a lot instead and have a sore throat
 but this is at least a change.  Tomorrow they knock out my immune system
 again.  I wonder what the cold sore will do when my neutrophil and lymphocyte
 counts go down by Friday.  
 
 Where does hair grow back that it used not to grow?  I read a book once about
 someone whose profession it was to create head models from skulls, and he did
 King Midas (they found his burial site in Lydia).  Midas supposed had pointy
 ears with hair on them, which is a rare genetic disorder.
 
 The SVGA driver with our SiS onboard video chip did only 8-bit color.  So did
 the S3V driver with our S3 Virge card.  The S3 Trio64V+ card with S3 driver
 for X did 'no screen' and would not display anything, so we put back the SiS
 with 8-bit color (and only 1280 max resolution tho the card does 16 and had
 8M onboard RAM).  Then someone suggested since it is VESA 2.0 it can be used
 with the xxfb frame buffer driver.  What is a frame buffer?  This should give
 us more colors.  
 
 Jim now wants me to put linux on a third computer for him.  First I want to
 finish compiling lynx and antiword and put linux on a first computer for me.
 Before tomorrow if possible.
 
 Maybe the chemotherapy will stop the herpes in the cold sore from multiplying,
 or perhaps it only acts on real cells.
#16 Mike McNally(mcnally) on Sun Dec 28 11:35:37 2003:
   re #15:  "Midas has ass's ears.."
 
   (there's actually a folk tale about Midas' misshapen ears..)
#17 Jeff Rollin(twenex) on Sun Dec 28 12:48:01 2003:
 Using the fraembuffer just relies more on the video chip's memory. The frame
 buffer is used to store the images of screens. That's why, on some graphics
 cards, (like mine), the first thing you see when loading up X, when the
 graphics (as opposed to text) mode has been initialized but before X comes
 up, you see an image full of dots, or full of the last screen image before
 the graphicsw screen was turned off, if you reboot.
 
 (Note: by "dots" I don't mean "snow", like you apparently get when you use
 Linux with CGA cards, but a pretty, random, pattern.)
#18 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Sun Dec 28 12:59:18 2003:
 When loading X we see a grey dot pattern.  I tried the fbdev driver and was
 told I don't have /dev/fb0.  I give up, this is beyond me for a while.  Jim
 will edit photos in 8-bit color on this computer.  
 
 How do you put aspi.sys properly into config.sys or autoexec.bat to use a DOS
 CD burner program?  
 
 The person making models of heads from skulls said he got the idea of the
 hairy ears for Midas by noticing someone in the lab had hairy ears. It is a
 rare condition.  
#19 Jeff Rollin(twenex) on Sun Dec 28 14:12:20 2003:
 Re: aspi.sys: put the line:
 
 DEVICE=ASPI.SYS
 
 into config.sys (not autoexec.bat)
 
 DEVICE must be in uppercase, i believe.
 
 My Dad had chemotherapy when he had cnacer. His hair fell out; the hair that
 came back was mostly grey, but he never grew hair back in places he'd already
 gone bald.
#20 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Sun Dec 28 14:58:58 2003:
 My mother's grey hairs came back brown, odd.
 When loading oakcdrom.sys you need to add a switch d:/oemcd001 or the like
 - does aspisys need this?  Only one of the two drives can write.  But we only
 had to do oakcdrom for one drive and it found two, unit 1 and unit 2.
 I will try out what we have after I package a couple of things for linux. 
 I just tried out ltools for DOS that lets you do things on the linux drive.
 The 2M download was that huge because it was full of guis and other things
 for Windows/Java/browser use, files for UNIX, and source code.  I got the DOS
 part down to 75K zipped and it works.  This will be handy on a combination
 DOS/Linux computer in case I download with linux and want to use thefile with
 DOS.
#21 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Sun Dec 28 22:05:02 2003:
 I have not coughed since yesterday, the cold sore has already started to ooze
 a bit, and I expect to be done with the last but one chemotherapy tomorrow
 by 9:15 pm (or 5 pm if they don't run as late as usual).  Last time we were
 at the hospital, Dec. 24, they did not charge a parking fee even before 9:15
 pm.  I just realized I did not get a headache this cycle, and my ribs have
 not been hurting.  My left hand stopped hurting intermittently only yesterday
 so it must be high time to jab it again.
 
 Tomorrow they tell me if the chemotherapy has accomplished anything visible
 since two months ago.  If yes, I continue therapy, unless maybe there is no
 longer any sign of lymphoma in my spleen.  If no, they have to decide what
 to do next.  I will try not the think about it for the next nine hours.  
 Tune in tomorrow evening.  
#22 klg(klg) on Sun Dec 28 22:44:59 2003:
 (It is interesting to read about your experiences with chronically late 
 appointments and problems with venopuncture at a government hospital.  
 In the private sector, the experience was that appointments were kept 
 within 1/2 hour of the set time and venopuncture was essentially 
 painless.)
#23 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Mon Dec 29 01:01:13 2003:
 I thought all doctor's appointments always ran at least two hours late, at
 least that was our experience with two private doctors and afternoon
 appointments.  At the U of M, when I had an 8 am appointment it was never more
 than 1/2 late, same for 9 am infusion.  By 1 pm they are running 3-4 hours
 late.  Understaffed and too many patients for the number of chairs.  They
 started a few people on chairs from the waiting room instead of recliners.
 
 The blood draws are relatively painless but the IVs are larger needles.
#24 David Brodbeck(gull) on Mon Dec 29 09:39:10 2003:
 Doctors "overbook," just like airlines.  Their time is valuable and they
 know at least some people are likely to not show up, but if everyone
 does they run late.  The earlier in the morning you schedule the less
 likely you are to have to wait.
#25 klg(klg) on Mon Dec 29 14:12:29 2003:
 That is strange.  The Infusion Center to which we went was emptying out 
 by 1 or 2 p.m.  Lots of open stations.  And a 4:15 doctor's appointment 
 was generally not more than 15 minutes delayed.
#26 Tim P. Ryan(tpryan) on Mon Dec 29 16:16:39 2003:
 re 16:		I thought the ears where some accident with
 the early attempts at a mechanical rice picker.
#27 Todd(tod) on Mon Dec 29 16:21:03 2003:
 
#28 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Mon Dec 29 16:31:59 2003:
 Every time I had infusion scheduled for 1 pm they were running several hours
 late.  At one point 9 of us were waiting for late appointments.  They put me
 on every time at 4 pm because I need 5 hours and they close at 9.  Other
 people have to wait even longer.  The put two of us with long infusions into
 a room normally only used by very ill people because it was free.
 
 Today I had my blood drawn at 10:00, and got weighed and vital signs taken.
 Respiration 20, pulse way down to 60.  In the hospital it was 120 and on prior
 visits 70-90 or so.  I might have helped that I was half asleep because I was
 awake until after 2 worrying and the garbage trucks attack Jim's street first.
 
 The nurse asked about my cold, noticed my cold sore, and said my lymphocyte
 and neutrophil counts were down and that was either caused by the cold or was
 the cause of the cold lasting so long and had something to do with my bone
 marrow wearing out from treatment.   So they decided to postpone the next
 chemotherapy a week.  Jim was predicting I would not be treated today but for
 the wrong reasons.
 
 The doctor came to tell me that the CT scan was excellent, with no more fluid
 around my lungs.  I had guessed this because I had no rib pain and I was
 breathing normally.  My spleen had also stopped hurting and he said the masses
 there had shrunk even smaller but not disappeared.  After the eighth treatment
 they will do a CT/PET scan, which involves injecting radioactive glucose,
 which is concentrated in highly active dividing tumor cells.  This will be
 3 weeks after the final treatment, not two as before.  And then I wait 3
 months for my next CT scan to make sure things are still okay.
 
 While waiting I talked to someone in for his biannual checkup who had had
 Hodgkin's lymphoma.  Six months chemotherapy during which he was nauseous a
 lot.  He said the steroids made him hungry so he gained a lot of weight, after
 losing 36 pounds in 6 weeks before he was hospitalized and treated.  At his
 3 month checkup they found he was no longer in remission and gave him 6 more
 months of some 'more aggressive' drugs (harder on the tumor cells and on
 general health).  He could not go back to work as a research geologist for
 3 months after all his treatments, which included radiation and stem cell
 transplant, because the drugs kept him from thinking straight even enough to
 read a magazine.  I am a lot luckier, but he is fine now for five years.
 
 The doctor said to remember there is a light at the end of the tunnel and in
 my case it is a large one.  Large light or large tunnel?  
 
 Anyway, I get a whole week that I can sleep without steroids, and maybe my
 taste will become more normal.  We celebrated by eating in the cafeteria for
 $6 - one cheese pizza (made with hot sauce so Jim ate it) and three vegetables
 with roll (they let us take a brown one from the salad bar).  I am supposed
 to drink a lot the whole cycle.  My ALT and AST counts were very high normal,
 which I think means I have a lot of dead cells being cleaned away.  It can
 take three weeks or more to clean up after each chemotherapy which is why they
 are waiting 3 weeks for the PET scan.
 
 I went to the bank and cashed a savings bond (since I won't be paying income
 taxes this year and there is interest on the bond) that I will use to pay for
 the insurance deductible for 2 infusions and a PET scan in Jan-Feb.  The
 insurance pays for the next three CT scans after that.  
#29 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Tue Dec 30 00:31:30 2003:
 I napped two hours and can think straighter again.  The nurse said my hand
 will probably stop hurting after they stopping sticking needles in it, but
 the numb area over the spleen might stay numb due to the biopsy.  I don't know
 if it is the biopsy itself or the anesthetic that causes.  It is not a problem
 - I did not even notice it until now.  
 
 Jim recuperated by falling asleep in the tub.  We unpacked the applesauce and
 mortar and pestle kit which we will use next time to mash up benadryls and
 tylenols, and the tapes and CDs and books.  
#30 Andrew J Lanagan(drew) on Tue Dec 30 02:43:38 2003:
 Re 15,16,26,27:
     Is this the everything-he-touched-turned-to-gold guy?
#31 John Willcome(willcome) on Tue Dec 30 02:55:16 2003:
 drew is a SEX CRIMINAL!
 
 Type:  PEDERAST
#32 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Tue Dec 30 10:26:35 2003:
 Yes, according to mythology.  He probably just lived some place with good
 mines.
 
 Someone who is helping me with software says PET scans involve antimatter.
#33 bruce allen price(bru) on Tue Dec 30 10:44:39 2003:
 If there is anto-matter involved , it is because the dilithium crystals are
 out of sync.
#34 Todd(tod) on Tue Dec 30 11:08:15 2003:
 
#35 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Tue Dec 30 11:44:09 2003:
 It is not a 'kit' - it is Jim's mortar and pestle, made of glass.  I have also
 seen ceramic ones.  Try an Indian food store?  The 'kit' is a tupperware
 container containing the mortar and pestle and some apple sauce.  The sauce
 is made from Rane's windfall apples and it is pink.
 
 I think my cold sore is healing already.  Maybe they should have given me only
 four days reprieve, but I will make sure to enjoy the whole week.  Still
 coughing.
#36 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Tue Dec 30 21:00:05 2003:
 The radioactive glucose is made radioactive by attaching radioactive fluorine
 to it, which emits positrons.  It can also be used to study brain active. 
 Fluoride allergy is unrelated to this.
 
 Jim's neighbor brought over some clementines as a gift.  Same neighbor that
 gave us 12 packages of cheese.  Jim does odd (literally) repairs for her.
#37 Tim P. Ryan(tpryan) on Tue Dec 30 23:59:46 2003:
 	Like every other repiar, on the odd beat?  Repair #13, then repair
 #15?;)
#38 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Wed Dec 31 00:11:14 2003:
 No, things like making her plumbing continue to work, finding child gates for
 her dogs.  The next odd job here is to make a gasket for the nonstandard
 toilet that is 10" instead of 12" from the wall so cannot easily be replaced
 and is leaking into a bucket instead.  Or do some fancy cutting of cast iron
 drain pipes and tiles and rebuild the plumbing system to take a standard
 toilet that does not need water dams to cut down the water usage from 5 gal.
 The old toilet matches the 1930s sink and tub in Jim's original bathroom.
 
 I am up coughing again.  The coughing does not start until I lie down.
 I am reading a very large book from the Dallas Art Museum deriving from their
 exhibit of American tableware of this century, which analyzes dining trends
 such as casserole dishes, barbecue, TV dinners, and other special events that
 required special dishes.  Melamine dishes were a big hit in the fifties and
 sixties.  My mother had two sets - parve and meat.  Brown and pink.  We never
 did casseroles or fondue or cocktail parties or barbecues - did you?
 The brown and white dishes matched the linoleum floor tiles, which she would
 repair with scotch tape.  Some people are more into duct tape or electrician's
 tape - does it reveal anything about their personalities?
 
 I will try again to read myself to sleep.
#39 klg(klg) on Wed Dec 31 11:46:37 2003:
 (She never served dairy?)
#40 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Wed Dec 31 12:09:52 2003:
 I guess it was dairy and meat dishes.  At some point she read that you can
 ignore this distinction if you use a blazing hot metal rod and there must be
 one in the dishwasher somewhere so we simplified life after that.  I don't
 think our dishwasher heated water.  I wonder if the orthodox all have two
 dishwashers so they won't accidentally get particles of food from one dish
 to another.
#41 Joe(gelinas) on Wed Dec 31 12:32:22 2003:
 (We once looked at a house that had two dishwashers precisely for that
 reason.)
#42 klg(klg) on Wed Dec 31 12:45:01 2003:
 That would depend upon what one means by "orthodox."
 
 There are probably orthodox Jews who have 4 dishwasher.  Two for 
 general use and 2 for Pesach.
 
 However (so far as I know) for most people, plastic tableware cannot be 
 changed in such a manner.
#43 Todd(tod) on Wed Dec 31 12:54:07 2003:
 
#44 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Wed Dec 31 13:13:05 2003:
 One or the other what?   You are supposed to use one set of dishes for things
 with milk in them and another for things with meat in them.  Are you
 suggesting that kosher people should become vegetarian so as to have only one
 set of dishes?  We also had two sets of Pesach (Passover) dishes, in china.
 I doubt anyone would have trouble washing dishes in the sink for one week a
 year.  Our fancy dishes were acquired one at a time for cheap (or free?) when
 we spent a certain amount of money at the supermarket.  I have not seen that
 sort of offer for a while for dishes, but I think I saw it for pots once. 
 
 My nose is not dripping and I have not coughed or sneezed since 1 am and the
 cold sore is already healed.  Let's see if my blood counts go back up by next
 Monday.  I suspect they will poison me again even if not.
 
 A friend writes that her father-in-law has surprised all the doctors, who
 predicted he was too old (78) for leukemia treatment to work, by recovering
 to the point where he has normal platelets instead of 1/4 normal and no longer
 needs transfusions.  They can't figure out why he is doing so well.  
 
 Two people just emailed to ask about my CT scan results, one of them the
 friend whose father in law has leukemia, and the other the translator who got
 radiation for breast cancer.  Nice of them to remember the date when they have
 their own problems.  
 
 I wonder if my brother would be interested in hearing about my health.
#45 Todd(tod) on Wed Dec 31 13:18:19 2003:
 
#46 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Wed Dec 31 15:13:53 2003:
 I don't understand.  Dairy is the opposite of vegetarian?  Some vegetarians
 eat dairy foods.
#47 Todd(tod) on Wed Dec 31 15:27:36 2003:
 
#48 Lawrence Kestenbaum(polygon) on Thu Jan  1 15:47:32 2004:
 Just to be clear, there are plenty of folks who find being vegetarian
 makes it easier to keep kosher.  But I wouldn't assume they're being
 vegetarian for that reason alone. 
 
 One rationale for the separation of meat and dairy foods is that you're
 separating life from death, that is, dairy=life, meat=death.  Based on
 this interpretation, staying away from meat altogether would be a positive
 good.
 
 Michael Brooks of UM Hillel says that the difference between Judaism and
 Christianity is that Judaism prefers to separate life and death, whereas
 Christianity deliberately mixes it all up together.
#49 Rane Curl(rcurl) on Thu Jan  1 15:51:09 2004:
 ..and I think just that they are facts of our existence, ovbiously
 inextricably connected. There cannot be one without the other. 
#50 klg(klg) on Thu Jan  1 15:53:33 2004:
 (Do you eat dead fish with dairy?)
#51 Rane Curl(rcurl) on Thu Jan  1 15:59:15 2004:
 (I skip most dairy because I am lactose intolerant - though lactase pills
 circumvent the problem. But since you ask - I only eat fish that are
 dead.)
#52 klg(klg) on Thu Jan  1 16:25:01 2004:
 (Well.  We suppose that clears it up.  With the exception of monkfish, 
 that is.)
#53 klg(klg) on Thu Jan  1 16:25:36 2004:
 (Oops.  Forgot St. Peter's fish.)
#54 Rane Curl(rcurl) on Thu Jan  1 16:34:32 2004:
 (I know them as Anglerfish. Picture and facts at
 http://www.dnr.state.md.us/fisheries/education/monkfish/monkfish.html)
#55 klg(klg) on Thu Jan  1 16:38:26 2004:
 (Yes, we know.  Sneaky tactics.)
#56 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Thu Jan  1 18:36:48 2004:
 You can be kosher and eat dead fishes with milk, but not dead chickens with
 milk,  The original rule was not to cook a calf in its mother's milk. 
 Chickens don't usually give milk, but somehow got shifted into the cow
 category instead of the fish category.
 
 Today we took advantage of the greatly reduced amount of traffic (you could
 not even hear I-94 from here) and managed to cross Jackson and Dexter roads
 to go through an area of 50's Cape Cods (most with additions) to Miller Woods.
 There were a few other people out walking dogs (one was a dog trainer and had
 a very polite bulldog) and one on a unicycle.  Only one squirrel. The woods
 were full of large dead branches and fungus and moss and grapevines.  Miller
 Woods is rather large.  It was a farm maybe 100 years ago.  Next walk may be
 through the ravine if we can get across both streets again easily.  I walked
 nonstop for over an hour, at least 2 miles.  Usually I can do 3 miles per
 hour.  This is much better than a month ago even though I have been mostly
 housebound.
 
 I am still coughing a bit and sneezing in the middle of the night.
 
 Jim's nephew came by.  Jim had asked his sister to send us any leftovers. 
 She apparently reserved a few things for us instead and we got a large
 cardboard box with a red ribbon containing grapefruits, oranges, lemons and
 limes with some of the peel grated off (to cook with), pears, apples, some
 candy orange slices, baklava, chocolate oatmeal cookies, other cookies, some
 cooked potatoes, some ham (which we put into split pea soup for his nephew),
 a cranberry pie and an unopened box of cheesecake.  Hardly leftovers.  We were
 expecting vegetables.  Jim tried to get a video camera working with the small
 BW TV that someone gave his nephew but after finally getting the right power
 supply he noticed that the VCR output was not something you could put into
 that TV via the antenna screws so now they are playing with an amp and a
 guitar instead.  I forgot the two bananas.  And a green pepper.  His sister
 is out of town for a week (gone to a wedding) and her husband is eating Weight
 Watches' TV dinners (he tells people to be sure to eat two of them as they
 are small).  We will attend the next family get together in April when I don't
 need to avoid crowds.  
#57 John Willcome(willcome) on Thu Jan  1 21:16:01 2004:
 Fish.  Not fishes.  Count nouns.
#58 klg(klg) on Thu Jan  1 22:33:56 2004:
 We know.  But that contradicts the postulated dichotomy of dairy/life 
 vs. meat/death.
 
 What kind of dog was on the unicycle?
#59 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Fri Jan  2 09:44:29 2004:
 Nuclear Medicine just called to schedule a Feb 10 PET scan.  The doctor said
 to wait a full 3 weeks after my last chemotherapy, which is Jan 26.  The
 person who called said they usually only wait 2-3 weeks which made it Feb 10.
 But they let me choose Feb 17 (3 weeks and a day).  I have an ENT appointment
 that day at 8:15 and a PET scan appointment at 9:00.  At 9:00 I drink a bottle
 or two of something, at 10:00 they inject radioactive glucose, and at 11:00
 I do the scan.  For CT scan there is only one hour wait after the drink, for
 this there is 2 hours.  The scan itself takes under an hour.
 
 If I want to eat or drink, it has to be before 5 am.  Rather than getting up
 at 4 am I may skip breakfast this time.  The other option was to eat at 7:00
 and wait an extra two hours at the hospital.
#60 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Fri Jan  2 17:24:11 2004:
 Today we went for a walk through the Ravine near Revena and discovered that
 most if it has no trails but is just part of people's back yards and very
 overgrown, so we walked around and looked at houses and then headed to KMart
 to walk some more.  Corelle now has a 'rice bowl' and a '28 oz bowl' with
 unspecified purpose.  I said it would be good for holding more oatmeal.  Jim
 says it is for feeding or watering the dog.  Tall with steep sides.
 
 They have a CD-R/RW boombox recorder.  We looked for a way to record CDs with
 it and finally figured out that it will READ CD-R/RW disks and RECORD to tape.
 Only $40.  For $16 you can buy 50 CD-R disks and use your computer to record
 to them so you can play them on the boombox.  They don't sell computers there,
 but a Lexmark printer is only $35.  Lexmark cartridges are $25, B or color.
 Outside K-Mart Jim was spotted by a former customer of a rival electronics
 department where we used to volunteer.  
#61 Jeff Rollin(twenex) on Fri Jan  2 17:29:44 2004:
 
#62 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Sat Jan  3 20:14:16 2004:
 Today we used the last of the spring weather to walk (1.5 miles?) via
 Eberwhite and another woods to the hosue of some friends who also volunteer
 at Kiwanis to help one of them with his Windows computer.  He had forgotten
 how to print from Netscape (first do File then Print) and will put a note to
 himself on the monitor.  He was trying to use Hyperterminal from Windows
 instead of Kermit from dos to dial grex and was entering his log with an .org
 on the end of it.  He also tried his full grex email address as a login.  And
 then he wanted to know about those 'things hiding behind the screen -
 squiggles or googles or something' which turned out to be cookies.  I tried
 to show him how to read mail with html and text in it (view attachments....
 with pine) and then how to forward mail without any text in it to his ISP
 webmail but grex would not send any mail today so we gave up on that.  We had
 a nice lunch on the sunporch and admired the collection of shells and heard
 about what interesting people all the neighbors are.  And insisted on walking
 back.  Eberwhite woods is much less full of undergrowth and has almost no
 green groundcover unlike Miller Woods.  Maybe the thick layer of oak leaves
 makes the soil too acidic.  We saw one grey squirrel and Jim found three
 gloves and a lot of used pine flooring.  
#63 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Sun Jan  4 01:17:51 2004:
 Still 40 degrees F, so I may get in one more walk tomorrow before winter hits
 (and before my knees go weak again shortly after Monday's treatment).
 I have not sneezed since Wed. but I still cough a bit.  My fingertips and my
 feet are still numb.  Apples taste sour, oranges even more so, but the split
 pea soup and barley and yogurt tasted as expected (a bit sour, of course).
 Jim is thinking of letting me eat all the cheesecake.  The problem is if he
 eats one piece then he cannot stop.  He ate the cranberry pie (which I found
 sour).
 	Our friends today had trouble hearing me.  Soft voice, and they are
 both in their 80s and wear hearing aids.  Sometimes I think about which side
 effects I would like to disappear first.  Laryngitis, things tasting sour,
 weak knees, hot flashes?  
 	My oldest cousin sent a nice letter with photos of her grandchildren
 and a copy of a talk she used to give to local women's clubs.  She had breast
 cancer twice, was treated with radiation and chemotherapy, and the second time
 by mastectomy, and is fine now.  She wanted to point out to people that cancer
 is no longer a death sentence, unless you don't treat it.  Of the nine of my
 relatives who had cancer, she is the only one still alive (but her mother had
 cancer at age 86 and died two years later of complications following a fall).
 My cousin is trying to get more exercise and lose weight.  The friend we
 visited today (age 85 or so) says she goes to an exercise class three times
 a week despite her arthritis, which also does not keep her from gardening.
 They start off with chair exercises and progress to weights.  Jim wants to
 start doing pushups but I don't think I could do one real one yet.  
#64 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Mon Jan  5 20:19:01 2004:
 I got to sleep around 2 and woke up around 6 and got back to sleep just before
 the second garbage truck started, for a few minutes, and we ran a bunch of
 errands hauling things with the card, shoveled the steps of the neighbor who
 shovelled my walk.  She came out aghast that I was shoveling, in my health.
 Arrived 10:30 for blood draw (done by someone who hopes to become a hospital
 administrator after some master's program), and 10:40 saw the nurse (scheduled
 at 11:00).  Pulse around 60-70, bp 105/64 or so, no reason not to do therapy
 because my neutrophil count doubled in the past week and lymphocytes are low
 normal.  My hemoglobin is down from 14.3 to 12.5 but that it still low normal.
 Someone else in for the same diagnosis was also getting a transfusion since
 he lost a lot of hemoglobin.  He will have to stop at the end of 6 cycles.
 This is his second treatment, after 7 years remission, and it is harder on
 him than on me.  It also affects his blood sugar when he takes prednisone.
 
 I talked to someone who was about to start the same treatment and was
 terrified.  Several of us reassured him that nausea was uncommon for these
 drugs and that the worst to expect was numb hands.  For him this was pretty
 bad as he is a concert cellist, but the numbness is temporary.  He is only
 Stage II and I am Stage IV (or I was).  He is in much better shape than I was
 when I started.  He also has extreme cold sensitivity and digestive problems
 that I no longer have, probably caused by enlarged lymph nodes.  I write down
 my email adress and website URL to read about my adventures.
 
 The infusion went well and we got out at 5 pm.  The first IV in my left hand
 hurt a lot and failed, so she put a nearly painless one in my right hand.
 Everything went on time.  One of my neighbors was there for colon cancer
 treatment.  Once a week for six week, two weeks off, repeat this all five more
 times (1 year total).  After the first five treatments she spent her two weeks
 off a week early, in the hospital, dealing with a stomach problem she thought
 was mucolytis (mucositis?)>  She cannot comment on hospital food because they
 fed her through a tube down her throat.  Tubes everwhere, she says.
 
 My next neighbor was on her second round of treatments after 3 months of
 remission and has been 1.5 years on therapy now.  Every day for a week,
 repeat two weeks, a week off, etc.  They are trying different drugs because
 of teh side effects - drooping wrists, difficulty walking, peeling skin.
 
 After infusion we stopped to visit our doctor friend, who printed out my cat
 scans and explained them.  There are still a few enlarged lymph nodes but not
 many, and two spleen masses are down from 12 to 5 to 4 cm diameter.
 
 I am falling asleep, from a combinatino of benadryl and 4 hours sleep last
 night.  Got to eat and then drink a lot while taking prednisone for the next
 four days.  
 
 One of the patients, who was in there for a six-month checkup, had cancer
 caused by the immunosuppresant drugs given for his liver transplant.  The
 transplant was a year ago, the chemotherapy lasted 6 months.  Poor kid.
 He is also prone to catching colds, badly.
#65 Todd(tod) on Tue Jan  6 12:04:46 2004:
 
#66 klg(klg) on Tue Jan  6 12:22:24 2004:
 re:  "#64 (keesan): . . . Someone else in for the same diagnosis was 
 also getting a transfusion  . . .  This is his second treatment, after 
 7 years remission, and it is harder on him than on me."
 
 Did he mention the chemo agent(s) he's on?  Was it Bexxar (mentioned 
 above from an article found in CURE magazine)?  It said the drug was 
 developed by an AA oncologist (Kowalsky).
#67 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Tue Jan  6 12:48:36 2004:
 Kaminski (my doctor) developed the Bexxar.  The other person about to start
 CHOP-R had come from N. Carolina (Duke) for a second diagnosis because he ans
 his friend thought the single treatment of Bexxar sounded better than 6 months
 of CHOP with Rituxan.  Bexxar is a radioactive version of Rituxan which not
 only attaches to B-lymphocytes that it recognizes from a protein on their
 surface (and since it is an antibody it then spurs the immune system to
 destroy those cells, which can take up to 3 weeks particiularly since my
 immune system is being knocked out by the more traditional poisons).  The
 Bexxar actually kills those cells. Unfortunately it is radioactive enough to
 kill other nearby cells, and to make you so radioactive that they keep you
 in the hospital for a week behind lead shields.
 
 He will go back to Duke University Hospital and do 6 months of CHOP-R.
 
 The person in for a 7-year remission was getting CHOP-R.  Last time he may
 not have had the Rituxan, since it was only approved in 1996 and they were
 explaining to him very carefully how it worked.
 
 My hemoglobin has also started to drop around the 5th cycle, but not as much
 as his.  They keep complimenting me on my strong bone marrow, and my nice
 veins (but not my pulse, which is hard to find).  
 
 Today Jim went to get 4 x 70 mg prednisone.  They were out of stock on
 non-expired 50s so gave him 28 10's, which turned out to cost about 1/4 as
 much because there is a lower price for larger numbers.  I wish they had
 thought of this last time.  I don't swallow the 7 pills anyway so they are
 no more bother (for me) than the 2 pills.  Jim mashes them.  The Benadryl
 tastes worse than the Prednisone. It always nearly makes me gag. I have to
 stop after the first bite and space out the rest of the bites. 
 
 It is an hour after I took them and I am already snapping at Jim.  I asked
 him to forgive me for a few days for being nervous.
#68 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Wed Jan  7 08:32:04 2004:
 First night after therapy I slept a lot (probably from the Benadryl and
 Ativan).  Last night I got to sleep around 1, woke around 2 to urinate (force
 fluids!) and then managed a whole four hours additional sleep before waking
 at 6.  Only three more days of prednisone pills to keep me awake.  Apart from
 the prednisone effects, the other side effects have not increased.  Only my
 fingertips are numb, legs are still strong, things taste okay.
#69 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Thu Jan  8 07:22:17 2004:
 I will probably continue to wake up earlier every day until Sunday - today
 was well before 6 am.  Eventually I got hungry and had some milk.  This is
 pretty mild compared to the stories I have heard from a few other patients
 who ended up in the hospital unable to eat, or with all their skin peeling
 off.  Most people don't seem to have major side effects, though.  
#70 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Thu Jan  8 22:48:16 2004:
 Today the bitter taste of prednisone lingered for two hours and I thought that
 was what was making me slightly queasy until Jim mentioned that he felt queasy
 and lightheaded and stayed in bed all day.  Another grexer just got over the
 same virus and says the queasiness lasts 1.5 days and the lightheadedness a
 total of 3.  So again Jim seems to have gotten sick ahead of me and the timing
 this time is rather bad as my immune system will be conking out tomorrow. 
 Maybe I had this first and just not as bad?  Jim also has diarrhea and the
 prednisone has the opposite effect.  I offered him a prednisone but he is just
 doing mint tea today.  I am fine now.  I drank some orange juice to get rid
 of the prednisone taste.  I continue to be hungry but tangerines are getting
 more sour again.  I eat lots of raw carrots to counteract the prednisone. 
 Only one more day.  Jim very kindly got out of bed twice today to mash pills
 for me and to cook me breakfast.  I heated up my own leftover rice later.
 
 Today I discovered that older sound cards that use IRQ15 conflict with PCI
 bus and secondary controller.  The third sound card worked - it was PnP.
 The modem upgrade messed things up but finally I got back the 28.8 setting
 however the computer keeps trying to recognize a different modem now (the one
 for which I upgraded and which matches the chip but is not what Win98
 installed the first time around).  I got Realaudio to work at 28K, finally,
 with unpowered speakers, and will be able to listen to Bulgarian broadcasts.
 The idea was to do it with linux but the Lucent modem which can be used with
 linux has some hardware conflict of its own (PCI resources).  The first of
 three sound cards did not work.  The second did not work.  The third worked.
 I am learning a lot despite getting only about 4 hours sleep.
#71 Todd(tod) on Fri Jan  9 00:52:38 2004:
 
#72 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Fri Jan  9 09:53:20 2004:
 I have not tried listening to the Bulgarian yet, just tested this on King FM
 Seattle and then I also attempted Beethoven Radio (Florida) but they use
 ActiveX and after half an hour of poking around the Opera help site I noticed
 that they do not support ActiveX because it causes security holes.  What is
 ActiveX and how does it make holes?  I wrote Beethoven Radio about this.
 It also took me half an hour to figure out that I must have checked some radio
 button wrong and somehow disabled Realaudio as a plugin.  There is another
 member of our linux list group who translates Bulgarian (to and from Spanish).
 
 Carrots are high in fiber and do not taste sour.  Prednisone is supposed to
 cause fluid retention especially if you eat salt, so I don't.  Fluid retention
 leads to dry stools and thus constipation and therefore more fiber is good.
 They keep asking me about constipation.  It is not a problem but I do have
 somewhat harder stools.  This particular nurse is interested in the topic and
 seems disappointed whenever she gets a negative answer.  I drank less fluids
 yesterday evening and all night and got more sleep.
 
 I went a whole two days before I started sneezing and coughing again
 yesterday.  Jim has progressed to drinking grape juice today.  
 
 For a few days after discontinuing prednisone there is a tendency to very
 frequent and very soft bowel movements (which I am sure the nurse would love
 to hear about).  Anyone who wants should feel free to parody this all at mnet
 and let me know so I can admire the results.  
 
 Today someone is sending me two medical translations that I wonder if I can
 learn to print out (pdf) with linux ghostscript.  It seems you can only print
 if you set up a user account to print from (except for plain text, which even
 root can print).  My instructions were for printing from ps files, so I would
 need to make the pdf into a ps and run it through a filter somehow.  I wish
 there were a linux for people without split personalities.  
 
 I also have instructions for using xvesa so that I can get more than 256
 colors out of my fancy 'new' video cards with 4M RAM.  You need to use a
 different kernel, a different batch file to load it with loadlin, add an fb
 device by installing a package full of devices, and type out a long line
 specifying things about mouse and screen resolution (instead of a config file
 - but I wonder how it determines things like refresh rates and clock timings).
 What is a frame buffer?  Our normal kernel does not support those.
 
 You can tell I got more sleep - less typos.
#73 Todd(tod) on Fri Jan  9 12:49:05 2004:
 
#74 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Fri Jan  9 13:14:39 2004:
 I doubt anyone would get yellow skin from eating 2 carrots a day.
 I have to take Prilosec  (similar to Nexium) an hour before the prednisone
 to reduce stomach acidity.  Maybe the reduced stomach acidity in your case
 changes your bacterial flora which affects bowel movements?  
 I would eat apples instead of carrots but all fruit is tasting rather sour
 to me these past few months.  
 The prednisone is apparently hard on the stomach lining if you don't first
 reduce stomach acidity.  
 Jim went back to sleep.  It is strange that he keeps getting these viruses
 before I do.
#75 Todd(tod) on Fri Jan  9 13:44:25 2004:
 
#76 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Fri Jan  9 14:16:18 2004:
 No, just sleeping in an unheated room.  He commented that it was getting a
 bit cold up there recently.
 I heat my room to around 60 so I won't get sick while my immunity is low. 
 I used to sleep at 36 in the winter.  50 is comfortable if you start off witha
 hot water bottle.
#77 David Brodbeck(gull) on Fri Jan  9 14:27:57 2004:
 I have to keep my bedroom warmer than that or I get very reluctant to 
 get out of bed in the morning.
#78 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Fri Jan  9 14:34:06 2004:
 I have to turn down the heat a bit at night so that when I get my hot flashes
 that wake me up every hour or two I can cool off quicker after throwing off
 the blankets, otherwise I tend to fall asleep with the blankets off and then
 wake up cold.  A balancing act.  Luckily I did not get the hot flashes in the
 summer when I was keeping the hospital room 76 because the hospital gown had
 snaps down the back which landed just under my spine so I kept them unsnapped
 and would have been cold otherwise.  When you are very skinny snaps under your
 spine hurt even on a foam mattress.  And the mattress was plastic covered
 which would have been pretty sticky when I started to sweat from the hot
 flashes.  My timing on all this has been pretty good - I could go for walks
 because of the long warm fall, to get my strength back.  
#79 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Sat Jan 10 11:04:35 2004:
 Today I woke up before 6 am as usual and after two hours (without prednisone!)
 got back to sleep for a bit and it really feels nice to be awake.  I am still
 sneezing and coughing a bit at 6 am but don't have Jim's virus that I know
 of.  Maybe I had it and the prednisone masked the symptoms somehow?
 
 Jim suggests that it is the poisons which are making old injured muscles ache
 again - first in three spots probably caused by excessive coughing (which I
 had worried had something to do with the spleen masses) and now in my right
 calf, which I pulled a muscle in while walking in Eberwhite Woods on one of
 the last nice days when I really should have been resting because the
 prednisone (or discontinuing it) was causing extreme muscle weakness.  I don't
 have any muscle weakness yet this cycle, just these few minor aches.
 
 My left hand still aches a bit once in a while.  Like the nurse said, it is
 probably from using it for 6 of 7 IVs and my right hand, which I used twice
 (one IV went in both hands when the first failed) did not hurt during or after
 infusion.  It is slowly getting better.  For three cycles it hurt a lot for
 up to 1 week in mid-cycle.
 
 Yesterday my hands were more numb and shaky  but this morning they are better
 again.  Perhaps I am getting better at resisting side effects?  My other side
 effects (jaw pain, thrush) are apparently not going to be back this cycle.
 Last cycle the headache did not recur.  So far things have only been getting
 better except for needing to wait a week to get back my immunity last time,
 which may have been due to the bad viral infection more than the accumulation
 of effects of therapy (which depressed my neutrophil count since the
 neutrophils sacrifice themselves to fight off infections).  I have heard from
 some people that things get better as therapy advances, and from some that
 they get worse - lower blood counts and the need for transfusion among the
 elderly.  I am again one of the luckier ones. 
 
 I wish it would stop hurting to sit, and that my voice would come back (it
 got worse again two days after treatment but is still usable).  I know the
 hot flashes will eventually end (in two years, at worst!).  Nothing else is
 much more than a scientific curiosity at this point in the treatment cycle
 and I am extremely grateful to be living in a time and place where I was able
 to be treated with a good chance of cure.
 
 No more prednisone until the next (final) cycle in about two weeks!  Jim can
 sleep late (except he starts classes Tuesday).
 
 Time off for a hot flash....
#80 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Sat Jan 10 20:52:35 2004:
 I am pleased to announce that I don't seem to have caught whatever Jim had
 or else had a much milder case of it, and that Jim has sufficiently recovered
 that he is fixing portable CD players today.  He just drilled some holes
 larger so that he could replace the three missing ball bearings with some
 larger ones from another model.  All the faucets in the house continue to drip
 because there is nothing to be learned from fixing them.  
 
 Do any of my loyal readers know how to use Xvesa to display more than 8-bit
 color with a card that has 4M RAM and in theory does 24-bit color?
 Xvesa -screen 800x600x24  looks just like 8-bit color.
 
 What are the known advantages of using AOL 9 (which takes up twice as much
 space and needs twice as much RAM) over AOL 8?  Someone we know thinks she
 needs the latest version but it won't fit on her P133 so we offered her a P166
 and AOL 9 would require buying extra RAM.  I am trying to convince her to save
 $15/month and a lot of time by using an ISP and Opera instead.  
#81 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Sun Jan 11 16:05:56 2004:
 I am pleased that I am not as exhausted as I have been on the 6th day after
 previous therapies.  I got back to sleep until 10, which helped.
 
 The poisons keep fast-growing cells from dividing, which includes not only
 hair but skin (outside) and mucus membranes (inside) - intestinal lining,
 esophagus, throat, tongue.  My tongue and the inside of my mouth feel sore
 and it hurts a bit to eat and my nose is runny, possibly because my body is
 cleaning up all the dead cells lining it.  When I took a bath last night I
 noticed that a lot of dead skin rubbed off.  One of the phlebotomists (the
 people who jab needles into me to take blood samples) commented on how smooth
 my skin is.  Maybe chemotherapy should be patented as an anti-aging therapy
 for making your skin feel younger!  
 
 This is probably my day of lowest blood counts, but this time I have no signs
 of thrush (no slime on my teeth) or low platelet counts (no blood when I blow
 my nose).  My bone marrow must have recovered nicely.  I expect to start
 feeling better in most respects tomorrow, but my sense of taste is probably
 still getting worse.  More sour oatmeal for a week or so.
 
 I have some odd muscle-type aches in my right calf and in three areas of my
 abdomen, which feel better and then worse again.  Nothing severe.
 
 I was surprised how fast my hair dried.  Hair on the top of my head must not
 grow as often because it is a little thicker.  Hair on my legs must hardly
 ever grow because I don't notice it being any thinner.
 
 Today we are making a 'new' P166 with 17" monitor and sound card for a friend
 of a grexer, to upgrade her, using pieces contributed mainly by quentin but
 also a few things from other grexers, as needed (such as sound card and hard
 drive from Leeron).  She is somewhat disabled and low-income and really
 appreciates all the donations.  I wonder how slow this will run after she
 stuffs AOL8 onto it.  I plan to give her a month's trial of my local ISP (half
 the price of AOL and twice the speed) with Opera, for comparison.  
#82 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Mon Jan 12 22:00:58 2004:
 Two fingers are starting to have shredded skin.  I had forgotten about this.
 Today my right hand aches instead of my left hand, just one week after
 infusion.  It was okay for a week.  During infusion the nurse found it
 interesting that the area around the veins in my hand and wrist turned red
 and itchy from a drug reaction so maybe it is another drug reaction.  I am
 sure it will go away.  
 Things still taste funny.  Leek and jerusalem artichoke soup with yoghurt is
 okay, but millet is really scratchy.  The surface of my tongue feels burnt.
 Bread also hurts.  Jim thinks it is the salt.  The millet has no salt.
 
 Jim's sister phoned to let us know his only cousin is in Dallas for the next
 six weeks recovering from surgery for diverticulitis and cannot travel.  She
 went there to a convention.  She is allowed out tomorrow but can't come home
 by plane or bus or car.  We suggested the train when she is stronger.  We
 compared hospital experiences.  They also wake her every four hours, and the
 snaps on the back of her hospital gown hit her spine so she also undid them
 and also the shoulder snaps so the high neck would not strangle her.  Her
 insurance is paying for a single room.  She knows nobody in Dallas.  We
 promised to call again soon.  She is taking lots of pain killers but can now
 start eating solid food.  This makes my sore hand seem so trivial.  
 
 I am back down from 113 pounds with fluid to 109 pounds without fluid
 retention, which is more than I weighed in April but less than January (112).
 
 We have four weeks or so to finish putting together all our computers.  We
 are transplanting the hard drive and CD-ROM drive and cards from a computer
 we put together for a friend of bruin's because Win98 keeps crashing on it
 at inopportune moments such as while loading drivers, defragmenting, or
 starting IE 5.  And the screen turns an interesting green pattern.  Jim seems
 to enjoy moving parts around, luckily, so we are giving her my office computer
 and moving my parts to something else, after upgrading my original cpu from
 150 to 166.  We are downgrading me to 133 temporily.  DOS does not care much.
 This way she will get a known quantity.  My office computer works if you don't
 mind turning the power on a few times when the first time does not work.
 Nice to have the time for such useful projects.  
#83 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Tue Jan 13 09:37:42 2004:
 Today I am on the upswing, as expected.  This time the wobbly knees lasted
 only one day (Sunday) instead of a week, and my legs no longer feel like they
 have pulled muscles in them.  My voice is stronger already, my hands less
 numb, and I will find out when I eat if my tongue is still sore.  
 
 The hot flashes are worse again but that too will pass.
 
 We learned that when you change from a Cyrix 150MHz to an Intel 166MHz cpu
 (setting all the jumpers properly for speed, voltage, multiplier, etc.) the
 pci video card in the middle pci slot no longer displays a cursor or color.
 If you put it in the first pci slot it works again.  Scott gave us a computer
 with a video problem that we cured that way.  Also pci cards do not work at
 all unless you have them firmly seated and some are harder than others to
 seat.  I think we have two working computers again.  Finally.  I am curious
 if the two sound cards that crashed Win98 in the recycled PBell will do so
 in the new computer.  
#84 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Tue Jan 13 23:40:51 2004:
 We phoned Jim's cousin tonight and tried to distract her while they were
 putting in an IV (to give her potassium, they said).  It hurt.  It failed.
 They tried another.  It hurt.  It failed.  They were going to try her other
 arm.  She suggested they get a heating pad after Jim mentioned U of M Cancer
 Center used them.  The nurse had studied here and went off for one.  The
 cousin took the opportunity to go to the bathroom.  She is supposed to be
 allowed to leave but not on her own.  Jim's brother in Colorado offered to
 drive there in a car that converts to a bed and fetch her (to Colorado?  to
 Michigan?).  He has a friend in Dallas.  She is not allowed to wear a seat
 belt in a plane.  She will lie down in the car.  It is good to have close
 cousins when you don't have any siblings.  It is a one day drive from
 Colorado.  His brother is currently unemployed.  It is also good to always
 have at least one unemployed relative.  I had Jim.  Some people are not so
 lucky.
#85 Todd(tod) on Wed Jan 14 12:33:22 2004:
 
#86 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Wed Jan 14 22:00:46 2004:
 My tongue and lips still hurt when I eat anything scratchy, which includes
 millet and beans.  So I am eating lots of potatoes and squash with cheese or
 yogurt, and Chinese preserved eggs.  Also WHITE sticky rice that our Chinese
 visitor left.  Is this what is meant by bland foods?  I doubt that most people
 on special diets have sore tongues.  
 Only three more weeks and I will be getting better without the immediate
 prospect of more chemicals.  It gets a bit depressing to know that when I
 start feeling better the next chemo is only a few days away, but it is the
 last one.  
 
 I have number hands again but managed to type about 5000 words, including
 typos.  (numb-er)  Also numb feet.  My legs may or may not be wobbly.  I have
 not set foot outside for 8 days now.  Tomorrow my resistance should be back
 and we may go to the local library as a treat.  Someone gave us a dead
 computer with a DVD drive and we need a DVD to test it on.  What else do you
 need in the way of software?  We have a Win98 computer with RealOne that has
 some sort of DVD player.  Do you need to install a driver?  
#87 S. Lynne Fremont(slynne) on Thu Jan 15 09:35:19 2004:
 I am glad to hear that you only have one more chemo treatment left. I 
 am sure you will start feeling much better after that is done. 
#88 Jeff Rollin(twenex) on Thu Jan 15 09:37:37 2004:
 Let's all think positive thoughts about it.
#89 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Thu Jan 15 13:26:22 2004:
 I will feel even better after the Feb 17 PET scan, assuming good results.
 I am told that DVD players will also read data CDs and play music CDs so we can
 test if it is entirely dead.
 I remember someone else told me he had lymphoma of the tongue, with surgery,
 and had lost a lot of weight but could only eat liquids.  His friends were
 all coming up with liquid treats.  A sore tongue is pretty piddly compared.
 This is what support groups are for - to let you know that other people have
 survived worse and are okay now.  Thanks to all for the encouragement.
 
 Jim has started classes.  He sneaked out around 6 am and I got back to sleep
 for 3 hours around 9 pm.  We have a super-special low-flush toilet with a
 pressurized system that is supposed to keep your sewer lines cleaner, which
 you can hear all over the house (at 6 am).  Jim has taken up the challenge
 of learning to program in C for linux and DOS from a class on C++ where they
 assume you are using Windows.  He finally got Hello World to compile with
 linux gcc (g++) but djgpp complained about his 'deprecated' headers.  ???
 He was supposed to be computing volumes from known radii.  He is headed back
 from Washtenaw CC now on his bike, having learned how to telnet in the
 computer lab.  'Is telnet always this slow?' he wrote.  (Grex was going at
 a crawl until just now).  Next challenge is to set up a shell account and a
 website and I can save $8.33/month on my ISP.  For $300/year Jim can take one
 course and get free internet access - a much better deal than AOL.
#90 David Brodbeck(gull) on Thu Jan 15 16:25:22 2004:
 Test with a "real" CD, not a CD-R.  Not all DVD players can read CD-R discs.
#91 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Fri Jan 16 11:12:52 2004:
 Jim is going to work on letting me get more sleep by finishing the
 ventilation and wiring to his upstairs bathroom and then closing up the two
 big holes in the downstairs hallway wall through which all the toilet flushing
 noise travels downstairs.  I have asked him to do this before his class next
 Tuesday so I don't get woken again at 6:30.  Sometimes there is a
 technological fix to medical problems.  
 First he is fixing the thermostat on the space heater that stays on all the
 time so that we can use it to heat the computer room and I don't freeze there
 and get sick.  Another easy fix, I hope.
 
 Today I am awake after the first night in 6 weeks of at least 7 hours sleep.
 I have not had a hot flash in 1.5 hours, my hands are less numb, my lips don't
 seem to be hurting today, and I can look forward to about 10 good days before
 this all hits again.  Sort of cold to celebrate by going for a walk.  No point
 in walking to the local Chinese restaurant as things will probably continue
 to taste funny for another week.  I should make myself eat breakfast now.
 
 Linux is progressing well.  I got Opera 7 to work by downloading SW81 glibc,
 2 hours of 24MB, and was then told I only needed glibc-solibs, 1.3M.  Jim will
 use the big library for compiling and we have an 8G hard drive anyway.
 I wonder how wget managed to download 24M in 2 hours when the browsers cannot
 manage more than 8MB per hour.  Maybe I hit a fast download mirror?
#92 klg(klg) on Fri Jan 16 12:23:33 2004:
 "a car that converts to a bed"? 
#93 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Fri Jan 16 18:44:17 2004:
 You put the seat back down or something to convert the car to a bed.
 Today we celebrated that my immune system is probably recovered (though I have
 been waking up coughing again for a few days) by walking downtown, eating
 lunch at Dinersty (they were out of daikons and it all tasted like salt) and
 leaving me at the library while Jim walked on errands.  
 
 Jim asks 'If you're writing about me can I go in and delete your item?'.
 Or at least anything with his name in it.  
#94 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Fri Jan 16 21:33:52 2004:
 I hope this is the low point in my sense of taste.  I took one bite of the
 oatmeal (with some nice thawed peaches in it) and it tasted sour so Jim got
 that.  He made me some potatoes and those tasted even worse so he ate those.
 I managed to eat bread with sour yogurt cheese and a very sour tangerine. 
 Milk has always been okay, and eggs.  The Chinese vegetables at lunch were
 far too salty but otherwise okay.  Frozen mustard greens and tofu were okay.
 You would think since my tongue is numb it would not taste anything but
 somehow sweet is getting transmuted to sour.  Jams are awful.  Honey in my
 cocoa is pretty bad.  Bitter things are okay, they just taste normal.  I had
 a preserved egg just now, it tastes as a preserved egg should taste. 
 
 I have been forcing myself to eat since about July.  I can do it for another
 month or so and maybe even gain a couple of pounds.  At least my mother is
 not putting butter on everything like she did for a while after I came back
 skinnier from two weeks of Girl Scout Camp where the Jewish kids got peanut
 butter and jelly sandwiches for supper half the time and I would not eat them
 because they were icky sweet.  Jim tried to butter things for me at first and
 I told him I would not eat them at all that way.  Bad memories.  She tried
 to fatten my brother by giving him the canned sugar-syrup weight gain stuff.
 It eventually worked, 40 years later he has a paunch.  Mothers are odd.
#95 Reverend Puerile Dolt(happyboy) on Fri Jan 16 22:41:46 2004:
 hey, it's not like she fed him some food that she
 found, you know...laying on the sidewalk.
 
 now THAT would be sort of odd.
#96 Jeff Rollin(twenex) on Sat Jan 17 04:08:54 2004:
 It's strange how after chemotherapy, taste and the ability to keep certain
 things down are among the first things to go funny. Maybe after years of
 eating prepared food from supermarkets, butchers, etc., we don't necessarily
 need taste so much to test if somethign is harmful, so the sense has become
 weakened and therefore is more vulnerable than other things to damage.
#97 Rane Curl(rcurl) on Sat Jan 17 13:31:42 2004:
 Or perhaps, after having to eat or drink a lot of nasty tasting treatments
 our tolerance for the uneatable is raised. 
#98 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Sat Jan 17 14:26:24 2004:
 Rane, I think you mean our tolerance is lowered.  My tolerance for bitter
 things is not changed that I know of.  It is the sweet things that taste
 funny, or maybe things that have both sweet and sour in them.  But honey also
 tastes strange.  The taste of sense is damaged because my taste buds (some
 of them) are getting killed when they are dividing.  I have no trouble keeping
 anything down, it is getting it down that is the problem because of the taste.
 Jim made me a leek omelet and brie on bread today.  They were okay as was the
 milk (witha cardamom seed but no honey).
 
 I think different types of hair grow on different schedules.  Leg hair must
 almost never start growing.  Head hair must grow frequently enough that nearly
 all of mine has been hit by one of the last 7 cycles.  I don't notice any new
 short hairs on my head.  My eyebrow hairs all fell out long ago but new short
 ones have grown back.  They must grow more often than the head hairs.  Since
 this is a public conference I will not discuss any other types of hairs ;=).
 
 My fingernails continue to grow fast and strong.  I wonder why.  I still have
 trouble cutting them with one hand.  And my legs are rather sore from our walk
 into town and back.  
 
 Today I finally got 8 hours sleep, if you add it all up.  Jim has not exactly
 started on finishing off the hole in the wall.  Instead of flushing upstairs
 he snuck downstairs, which was quieter. He says the upstairs plumbing seem
 sto be slowly freezing again so he does not want to use it.  No heat upstairs.
 I turned on some heat in the downstairs bathroom so that drain from upstairs
 would stay a bit warmer as it goes through the bathroom wall downstairs.
#99 Rane Curl(rcurl) on Sat Jan 17 14:40:13 2004:
 He better use the upstairs plumbing if it is freezing, as pipes (and the
 toilet tank or trap) could rupture.  If one is concerned about water
 freezing in pipes one should let them flow slowly. 
 
#100 klg(klg) on Sat Jan 17 18:18:35 2004:
 SK-
 Got "accepted" to a CA patient/"survivor" support group.  Starts next 
 week.  Curious to see how it is.
#101 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Sat Jan 17 19:44:59 2004:
 Please report back on the survivor group.  The local hospital here has a
 second Tuesday evening Lymphoma support group but it is too far to walk and
 too cold.  The upstairs bathroom is above freezing, it is just that the inside
 of the vent stack is closer to outside tempreature and the vapor starts to
 freeze in there, one thin layer at a time.  The downstairs bathroom is now
 60 which should help.
#102 David Brodbeck(gull) on Sun Jan 18 12:23:20 2004:
 Chemotherapy kills off rapidly-dividing cells.  This is why it makes
 your hair fall out, for example.  Taste bud cells also divide rapidly
 because the lifespan of a tastebud is measured in weeks.  My guess would
 be that keesan's tastebuds are not regenerating and the ones for some
 flavors are dying off more rapidly than others, skewing her sense of taste.
#103 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Sun Jan 18 19:23:44 2004:
 My guess is the same.  Today I managed to eat my oatmeal so I think things
 are starting to improve.  In a week they will be nearly normal and then it
 is downhill again one last time.
 
 Today after Jim gave up trying to copying a Win98 drive using a DOS version
 of llpro (which complained some path names were too long) we hiked downtown
 (1.5 miles in 35 min) to the Life Sciences Concert at Michigan Theater.  I
 read the list of performers and Mary was not there any more, but there were
 a few engineering studnets, one LSA, and some music majors or even professors
 on double bass, contrabassoon, and timpani.  I guess people tend not to
 acquire these instruments as hobbies - not too much written for amateurs.
 
 Jim tried to lure me there with the 'refreshments follow' by Hiller's.  I knew
 better.  Hillers also donated food for the Life Sciences lecture series at
 the Law School last hear and it was some really horribly sweet cookies and
 soda.  Same this year, plus ginger ale.  I got some white grape juice before
 it went into the mix - sour.  Jim finished it for me, with sour strawberries
 in it as decoration.
 
 We finished off our big day on the town with Dinersty (they left out the salt
 for us this time) after briefly (very briefly) checking out the replacement
 for Hong Kong Inn, which used to be plain and simple and give you lots of food
 cheap.  The new place has fancy oak trim on the columns, menus in fancy
 plastic folders, someone who tries to seat you, and abominable loud music.
 
 It was cold out so we stopped at Dawn Treader.  They have a lovely large $45
 English to Slovene dictionary (I translate the other direction - that book
 has been there a few years) and we found three linux books.  One was for
 dummies, the other was for dummies to teach themselves but not labelled that
 way, and the other is 1995 Linux Doctor and it explained how to print from
 the command line without lpd, using gs!  sOutputFile=|lpr filename.ps.
 Also how to set up Cyrillic, and how to use DOSEMU.  1800 plus pages.
 $7.50.  Luckily nobody else had snapped up this bargain.  We suggested that
 they add the PBell 1991 DOS 5.0 book to the free box, where Jim picked up a
 book with Windows (31) C++ game samples.  1993.  The clerk says all their
 computer books as so old nobody buys them.
 
#104 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Sun Jan 18 19:26:52 2004:
 I have Realaudio working with a 33K modem, after wasting a day trying to make
 a 56K winmodem work in a Gateway that thinks it has no Com2 in Windows.  You
 can even get 32K broadcasts.  Three stations called for WMP71 so I wasted 2
 hours downloading it only to discover it is hideous looking and you cannot
 remove the skin or the 'visualization' (animated colored gif that occupies
 half the screen).  I uninstalled.  There were some other strange formats used
 for streaming MP3 - how does one listen to those?  
 The Win98 Media Player has no skin and the animated gif can be made to go away
 by changing to compact.  71 compact makes the menu go away but retains all
 the gifs.  I use the menu.  
 
 What do we need to play a DVD movie besides a DVD drive and Realaudio DVD
 player?  We want to test out a drive.
#105 Steve Whipple(charcat) on Sun Jan 18 22:28:18 2004:
 Hi Sindi, have you tried playing a dvd in the player, I think most of them
 come with a dvd playing program on them, I could be worng though.
#106 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Mon Jan 19 01:32:08 2004:
 It is not a DVD player, it is a DVD drive that came in  a dead computer that
 we need to find a way to test.   
 
 Today I was unable to get two winmodems to work with a variety of drivers.
 Both said 'modem not responding' and 'cannot read port name from registray'.
 Both automatically installed in com1.  I had one of them working in the
 Gateway computer and tried to make it work in the Compaq with the same driver.
 The other won't work in either computer.  How do I make it read a port name
 from the registry?  Which file is the registry?  
#107 Mary Remmers(mary) on Mon Jan 19 06:03:19 2004:
 How was the LSO performance yesterday?  I didn't audition for the
 orchestra this year or last.  It was a huge time commitment.  But
 I try to make their concerts and would have been there yesterday
 had I not been playing in a benefit recital at the VA Hospital
 at exactly the same 2:00 start.
#108 Coloured Folk(willcome) on Mon Jan 19 06:54:26 2004:
 Mary Remmers on M-Net?!  What WILL they think of next!
#109 Scott Helmke(scott) on Mon Jan 19 08:36:27 2004:
 Re 106:
 
 DVD software is somewhat controlled; DVDs are actually encrypted in the lame
 hope that it would reduce piracy.  You'll have to download (possibly buy) some
 DVD software.
 
 The Windows Registry is a database of sorts, from when Microsoft had decided
 that the flat .ini files weren't good enough.  You can tweak the registry by
 running regedit (Start -> Run, type in "regedit" and hit enter).
#110 David Brodbeck(gull) on Mon Jan 19 09:13:27 2004:
 Be very careful what you do in there, though.  Changes take effect
 immediately, for the most part, and it's easy to break things.  You may
 want to save a copy of the registry first, with the Registry/Export
 Registry File command.
#111 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Mon Jan 19 09:38:30 2004:
 Our neighbor who knows more about Windows says we should not need to edit the
 registry and maybe he can stop by this evening to help.  I wonder if we should
 turn off 'plugnplay os' in CMOS as the Compaq was originally working that way.
 And we may have turned it on in the Gateway.  Nothing to lose but more time.
 
 The concert was excellent.
 
 I think I once looked at the registry and it was unintelligible to me. I am
 unlikely to find modem settings in there unless I learn more first.
#112 Jeff Rollin(twenex) on Mon Jan 19 09:40:30 2004:
 The Registry is unintelligible to most people. It's all part oBush and Gates'
 Fifth Reich plan to control us all.
#113 Coloured Folk(willcome) on Mon Jan 19 14:00:07 2004:
 KEESAN AND GULL"RE HERE TOO?!  WACKADOO!
 M-Net's getting more users.
#114 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Mon Jan 19 15:48:31 2004:
 Can we lay DVDs using the DVD player that comes with RealOne?  Or do we also
 need some driver?  Were they invented by 1999 (WinSE)?
 
 I got the modem working by plowing through Windows Troubleshooter to the
 bitter end, where they told you about a tool supplied by USR in the USR
 drivers directory on CD that deleted modem driver info from the registry. 
 It happily deleted info for this non-USR modem (Conexant) and the next
 installation worked.  I had used a PCI driver the first time for this ISA
 card.  THe ISA driver worked.  That will teach me to delete files that I
 downloaded which did not work.  I will try the same technique to delete an
 actual USR driver from the registry and see if this gets rid of the error
 messages when I try to install a PCTel modem in the other computer.  I like
 USR.  They made my first modem, an external 1200, used, and even mailed me
 two diodes to fix it when lightning struck.  $150 for a used modem in 1985.
 
 
 Peeling skin near one nail, starting to bleed.  Nothing else exciting is
 happening.  Discovered Realaudio 8 won't load ('not enough memory' - we have
 48M) but RealOne will load and run fine on a 200MHz computer tho it claims
 to need 233MHz.  I think I have blocked the annoying animated commerciasl (you
 just won $1000 - pay us only $300) by blocking popup windows with Opera.  
 Jim is wondering now why he cannot run Visual C++ via the WCC website.  He
 has Borland C++ and gcc/g++ and DJGPP and two other DOS C compilers.  
#115 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Mon Jan 19 23:12:49 2004:
 Our neighbor went through the last five '56K' winmodems.  Three of them work
 at 28K when you upgrade from 33K to 56K and he says those use the other 56K
 standard that our ISP never adopted.  One of them acts dead with three
 different PCTel drivers.  The last one is an LTmodem and, after we removed
 all the other drivers (I used the USR regdel program) it installed itself
 using Win98 drivers from the CAB files.  Last time it did not work.  You have
 to remove the other modem drivers, reboot, shut down, then put in this modem.
 So we used the modem to download DVD software none of which worked for the
 DVD player.  RealOne says we need the software that came with the drive. 
 Someone else got the hard drive that came with the drive and wanted us to get
 the drive working for him without it.  
 
 Apart from the hot flashes, the laryngitis, and food tasting increasingly
 worse, I am doing well.  I could not stand to eat a tangerine today, horribly
 sour.  I can manage bread, and milk and eggs are okay.  I will eat next week
 instead.  Except I still get hungry when I don't eat.
#116 Ryan(ryan) on Tue Jan 20 08:51:23 2004:
 PCTel makes the absolute worst winmodems I have ever seen.  My laptop
 came with one of these pieces of shit.  It would disconnect me after
 being online after about 20 minutes from a 'cold start'..  If I reconnected
 without allowing for a 'cool down' period of several minutes, I would be
 lucky to get 5 more minutes before I got disconnected.  I had to buy 
 a separate pcmcia modem for my laptop at the time just so I could get
 online.
 
 Additionally, the drivers for PCTel were absolutely the worst thing
 you could possibly imagine.  In order for the device to "work" (Well, not
 really work, but be functional in some situations for a liminted amount
 of time), it required that an EXE be loaded into memory (started somewhere
 deep within the windows registry) in addition to the normal "driver."
 This EXE (I forget the name, it has been too long) would cause
 Windows "Application Errors" quite frequently.  
 
 I can't believe that company is still in business.  I guess they let
 PC MFGR's say their products have "modems" in them, at a cost of probably
 around 3 dollars per machine.
#117 David Brodbeck(gull) on Tue Jan 20 14:36:48 2004:
 The obsolete 56K standard that hardly anyone supports is called Kflex, 
 by the way.  It came out because a few companies couldn't wait for the 
 official standard, and came up with something incompatible on their own. 
  The official standard that's widely supported is V.90.
#118 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Tue Jan 20 21:46:38 2004:
 So if the modems do not say v90 we should not try to make them run faster.
 The PCTel is .v92.  Maybe we are lucky it would not even install at all. It
 came out of a dead Compaq.  The Gateway had a Telepath 56K that would not work
 - let's see what it says on it -x2 technology for Windows.  1997
 That one worked fine with the 3com-usr 28K driver from the Win98 CD.
 We have three Lucents also 1997, worked at 33K until we tried to use several
 upgrades which made them 28K.  The PCTel went with our neighbor to be studied
 more closely.  Its only advantage was that it was a pci linmodem and I have
 a computer with only two ISA slots that I wanted to use for linux and one slot
 has a HGC card in it.  A pci modem would have freed up the other slot for a
 Creative sound card.  The pci sounds cards appear to be Windows only.  So who
 needs sound with linux.
 	We now have a 56K external modem which will solve the problem of the
 shortage of ISA slots, that we got in exchange for the 200MHz Compaq computer.
 We had a really big adventure today.  Jim carried me in a car to WCC and I
 visited his class.  I corrected the punctuation in a program (The Smith's
 house should be the Smith house or the Smiths' house).  We had lunch in
 Dynasty Buffet and I could eat the green beans and bok choy and broccoli and
 two kinds of melon and suprisingly the pineapple, so we bought a pineap;ple
 and some bananas and a few other things at Kroger's.  Juice for next week when
 my sense of taste should be somewhat better and I have to drink a lot.  You
 can now get orange juice with a choice of 2-3 of the following (but not all):
 Vitamin C, Vitamin D, VitaminsE, B6, B12, calcium.  Not with folic acid.  They
 are advertised as being good for your heart or your immune system or your kids
 (who won't eat vegetables - vitamin E AND carotene).  It might have been
 cheaper to put all the vitamins in the same juice but maybe it would not sold
 as well that way.
 	We delivered the computer we had made and set it up easily for the
 printer and AOL.  I tried Realaudio with IE 5 and Opera and it worked.  AOL
 said hello you have mail.  We then tried to use Radio@AOL and it would not
 load.  The live online help said we need 128M RAM not 48M.  You cannot put
 more than 48M into that model COmpaq, we discovered (and if you could it would
 cost more than the computer is worth by far).  The live help sent instructions
 on how to clear the cache - which is on the hard drive, not in the memory.
 Of course it did not help.  I then got Realaudio working while connected with
 AOL.  In theory AOL 5 does not do Radio.  I bet it would let you use
 Realaudio, and also load faster.  But she is happy that it kept her address
 book and she can still use it.  It did not keep Yahoo Messenger.  She was not
 happy with 1024 resolution because the screen looked different from 800
 resolution so we put it back and now the fonts are all very large and she has
 to scroll.  Too many new things at once - Win98 and AOL 7.  
 	Jim then tried to put our non-Windows 28.8K internal modem into her
 old computer which the store said would only work with an external modem. 
 Com2 had a strange address.  If he changed it to the usual one the CMOS setup
 program told him there was a hardware conflict.  The modem would not work on
 Com2 with Com2 disabled (Windows seems not to like that tho DOS requires it).
 WEe had another IBM once that gave us teh same problem and we used up our only
 external 28K modem on it.  We did not have another one.  So Jim tried Com3.
 He tried Com1.  He tried enabling and disabling ports.  Our computer recipient
 wanted to make supper (it was 7 pm) so we took the computer away.
 	We stopped to pick up a few things from the grexer (qborthwi) who gave
 us the computer - 400 MB tape backup, a CD-Rewriter (is this different from
 a plain CD writer and if so I suspect it is dead),  a couple of read Creative
 sound cards with manuals and floppy disks of drivers (!!!), another 28K
 internal modem.  On the Mac monitor I noticed a PC modem.  He said it was no
 good since there was no power supply.  It was a 33K.  'Just in time'
 
 	Jim still wants to make the internal 28K modem work. To learn from it.
 We have lots of USR modem power supplies.
 
 We will be wary of 1997 56K or upgradeable modems from now on.  Thanks.
#119 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Wed Jan 21 10:15:40 2004:
 Today Jim woke me after 6 hours sleep by getting up early to work on
 defragmenting the Win95 computer that we replaced.  Something in the 10 or
 so programs whose icons are in the lower right of the screen keeps loading
 itself into memory and starting defrag over again at 1%-0%.  He ran in SAFE
 mode and got half way through.  The drive is 11% fragmenting.  It looks
 terrible when viewed with scandisk.  This offends his sense of something or
 other.  One of the programs is checking memory usage.  I cannot find a way
 to remove it from automatically loading.  The others look harmless - Yahoo
 messenger, weatherbug, volume control.  How do we remove these things?
 She never uses them, just the start menu.  
 
 Before this I spent an hour getting the video to work again.  Jim somehow
 misunderstood when our neighbor said to change BIOS to NOT do plugnplay and
 he changed it to do it.  Then PnP conflicted with the video.  Troubleshooter
 said to remove the video driver which I did and Win95 put it right back in
 the same place.  So I removed three lines in System about PlugNPlay and
 restarted.  It put back PlugNPlay and then video and they no longer
 conflicted.  Sound is marked as not working but it works, same as in my
 computer.  We heard the Windows startup sound as we were reading about the
 sound conflict.  I removed a few icons that led to programs that were looking
 for nonexistent dll files.  There seem to be two installations of AOL 5.0 on
 there of different sizes in aol and aol.001.   This annoys Jim too.  I
 suggested we defrag and put in a modem and just give it back that way.
 
 I am coughing again and sneezed once.  My own fault for not remaining in
 isolation for another three weeks.  We have been among crowds at the library,
 two restaurants, and a concert, and now at class.  I cannot imagine what the
 bone marrow transplant people are going through - a year of this, with much
 worse resistance than I have.  They survive, I will survive.
#120 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Thu Jan 22 08:57:20 2004:
 The computer video kept starting to conflict with PnP BIOS extension boards
 every other time we loaded Windows but we finally got a standard modem working
 (no idea how, it did not work the first few times - Jim thinks it helped to
 load Windows with no modem in there, uninstall all modems, turn off, put in
 modem, turn on and load Windows again) and at the moment the video seems to
 be working again.  Whenever I remove PnP BIOS and restart, it reloads a lot
 of other things such as IDE controllers - one each time it restarts - and PCI
 buses, and the joystick (five times now) which does not exist...  'I hate
 Windows'.  I hope we are done with Windows and then I can play with linux
 sound and two CD burners.  Is a Cd-rewritable drive different from CD-R?
 
 Jim biked off to WCC at 6 am.  It is 8 degrees at 8 am and a bit windy.  I
 hope he does not bring back any new viruses as I have been relatively healthy
 all this cycle and want to make it through one more cycle without the flu.
 
 I get to enjoy the next four days.  Hands hardly numb, knees working,
 laryngitis affects pitch but not so much the volume of my voice.  Hot flashes
 continue but only wake me every 1.5 hours for about 20 minutes.  Food tastes
 about as bad as it has for the past few months.  Next week it might taste
 better and then worse again for 2 weeks.  It is too cold to go anywhere.
#121 Psycho Freak Goalie(ea) on Thu Jan 22 22:58:08 2004:
 Sindi - to stop something from automatically running in 
 Win95/98/Me/2000/xp
 
 Open the start menu, select "run", and type msconfig in the run box.  
 This will bring up a program that you can use to turn stuff off at 
 startup.
#122 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Thu Jan 22 23:25:00 2004:
 Wow, thanks!  I managed to get Realaudio out of Quick Launch on my own
 computer today.  I could not even find Quick Launch in the index of our Win955
 book.  I think we have conquered Windows for a while.  We plugged in a bunch
 of sound cards.  One stopped the hard drive from running (some sort of
 conflict)?  One sort of installed in Win98 but was missing something. 
 Recycle.  We kept the ones with drivers and the ones that passed the sound
 through them without having drivers loaded so you can use them to play CDs
 out the back of the computer through speakers.  People seem to prefer that
 to plugging in the front of the CD.  Soundblaster passes through sound and
 has drivers.  Most of the other cards did one or the other - the older cards
 pass through sound but are probably also 8 bit.  
 
 I just learned that Linux likes Soundblaster but not Creative Vibra16 - what
 is the difference between them?  They will work the same in DOS.  
 
 Jim is trying to learn to compile C++ for DOS in a class that teaches Visual
 C++ for Windows.  Can anyone help him?  He tried to compile a 2K file and got
 out 600K of something similar looking ending in .exe that would not run.  It
 was not a binary file.  
 
 My sense of taste is still not improved.  My hair (what is left) has started
 to come out again.  But I feel much better apart from that.  I also feel
 hungry but I don't feel like eating more sour stuff.  Ice cream might work
 but it is cold.  
 
 A friend who is a nurse said to call and talk to her any time since she cannot
 give me a hug.  I am hard to understand on the phone.  Good thing there is
 email and snail mail.  I owe letters to several people who tell me they really
 don't like using email.  Maybe I can answer Monday while my left hand is tied
 up (unless they jab my right hand again - maybe I should let them since my
 left hand has finally stopped hurting).
 
 Jim went to bed.  He biked off into the sunrise at 6 am to do homework before
 class because the WCC net was down and he could not get his homework here.
 He said it was rather windy (as well as being around zero degrees).  I guess
 there is less traffic earlier in the morning.  The bike path along the river
 is being kept clear, amazingly.  Some people think it is a path to skate or
 walk dogs on, but not in the winter.  Or maybe dogs walk there in the winter.
 
 I am told you can play DVD movies on a 33MHz computer (slowly).  I wonder what
 drivers we need to run it on our computer.
#123 David Brodbeck(gull) on Fri Jan 23 09:45:02 2004:
 If by "slowly" you mean "around one frame per second, with no sound",
 that might be right.  For acceptable quality, you'll either need a
 hardware decoder card or a faster CPU.  Anything from about 300 MHz on
 up would probably do it.  You'll also need a DVD playback program; it
 takes more than just a driver.
#124 Kevin Albaugh(albaugh) on Fri Jan 23 13:07:39 2004:
 Where would the msconfig program normally be located in Win2K?  My Win2K PC
 at work says "can't find it"; I wonder if it was deliberately removed by IT
 to keep people from turning off things...
#125 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Fri Jan 23 21:46:02 2004:
 We have the DVD player in Realone and a 500MHz computer.  We tried to get this
 working on a 233MHz computer and it was missing some drivers.  We downloaded
 three different drivers for that model DVD drive and found nothing that
 appeared to be usable.  Two of them were some hardware identification program.
 How large is a DVD driver supposed to be?  Samsung made lots of different
 models - do they have something generic as do CD-ROM drives made since 1995?
 
 Tonight we had a visitor - jep brought over his dead aquarium lamp and he and
 Jim managed to replace the switch and then discovered that it still did not
 work and needed new contacts, which had corroded away to nothing.  We
 attempted to fix an Epson printer that required a 40 min download for the
 basic manual (on a fast modem), and tried to fix a dead cartridge or two, and
 had supper and a lot of fun hearing about submarines and fishes.  
 
 This afternoon I shoveled Jim's walk and three of the neighbors' walks.  It
 was light fluffy snow, but I was impressed that I could manage this.  Just
 four months ago it was an accomplishment to walk to the corner and back.  
 It is still work climbing stairs.
 
 Tomorrow we may have another last day on the town before I go into retirement
 again for 10 days.  The library is having a 50 cent booksale (down from $1
 or more) and we will see what they have in outdated linux books.  
 
 Jim compiled a program about how to count calories in order to lose weight.
 You are supposed to stop drinking orange juice and eat more bananas.
#126 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Sat Jan 24 16:08:36 2004:
 Today we went to the library book sale to get linux books.  There was one
 Redhat which we left there but Jim found a lab book for C++ and I found a
 Norwegian-English pocket dictionary which I could not pass up.  I have little
 trouble getting to town but coming back it is uphill and my legs get tired
 and they are sore again.  I should do this more often.  On the way back my
 neighbor from where I usually live came out the door of her futon store so
 we stopped to visit.
 	Futons now come not just in cotton but in cotton with foam core, all
 foam, cotton over foam over cotton over innerspring, and polyester fiber over
 cotton and who knows what else.  They have one frame that incorporates a
 tatami mat for those who don't want to put their futon on the floor (and
 matching seats and bedside tables topped with bits of mat).  It counts as as
 futon if you can bend it.  One futon was on a frame which lets you crank up
 the end like a hospital bed.  One was cut in two pieces (all foam inside) with
 sort of a hinge - without the hinge it would be a 'mattress'.  The latter are
 harder to move through doorways and attic hatches.
 	No more social events scheduled other than Monday's chemo session and
 the several hours of waiting around when I talk to other people there and
 don't feel so weird for a while without much hair or voice.  My voice is
 actually a lot closer to normal today which means I am due for another session
 very soon.  It will probably be better on the day I see the ENT doctor just
 over three weeks from Monday.  Who cares, the insurance is paying for it since
 I am going to be over $8000 again.  The last CAT scan (no contrast solution)
 was only about $3000 instead of $4000.  They can charge what they like.  It
 is three times as much for abdomen-pelvis-lungs as it is for just one, but
 does not take much longer to do.  
#127 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Sun Jan 25 18:19:56 2004:
 Food is tasting sort of okay today.  I had mustard greens, which are always
 bitter, and grapefruit juice, also bitter, and neither was sour.  Tomorrow
 things go back to what has become 'normal'.  
 
 I usually phone my brother on his birthday, which will be Tuesday, but I won't
 have a voice for a couple of weeks after tomorrow so I tried today.  The
 babysitter does not know when they will be back.  I finally got her to take
 a message.  
 
 Jim just made sure the car starts.  We already used it a week ago.  It needs
 the exhaust system patched at its other end and some belt tightened but it
 will get us 2 miles and back tomorrow.  Too cold to patch things today.
 The bathroom space heater died, maybe from overwork.  
 
 Jim's wcc internet connection has been dead all day.  My ISP (which I was
 going to drop but it is hardly worth it to save $5 month through Nov.) was
 running at 0-500 bytes/sec.  The file we need to download to install a small
 version of Slackware 3.5 to which we can add a small compiler that will fit
 on a small hard drive on a laptop computer is at two URLs to which the links
 are broken.  Jim wants to take DOS and linux compilers to school in his
 backback, on the bike, since they have only Windows there.  He could not get
 his assignment from the website today or Friday.  We had been planning to get
 a lot done today before I go down for the week tomorrow.  At least I don't
 have to plan my life around a 3-week cycle again after this last one.
 
 
 Jim is pleased that he got DJGPP to compile the same 1/2 page program that
 gcc and Visual Basic could manage.  He had to change PI to Pi or else not
 define it as a constant.  The output was 600K and the program that compresses
 and strips it will run only under Windows and that is what the DOS compiler
 is supposed to use.  Odd.  He is looking into linux nasm assembly language
 to write smaller programs.  I tried to compile openssl so that I could compile
 lynx with ssl and it failed some test, meaning I might need to compile some
 test program since.  
 
 It is nice all of this did not go wrong a couple of weeks ago when I was not
 getting much sleep, and that none of it is important.  
 
 Jim might rob the thermostat out of the dead heater to replace the one in the
 new heater that runs constantly in a 60 degree room and overheats it.
#128 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Mon Jan 26 23:08:38 2004:
 10:00 blood draw ran 1/2 late.  We met a woman from Alpena who took 3 months
 off her job to come here to stay with a friend who is getting a bone marrow
 transplant and is too weak to care for herself.  We met another woman from
 Alpena there with her husband who was getting a bone marrow biopsy.  She was
 very nervous.  They are togethre 54 years.  She taught music - piano, violin,
 drum, etc.  Whatever they wanted she would teach herself first.
 
 I ran into the Cuban lady who had a remissiong and is getting a new treatment
 that requires spending 3 days in the hospital each time, every 3 months.  I
 met someone I had seen before with T-cll lymphoma who had 6 treatments and
 then after 2 months a remission and this time they are doing two treatments
 if ICI (3 days in hospital) and then 1 month in the hospital for bone marrow
 transplant, maybe her own.  I gave her my phone number if she wants company
 or outside food.  I saw three small bald children some with masks.
 
 The people working in reception had hearts and cupids all over the place, even
 on their heads, and were blowing bubbles at one baby.  
 
 They were crowded so at 3 pm they gave me a bedroom and brought in a CD
 player.  I knew the nurses from my first time in 'bedside'.  One of them
 ignored my suggestion to use the large vein in my right hand that worked last
 time and tried one in myleft hand - failed (no blood backed up).  She heated
 my left hand and tried another vein (not the large one) - failed.  The failed
 ones hurt more.  She called another nurse who heated my right hand and used
 the large vein.  It was okay and hurt less.  By now my left hand also hurt
 in two places and hurt more from teh pressure of a little pad bound on
 tightly.  They sped up the rituxan to just 2 hours instead of 3 (ro originally
 5) and I had no problems with it, and then the rest was done by 7 pm and we
 celebrated by decorated a pineapple with straws and eating it.  One nurse took
 a piece.  
 
 	I talked the doctor out of making an appointment after the PET scan
 for him to explain the results.  It can be done by email. But he wants to have
 an exam after the CAT scan 4 months from now.  No more IVs in teh CAT scans
 after this next one Feb 17.  Jim will skip school to fetch and carry and hold
 my hand.  
 
 	The 1 benadryl is still putting me to sleep but I ought to eat
 something first.
 	Excuse typos.  I am too nervous to sleep much before this and the
 chemicals may also be affecting my brain.
 	We celebrated my last chemotherapy by going to the coop and getting
 lettuce, an avocado, chocolate, and tofu.  I will go eat some salad now.
#129 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Tue Jan 27 08:12:33 2004:
 The benadryl was putting me to sleep but I stayed up until after midnight when
 Jim finally went to bed and woke about 6, probably from the prednisone.
 Today I seem to be making fewer typos.  
 
 They don't do more than 8 sessions because the doxorubicin (adriamycin) not
 only causes laryngitis but can cause heart problems due to inflammation. 
 Maybe that is what the prednisone is for, since it reduces inflammation.
 I need to take one in 1/2 hour.  They can't taste as bad as the
 benadryl/tylenol combination, which nearly makes me gag when mashed in apple
 sauce.  
#130 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Wed Jan 28 18:47:20 2004:
 Monday my second nurse was the one interested in pawpaws.  She also walks the
 2 miles to work and lives not too far from Jim, so today we hiked over to her
 house to give her some ice cleats. She traded us cookies.  Said her home email
 had stopped working so we phoned U of M and got the mail website and figured
 out her passwords (I could now use her mail, as if I don't have enough of my
 own accounts).  She has an AMD 5x86 75MHz and we offered her something at
 least 5 times as fast with a working CD-ROM drive that is shorter.  She gave
 us a tour of the 1942 house she has been fixing up.  Jim's is 3 years older
 but very similar floor plan.  She added dormers.  Her mother has been staying
 with her while doing chemotherapy.  We invited her along to visit the guy
 making pawpaw wine when she mentioned she is interested in making wine and
 beer.  They are both quite tall - good thing I don't have to keep up with
 someone any taller than Jim when walking.
#131 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Thu Jan 29 09:45:32 2004:
 I think my inability to remember things (old or new) was caused by Monday's
 drugs, not the lack of sleep due to prednisone, because even though I got to
 sleep after 3 am I can think straighter today.  I was having to write down
 everything yesterday or it would disappear.
 
 The winery tour is on for some time in February.  I will stay busy until then
 with linux.  Still compiling lynx - it turns out I need to compile zlib first
 in order to get the static libraries instead of the shared ones that came with
 the precompiled version.  Same for openssl - which took longer than lynx to
 compile and was tricky.  Lynx had to be pointed at the ncurses directory but
 I got a static version of ncurses from a later slackware (8.0) with the right
 libraries in it.  You need one file from zlib to use .gz help files with lynx.
 I need to ln -s /dev/hdb /dev/cdrom (or vice versa) to play CDs with linux
 and to download 22M midi patches to play midi files.  In DOS 2M RAM seems to
 hold all the equivalent wavetable files.  Real8 is said to work with links
 not just with opera.
#132 Jeff Rollin(twenex) on Thu Jan 29 10:59:32 2004:
 Wavetable files are not as advanced as minid files, i.e. they do not encode
 as much info.
#133 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Thu Jan 29 11:46:57 2004:
 Does that mean they don't sound quite as good?  They are a lot better than
 FM synthesis sound, which is like a kazoo.
 
 I compiled zlib and now lynx configure program can't find gzopen or -lz
 and still won't link zlibrary.  I can manage without .gz'ed help files, in
 fact I can manage without help files at all if need be.  What is gzopen and
 why did it not come with zlib?
 
 I am about to try getting links to play CDs again.  It is much easier just
 to push the play button on the drive but this is a test.
#134 Jeff Rollin(twenex) on Thu Jan 29 11:49:43 2004:
 It does indeed mean they don't sound as good. I believe they encode sound as
 stereo, whereas a wavetable file sounds like those little pocket piano things
 you can get for kids.
#135 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Thu Jan 29 12:48:09 2004:
 I am not sure that even good midi files are worth a download of at least 4
 hours for 22M, or 3 days at current connection speeds due to virus loads.
 Realplayer 8 for linux won't run - gives me 'segmentation fault' - why?
 It is a large .bin file.  I did chmod u+x on it as instructed.  Does it need
 to be somewhere on the path perhaps?  I am trying to run it from /tmp where
 I can run other programs that are not on the path if I go there.
#136 Jeff Rollin(twenex) on Thu Jan 29 12:56:29 2004:
 /tmp is probably not a good place to run programs from. a segmenmtation fault
 is the equivalent of a windows GPF or "illegal operation".
#137 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Thu Jan 29 13:09:46 2004:
 What makes it illegal to run a program from /tmp?  
#138 Joe(gelinas) on Thu Jan 29 13:11:54 2004:
 Not "illegal", just not a good idea, because /tmp gets cleaned out at
 irregular intervals.
#139 Phil Green(polytarp) on Thu Jan 29 13:55:05 2004:
 But only on some systems, which even I didn't know, and that caused me to
 accidentally delete /var/tmp on a work computer, and oh my gosh did I ever
 hit my forehead hard.
#140 David Brodbeck(gull) on Thu Jan 29 14:49:55 2004:
 On some systems /tmp is even a ramdisk.
#141 Phil Green(polytarp) on Thu Jan 29 15:01:02 2004:
 Wack.
#142 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Thu Jan 29 15:06:22 2004:
 I clean out /tmp when I think it needs cleaning and I try out programs there
 before moving the working ones somewhere else.  I put realplayer8 in its own
 directory and it still gives segmentation faults.  
 
 I need to add another \ to my lynx compilation script so it will compile
 statically and then compress the output.
#143 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Thu Jan 29 20:22:27 2004:
 It told me command not found when I added \ to the first line of the script.
 I am supposed to figure out what command was not found now.
 
 Today I have numb shaky hands, I am sleepy but cannot sleep, my legs are
 wobbly, etc.  This gets worse until Tuesday at which point my tongue and lips
 will hurt and things will taste worse again. My hair is falling out again 
 but not making much mess because there is little left to come out.  I don't
 care, it is the last time (I hope) and in two weeks I will be nearly normal
 except for the laryngitis and things still tasting funny.  Hot flashes might
 have been a little milder for a couple days but are hotter again now.  At
 least I know what to expect as it is the 8th time, and my blood counts are
 better than for the last couple times, and I am not coughing nor is Jim.  He
 is recovering from 12 hours of chasing around school by taking a very long
 hot bath.  
 
 I cooked for myself.  Hands not up to chopping but I made a peanut butter
 sandwich, and warmed some soup, and boiled two medium eggs and used the water
 for noodles and ripped up some lettuce.  The noodles taste a bit odd.  I put
 cheese on them for disguise.  
 
 Now that we figured out how to upgrade two motherboards from 100MHz to 133MHz,
 I learn that Kiwanis is throwing out 200MHz cpus.  Maybe they will save us
 some to make a really blazing fast computer for my nurse.  The one I upgraded
 to 166MHz has an F0 0F bug - what is that?  At least it does not spread.
#144 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Fri Jan 30 06:37:21 2004:
 This week I am now consistently waking at 5 am or before (plus a few other
 times during the very short night) after getting to sleep somewhere around
 1 am.  I got up and managed to break open my own capsule and mix it with
 applesauce.
 
 I am having the usual temporary shaky hands, which are a little more numb.
 This will not last long.  The 2-day slight incontinences is over - the poisons
 must cause bladder irritation.  I have pains in my upper arms, which should
 be gone in a day or so, and sore leg muscles, ditto.  Tongue is getting a bit
 sore and that will last around a week.  Eyes are runny but that gradually gets
 somewhat better during the cycle.  
 Things that I expect to get worse - immunity and fatigue (will start to
 improve around Tuesday), sense of taste, sore tongue, mouth, and lips.
 
 Will get slowly better - laryngitis and hopefully some day the hot flashes.
 
 This is really minor compared to what many other people go through and I am
 even cheerier about it than the last 7 cycles since I expect it to be the last
 time on all of this.  And if not, people have survived worse.  
 
 Maybe I will have more hair by the time it gets warm enough to go out without
 a hat.  I may celebrate somehow around May 20 if the first checkup goes well.
 Two people I talked to did not make it that far but they had different types
 of lymphoma.  
 
 It will be nice to be able to bike again and spend time at my own apartment,
 which I have not been able to do since July.  Things are a mess there but at
 least I don't have the pile of computers any more, it is here as are the hard
 drives, sound cards......  Most of the food, many of my dictionaries, some
 clothing.  I wear the same few articles of clothing all the time so as to save
 space here (and nobody sees them but me and Jim anyway).  I still need to drag
 myself up by the banister to climb stairs and my apartment has stairs to the
 basement bathroom so it is easier here.  But my piano is there.  
 
 The two people who did not 'make it' to the first checkup are not dead, one
 of them did just fine with his second round of therapy and the other is not
 looking forward to it (two 3-day treatments in hospital, bone marrow
 transplant of her own marrow) but is feeling a lot better about it now that
 I told her that the other guy has been okay for 5 years and was in bad shape
 to start with.  So far at least 4 of the 5 people I talked to with recurrences
 had lymphoma of some sort.  My mother had a recurrence (and two radiation
 treatments) but hers was not treatable with chemotherapy and it was 20 years
 ago.  I will try to enjoy the next two weeks, hope for the best on Feb 17 PET
 scan, and assume that the next CAT scan 3 months after that will go well.
 
 The doctor expected me to come in to see him a few days after the scan so he
 could explain it to me, but agreed to let me skip that appointment unless
 there was something wrong after I told him I translate this sort of thing for
 a living and my doctor friend was sending me copies of my scan results.  I
 still have to have blood draws and checkups every 3 months as well as CT
 scans.
 
 The hospital has started charging for 6 instead of 5 units of Rituxan now that
 I have gained back 15 pounds, meaning an extra $1000 each infusion for just
 that one drug.  It would have been a lot cheaper to stay skinny.  And they
 charged me for 3 hours infusion of it most times but 2 hours once.  It took
 an extra hour to get the IV in last time - will they charge $500 extra for
 that?  They were busy with other patients while I just waited around in the
 room.  They charged for 3 kytril antinausea pills one time and I only get two,
 so I might ask them to fix that and the insurance company gives a commission
 on overcharges that I report.  
 
 I should get some more interesting reading matter.  Yesterday I sorted out
 all the pieces of paper that I keep getting from the insurance company and
 the hospital - bills, receipts, etc.  They are in sort of random order as they
 get billed at various times after things happen depending on the category,
 so that some later events went towards my deductible while earlier ones got
 paid by insurance.
 
 I paid them $8000 last time to cover both infusions and the PET scanin advance
 and I hope they don't apply it to last year as it is this year's deductible.
 The woman there made various notes about this, and a phone call.  I cannot
 phone in my debit card number, only use it in person, and only up to $1000,
 so I wrote a check.
 
 I also have a sore spot again where the spleen biopsy was - that seems to get
 worse after each infusion for no reason I can think of.  And sore spots in
 both hands where I was jabbed, with blue blotches around two of them.  The
 first needle may have missed the vein and hit a nerve as no blood came out.
 The nurse said no blood was coming into the needle of the second one so she
 removed it - I wonder if she went all the way through as lots of blood came
 out when she removed it, and lots went into my hand.  The third one worked
 but is also blue blotchy.  None of this is terribly painful, just annoying
 but I assume it will eventually all stop hurting and if not, who cares, it
 is nice to be alive and feel things.
 
 I may wake Jim (it is already 6:30) to cook breakfast, or have a peanut butter
 sandwich with my last mashed 7 10 mg prednisones.  This time they gave me a
 special non-child-proof bottle which I can actually open myself.  My hands
 are still not as strong as before.
#145 Scott Helmke(scott) on Fri Jan 30 10:18:41 2004:
 Sindi,  a couple of Pentium II motherboards from my old office are still
 available... you turned them down a couple years ago, but perhaps they've aged
 enough to be useful?
#146 Jeff Rollin(twenex) on Fri Jan 30 10:33:32 2004:
 The illegality of the segmentation fault and the not-a-good-idea-ness of
 putting a program in /tmp are two separate issues. A segmentgation fault means
 the program is somehow broken.
#147 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Fri Jan 30 11:43:44 2004:
 I am trying to run RealPlayer8 for Linux - I doubt that they would post a
 broken program.  Maybe it requires a Pentium II to run?  We have a Pentium
 II and I will try it on that next.  
 
 What I would really like is Pentium I 200MHz cpus to put in our existing
 boards.  The PII need special cases and we don't have those, but I think we
 have one that we could modify to fit by adding a panel so yes thanks, however
 our current prospective new owner of a computer wants a small case and we are
 thinking of setting her up with the PI 166MHz that you gave us a year or two
 ago, which will fit UNDER her 14" monitor instead of the 25"  486 that
 she has on the floor next to the desk now.  It will take a 200MHz cpu if we
 can find one for it.  Do you have any of those?  Kiwanis throws them out. 
 
 I got 2 more hours sleep this morning after my last (awful tasting) prednisone
 so am up to nearly 6 hours and feel relatively great!
 
 Jim did his homework already.  He switched yesterday from a morning class
 taught by someone who is not teaching the way he can understand, to an
 afternoon class.  The first instructor is learning to use the new MS program
 and posted the assignment at the 'blackboard' website.  Apparently the second
 instructor makes up all the assignments and supplies them and the answers to
 the other two instructors.  His first instructor also posted the answers, in
 fact she posted an entire directory.  Jim has been having an easy time doing
 the programming but the typing takes him forever and I need to fix all his
 spellings.  He will just change the first line in this one - he thought about
 changing a few spellings too.  His favorite spelling is volumn which does not
 rhyme with column.  
 
 I am still trying to compile lynx with zlib.  I may have an extra space in
 my script for configuring it.  openssl is at least under control.  
 
 Jim is microwaving apples to make them taste better so I will continue to
 force fluids.  Time to start gargling salt-and-soda water for a week.  If I
 can avoid catching the flu for one more week (by not going near anyone) I have
 it made.  Assuming Jim does not pick up something in class, which is not until
 next Tuesday.  His new class is full (24).  The old one was 12 and dropping.
#148 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Sat Jan 31 09:19:07 2004:
 No more prednisone!  It has been over 24 hours.  Now I can spend a few days
 being sleepy instead of nervous.
 
 Today I got my first hate mail from someone at grex that I never heard of.
 I forwarded it to uce (spam) before bothering to read it.  Strange.  I presume
 the sender is rather young and does not know how to do 'forget'.  
 
 libncurses.a is only half-size.  I wonder how long it will take to compile
 ncurses in order to get that one file the right size.  THere must be an easier
 way to get the file.  What is an .a file?
#149 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Sat Jan 31 17:54:39 2004:
 I decided to risk walking into town today instead of waiting until Thursday
 for my immune system to come back as it does not matter any more if I am sick
 for the next month because no more chemicals.  We had something due at the
 library.  It is still a tiring 1.5 mile hike up and down what feels like steep
 hills.  We bought one lunch at the Mysore vegetarian Indian restaurant, which
 the cooks insisted had no hot peppers, in fact no peppers, only some cardamom
 and a few other spices, and they even put it on a paper plate instead of a
 styrofoam bowl, and Jim ate most of it because it hurt.  It might have hurt
 even without the hot peppers as my mouth is sore again, by I figure it should
 sterilize as well as salt-soda solution.  
 	After we got back Scott kindly dropped off two PII motherboards which
 we need to put into cases.  And I proved that you can undo the floppy disk
 damage caused by writing a half-disk image to disk by writing a whole-disk
 image to disk.
 	The hand with the two failed IVs still hurts but the bruise is fading.
 It will be strange not to be on a three-week schedule any more.
#150 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Mon Feb  2 12:51:18 2004:
 For two days I have felt like I am catching the flu - cold, achey, etc.  But
 I recall this happening in mid-cycle before.  I thought yesterday everything
 that was going to hurt had started hurting, until I woke up with a sore
 windpipe.  The entire lining of my respiratory and digestive tracts has
 probably been killed (or cells in all of it anyway) and my body is now
 cleaning up and I have to blow my nose a lot, and also wipe my eyes a lot.
 
 I discovered that not only do I pull muscles at this time of cycle but I also
 get muscle cramps when I sit on my feet.  I have stopped sitting on my feet.
 (The chair is too low for the table on which one of our computers sits).
 Muscles also replicate frequently and muscles cells must have been killed.
 
 Tomorrow I should start to feel better.  Today I will go back to bed.
 The hand with the 2 failed IVs is still hurting.  The one with the successful
 IV is fine.  
#151 Todd(tod) on Mon Feb  2 13:10:32 2004:
 
#152 Starzburtz, King, 'n' Aerre.  good firm.(witzbolt) on Mon Feb  2 15:34:27 2004:
 i'm ejaculating on your tits.
#153 Jim Daloonik(naftee) on Mon Feb  2 16:48:13 2004:
 tod has big tits
#154 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Tue Feb  3 09:03:24 2004:
 Which file is it that I can edit to add someone to the ignore filter rather
 than running the ignore command, which requires typing in all the old names?
 
 Today my immune system must be recovering because I have stopped blowing my
 nose continually and I am no longer freezing.  Yesterday I had the heat turned
 up (to at least 60), I was in bed under a pile of bedding, and wearing lots
 of clothing (6 layers on top including three of wool) and I still needed to
 run a heating pad.  I have also stopped coughing.  I think I can stop worrying
 about getting deathly ill during this (last) cycle now that I have an immune
 system again.  
 
 Jim's neighbor, who asked him to help with her plumbing, sent over a half
 gallon can of chicken bouillon.  The label shows carrots, tomatos, garlic,
 onions, peppers and celery.  The ingredients list shows water, salt, chicken
 fat, onion juice, carrot juice, sugar, natural flavors, and some other
 chemicals.  One cup gives me 50% of my daily sodium requirement.  I am
 supposed to be gargling salt water this week as a disinfectant and this should
 do it.  I alternated sips of this with large swallows of water.  
 
 The nurse said to let her know if I had chills or fever over 101 F so I took
 my temperature last night and it was 100.4F.  I did not know you could be
 chilled and have a fever at the same time.  I feel much better today.
 
 My mother, who was not doing chemotherapy but rather radiation for her
 cerebral lymphoma, twice ended up in the hospital with pneumonia.  One time
 the neighbor found her on the kitchen floor.  I really should not have gone
 to the library Saturday but I figured if I got sick it would not interfere
 with the next treatment as there is no next treatment (for a while, anyway).
 
 It should be all uphill starting today!
 
 Jim is going to take some chicken broth to my neighbor, who is expecting only
 a USB keyboard.  Sunday he helped us over the phone to get a Win98 computer
 to dial and connect to UMich.  We built it for my cancer center nurse to
 replace her 486.  I know you are not supposed to just move over working
 installations on hard drive, but we did that and the only conflict was between
 'two' sound cards so I removed both and reinstalled one and that worked. 
 Turns out this was set up for a network and had 3 or 4 extra 'adaptors' - VPN
 stuff, whatever that is.  The error message said something about network
 protocols not being negotiated.  I deleted ALL the adaptors and then added
 dialup adaptor and TCP/IP.  It worked.  It crashes once in a while when doing
 Opera preferences but that is probably normal.  Just don't change more than
 one preference at a time if you want to use Windows.  Ctl-Alt-Del when it
 crashes.  What is 'Microsoft family logon'?  It kept adding that when I added
 dial-up adaptor.  No families will be using this computer.  
 
 We moved over this hard drive because it had a bunch of sports games on there
 and she likes basketball.  I hope she likes these games.  It would have been
 quicker just to start from Win98 CD.  
 
 I put on IE 5.5 from an Earthlink CD and it added what it said was 70MB for
 the 'minimal installation' including a bunch of things I had gone to some
 trouble to remove (Outlook) and now if you use IE you get popup ads from
 Earthlink.  Then I used IE 5.5 to download Opera which can block popup ads.
 The Netscape 4.04 on there kept going offline after accessing one website and
 the home page could only be set to flashnet.  
#155 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Tue Feb  3 16:09:35 2004:
 I was reading what I wrote 3 weeks ago and it looks like my sense of taste
 will continue getting worse until at least Friday.  This morning oatmeal and
 milk tasted edible, while this afternoon milk tasted bad.  I had a raw carrot
 and a preserved egg.  The chicken broth tasted bad too but a lot less salty.
 It came frozen and Jim must have thawed it partially and the part to thaw
 first contains most of the salt.  I see there what looks like a large block
 of ice with fissures in it where the salty liquid thawed.  Sort of like ice
 melter.  My tongue is now numb instead of sore.  I wonder what I will force
 myself to eat for the next few days.
 
 Temperature down to 99.2.  I would have hated to end up back in the hospital
 with needles in my arms and not being allowed to sleep at night.  Someone with
 T-cell lymphoma whose treatment failed after 2 months said she had a lot of
 fevers during therapy and I did not so maybe I am okay.  I had a continual
 high fever last summer before therapy.  This was my first fever since that
 and I would normally have ignored being sick for a day.  Glenda is certainly
 going through much worse than I am.  I think what is worst is the uncertainty
 as to whether this actually all worked.  I do feel a lot better than before
 therapy and am still alive.  I would like to keep my own bone marrow though.
 Will know more in 2 weeks plus a few days.  
 
 What do people eat when they are awaiting repeat surgery for diverticulitis?
 My mother used to run a little newsletter for dialysis patients, telling
 people how to soak canned tuna fish to remove the salt.  This week I can eat
 salt, in fact I can eat anything I want to eat, but I don't want to eat
 anything, however I get hungry....  I don't know how people manage when their
 therapy makes them nauseous.  
#156 Glenda F. Andre(glenda) on Tue Feb  3 22:35:08 2004:
 Since I don't have diverticulitis, I don't have any of the normal food
 restrictions (mainly anything that remains recognizable in the stool: corn,
 nuts, seeds, fruit peels, etc.)  I had a perferated diverticulum, you don't
 have to have diverticulitis for that to occur.
 
 I do, however, now have food restrictions because of the blood thinners I am
 currently taking for the blood clots.  I have to watch the amount of vitamin
 K I eat.  This means not increasing or decreasing the amount I get.  Vitamin
 K is found in high concentrations in apple peels and green leafy veggies. 
 There are a few other things (they gave me a 10 or so page list of foods and
 their vitamin K values, I haven't had time too really look at it yet).  I have
 to notify the anticoagulant clinic of any change in diet, exercise,
 medications, bleeding, etc.  I have to go in for blood draws every Mon, Wed,
 and Fri until the blood levels stablize, then probably once every week or so
 for the duration.  Since I have been steadily loosing weight since the surgery
 and that affects blood levels, I will probably have to have them more often
 than what they would normally do.
#157 Joe(gelinas) on Wed Feb  4 00:03:10 2004:
 I think fevers cause chills because you are so much warmer than the
 surrounding air.  Just as you shiver outside, to keep your body temperature
 up, so do you shiver when you have a fever, to keep the temperature up.
 Heat loss is heat loss, as far as the body is concerned.
#158 Sindi Keesan(keesan) on Wed Feb  4 04:46:22 2004:
 I was not shivering when I was chilled, just achey on any uncovered part.
 Temperature back to normal yesterday.
 
 The anticoagulant diet sounds pretty complicated.  What does vitamin K do,
 prevent clotting?  Are they checking for blood levels of vitamin K?
 Three blood draws a week sounds pretty time consuming but you are probably
 not a coward about them like I am.  I hope they cut back soon to once a week.
 It is the little improvements that seem to make a difference.  Is there no
 home test you can do on your own blood?  
 
 I am almost certain that it is starches and sugars that taste funny to me.
 Yesterday for the first time even milk (with lactose) tasted funny.  Today
 it was okay.  Cheese was okay yesterday and that has the lactose (sugar)
 converted mostly to lactic acid (which is also why lactose intolerant people
 like my brother can eat cheese). Eggs have been okay.  Grains and starchy
 vegetables, many other vegetables (anything with sugar such as cabbage), and
 fruits (bananas, strangely, have been okay) taste funny.  I should get some
 bananas if I feel well enough today.  (I will need to get more than 4 hours
 sleep first - woke up too hungry to get back to sleep at 3 am).  Pineapple
 has tasted okay before but yesterday was bad.  Pickled peppers tasted so
 strongly of vinegar that they did not taste otherwise odd so I made myself
 eat one for supper with half a can of (very salty) mackerel (I know it is not
 vegetarian, it is medicine at the moment).  Lunch was one preserved egg and
 a raw carrot.  Not the way to gain weight but it is temporary.
 
 Glenda, are you attempting to lose weight, or you don't feel like eating, or
 you eat but don't digest it all?  I hope you reach some acceptable weight and
 can stick with it so you don't need all these blood tests for 6 months.  
 
 Most restricted diets seem to require you to eliminate certain foods.  That
 sounds simple compared to having to eat the same amounts of things every day,
 such as what Glenda needs to do, and what diabetics