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Grex > Health > #89: Sindi Keesan's Lymphoma Journal Part 3 |  |
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| 25 new of 475 responses total. |
klg
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response 316 of 475:
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Feb 29 21:36 UTC 2004 |
You are referring to the willingness of a new carrier to insure an
individual with a personal history of cancer?
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keesan
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response 317 of 475:
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Feb 29 22:31 UTC 2004 |
No I cannot change policies, even within the same company, and have my
preexisting condition covered. I was just looking for some way not to pay
state taxes on my medical expenses.
Today we walked to my apartment and the building site again and got
congratulated by almost every neighbor on the block plus one that was out for
a stroll (she moved a few blocks away) and two that were visiting their father
(they moved to Detroit area with their mother). We met a new neighbor with
a 5 year old and introduced her to an old neighbor with a 5 year old, plus
the 4 and 6 year olds who were visiting. We got a tour of someone's
remodeling project. The doctor who was visiting her mother next door promised
to buy me some ice cream to help fatten me up. We practically had a block
party on the sidewalk. We challenged two neighbors to finish their projects
before we got the porch glazed. (Then they will have time to help us!).
We offered a replacement side door to one neighbor, which we had given to
another neighbor who got a different one. I don't know why people keep
putting in wooden doors, which rot because they are at ground level and get
snowed in.
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keesan
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response 318 of 475:
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Mar 3 16:31 UTC 2004 |
Monday we were invited to the latest incarnation of Country Kitchen Buffet
(Hometown Buffet - we have been to one in Chicago with Chinese friends who
thought it was great) and I sampled lots of foods and could eat most of them.
I tried the 'cherry pie' to see if it would be sour, and it was peach pie.
They have the largest vegetable selection I have seen in any restaurant
including baked sweet potatoes, mixed fancy greens salad (or spinach, romaine,
iceberg), cabbage, squash, green beans, zucchini, potatoes, onions, carrots,
bean salad, sugary baked beans. No turnips.
I took a short walk around in a circle to keep from getting stiff after
Sunday's long walk.
Tuesday we pushed my limits again by walking to the Dental School (at least
2 miles each way, no rest) to an excellent lecture on how whales evolved from
small four-legged creatures with long tails, to rather different creatures
with either sonar or baleen, and wide tails instead of hind legs. They could
see ridges where the blood vessels that supported the baleen used to be, in
whales that still had small teeth. I made it back. Jim also wanted some
exercise so he carried a 14" color VGA monitor back half of the way to see
if it works. Today I am really sore and stiff, so will go for just a short
walk. I need to climb more stairs and do more crouching so that it won't be
so hard to get back up.
My feet are less numb. My fingertips are all still numb. The edges of my
palms hurt a bit less but it still hurts to sit or to lie on my left side.
When I injured my left heel similarly, it took 6 months of wearing padded
shoes for it to start to clear up. I can't go 6 months without sitting!
My tongue still feels a bit burnt but things are tasting better. Rice and
potatoes are tolerable but not good tasting, and the rice is still scratchy.
My eyes and nose are still a bit watery. My inner lining still needs to heal
some more too. My voice is worse some days than others but I can sing today,
tho I don't sound the best.
Yesterday we saw snowdrops up in two south-facing yards, including Jim's.
THe probably means we are due for some more snow soon. There is also a
2-year-old kale that survived in Jim's yard.
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keesan
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response 319 of 475:
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Mar 4 18:20 UTC 2004 |
Wed we took me for a long walk and then I noticed in the Observer that a
friend of ours (paleontologist) was giving a talk about Biodiversity at the
Exhibit Museum, so we walked to that. She gave us a ride home. I never knew
until this week how many different muscles were involved in walking. Even
my heel muscles are tired. I have to be able to walk to the hospital May 18
unless I can get back to biking by then.
People have been phoning and emailing me about work. I turned down 75 pages
of badly faxed bad handwritten medical Polish, but agreed to edit a client's
translation into English of a school transcript. Last night the scanned and
emailed copy arrived - ten attachments labelled things like 'English-1'. No
file extension. The translation agency employee must be new to the business.
I had told her (just in case) to send a monochrome image, and NOT a jpeg.
These files were 300K, sort of large for 1-page mono gifs or pdf files, so
I emailed asking the file format. Tiffs. They sound like pretty low
resolution tiffs to me. She also offered jpegs instead. I wrote back
explaining how jpegs are not the thing for scanned BW documents, and to please
scan again, at 300 dpi (or HP Deskjet 500 printer setting - are there scanning
programs that don't offer at least one of these choices?), in monochrome (not
greyscale, or photo, or color....) and it should end up about 50K/page - does
that sound right?
I quit working for one company that accepted jpegs from their clients.
It would take me about 40 minutes to download all these tiffs, which are
probably too low resolution to be useful anyway.
I asked for gifs or pdf files. Monochrome.
I would have her fax, except the fax machine here is old and sometimes
interprets faxes from other machines sent on 'fine' as 'standard'. We have
a Canon all-in-one printer-fax-copier that is prone to paper jams. My Deskjet
500 is much higher quality and does not jam paper (or feed through 10 sheets
at once).
I will wait for mono gifs, and write e-mail-less friends in Slovene and
Macedonian, to let them know cancer therapy can work. One has a sister who
was treated for stomach cancer, the other a 'boyfriend' about to be treated.
I just learned from last night's lecturer that a mutual friend's mother has
untreatable brain cancer and can no longer talk, or eat. I have never heard
of any malignant brain cancer that was cured. I am lucky.
One photo at the lecture was of a species of periwinkle (Vinca) used to
produce the anticancer drugs vincristine (the one that makes my hands and feet
numb) and vinblastine.
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keesan
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response 320 of 475:
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Mar 4 20:59 UTC 2004 |
I checked for my mono gifs, and the woman at the agency decided to send a test
attachment to make sure I could handle the format. The first mail was missing
its attachment. The second one had a 168K .dat file? What is a .dat file????
I asked, for the third time, for a monochrome pdf or gif file. I also
suggested she just try faxing the ten pages, tomorrow, so that Jim can find
the other fax machine (the thermal paper one that interprets 'fine' from other
machines as 'standard', instead of the plain paper one that jams paper) and
plug it in first. It is rather complicated not working at my office where
I have a working fax machine with fax-phone switch. The problem with being
semi-retired temporarily. I will move back when it gets warmer, or at least
work there when I can bike again.
I thought I had seen all the unexpected things that a scanner could produce.
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keesan
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response 321 of 475:
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Mar 4 21:09 UTC 2004 |
I did some reading on the net and it is possible she tried to scan this
document and turn it into a digital photo format. We are going to try faxing
tomorrow morning and give up on the scanner.
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rcurl
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response 322 of 475:
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Mar 5 06:32 UTC 2004 |
My scanner software scans lineart, halftone and grey, plus several color
formats. What is "monochrome"? I thought "grey" was monochrome.
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scott
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response 323 of 475:
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Mar 5 14:23 UTC 2004 |
"single color", of course. Perhaps they included a synonym or two to prevent
confusion and increase apparent choices?
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keesan
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response 324 of 475:
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Mar 5 17:05 UTC 2004 |
Lineart is monochrome - no shades of grey. Halftone might be one shade of
grey. Jim looked up in 'his' (library) scanner book and .dat is not one of
the formats you can scan to. Black on white documents scanned in 16 million
colors (24 bit) are still legible (if not made into jpegs) but they will be
12 times as large as 2-bit.
I have to get back to biking so I can work at my office with a good fax
machine. Someone else is mailing a pile of insurance documents here.
Today I got a spam offering me a $300 computer (marked down from $700) to all
nurses, health care workers, teachers and students. I must be one of those
since I spent some time in the hospital. The computer has a fax/modem and
a network card and it is also internet and network ready. It even has a
keyboard and a 'scroll' (?) mouse. All you need to do (if you read closely)
is add a monitor and software. Too bad I don't need a 2GHz cpu or 20G hard
drive or 128MB RAM. What are currently manufactured computers offering?
We just got Scott's two 233MHz boards (with 64MB RAM) into cases from two dead
computers given to us by another grexer, and don't quite know what to do with
all that power. Jim will compile on them with gcc and djgpp until he learns
to write in nasm instead.
Someone steered me to a statically compiled version of links-ssl which WORKS!
It is 400K UPX compressed, and was compiled with diet-libc. What is that?
You can use this links to access grex via backtalk, or webmail, or other sites
where you need to log in (such as driverguide, I presume, or ebay, or the
Opera forums). I can use it with my 2M RAMdisk linux by copying it into /tmp
and running it from there.
ftp://foobar.math.fu-berlin.de:2121/pub/dietlibc/bin-i386 has this
links-ssl (it says it is text but that is what UPX-compression must look like)
and sftp and several other programs, all cheaper than the above computer.
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gull
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response 325 of 475:
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Mar 5 17:11 UTC 2004 |
libc is the standard C library. It has a lot of common functions that C
programs need to run. diet-libc is a smaller version of libc for
programs that are willing to sacrifice some functionality for size.
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keesan
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response 326 of 475:
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Mar 5 17:34 UTC 2004 |
A smaller version of which libc - libc5 or glibc2 (libc6)?
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keesan
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response 327 of 475:
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Mar 6 03:53 UTC 2004 |
I am now able to use RAMdisk linux on my TTL monitor. I set it up with
mdacon, which let me specify that terminals 1 and 2 use the TTL monitor and
3 and 4 the VGA monitor. Is there some way to get linux to display Hercules
emulation on a VGA monitor?
insmod mdacon mda_first_vc=1 mda_last_vc=2
(in /etc/rc).
mdacon.o in /lib/modules/2.2.16/misc/
I was then able to save the RAMdisk version to a large gzipped file which I
can boot from next time with loadlin. Exciting! I can take linux anywhere
on 2 floppy disks and use it to telnet to grex, or browse with links.
Today we exercised me by walking to a lecture on Smetana, followed by a quick
stop at the Washington St. Art Gallery (which has migrated to Liberty St.)
and the library. I made it back but my feet hurt again.
I can now eat grapes and pineapple (I tested them at the art gallery) but
February tomatoes (part of the decoration) taste quite sour. Bread is still
not very tasty either.
I have cured whatever imbalance of intestinal flora I had for six weeks
starting with the last chemotherapy by eating some yogurt (organic,
nonhomogenized, live culture). I should have tried this sooner but yogurt
is sour.
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gull
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response 328 of 475:
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Mar 8 00:06 UTC 2004 |
libc5 and libc6 are different versions of the same thing. Which of them
a program needs depends on what it was compiled against. diet-libc is
basically yet another implementation of the same thing. I don't know if
it was based on a specific version of glibc or not.
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drew
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response 329 of 475:
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Mar 8 02:36 UTC 2004 |
Can libc6 serve in the place of libc5?
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keesan
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response 330 of 475:
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Mar 8 04:47 UTC 2004 |
Programs compiled to use libc5 can't use libc6, as far as I know. You can,
however, use later versions of libc6 to run prorams compiled for older
versions of it. So Slackware 8.1 will probably run programs compiled for
Slackware 7.1, but not vice versa (they might, but might not run). I was able
to use ncurses from SW8.0 or 8.1 with SW7.1.
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keesan
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response 331 of 475:
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Mar 8 23:09 UTC 2004 |
Today we went to check out the new Chinese food store on Liberty near Dragon's
Lair Futons, Faz pizza, and Coleman's market. They bought a large chunk of
building that used to be several offices, and did the wiring and painting
themselves - two brothers and one wife who used to have a downtown restaurant.
Scott let us know that they were open. They were excited to see us and let
us come in the wrong door (where there is no shelving or food yet). No other
customers, so we got a grand tour of all the dumplings, and fish, and tofu,
and vegetables (we got Chi broccoli and baby bok choy and 2 garlics for $1).
Prices are very low - they say it is to attract new customers. Jim got some
black sesame seed candy, and dried tofu and mushrooms, and sesame oil. We
got advice on how to make soup and how to steam dumplings from some good
cooks. There will be even more food in a few days. You can buy 25 lb of MSG,
or 50 lb of rice (or 10 brown rice). They are selling to the 5 local CHinese
restaurants. While we were there someone wandered in looking for a type of
meditation chair and they steered him to us (our English is better and they
know we like brown rice).
They found us some vegetable and leek dumplings but we already spent
all our $17 on other things so will come back again soon.
We then wandered through Coleman's and looked at garlic for three times
the price, without even the nifty little plastic mesh bag. Coleman's is
selling sticks of forced forsythia.
I am still having trouble keeping up with Jim.
Today I got an email from one of our small group of computer users who says
AOL blames the modem we gave you (56K winmodme) for the fact that she is being
disconnected increasingly often. I used it for a while (the modem) in my
computer and never got disconnected. I have heard that AOL disconnects users
when things get busy - is this true? I suggested she keep a log of what times
she gets disconnected and how long she has been on first. AOL suggested her
modem was 'outdated'. Do outdated modems disconnect more often???
Last tiem they told us to make more memory by clearing 'art work' (saved image
files) from the hard drive cache. I don't trust anything they say.
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keesan
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response 332 of 475:
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Mar 9 00:54 UTC 2004 |
I phoned a friend who is using AOL (at $25/month) who asked me how often I
get disconnected. I don't. I was on 7 hours straight yesterday. He says
once he was on for at least an hour, but usually AOL disconnects him 4-5 times
an hour. AOL will email the other person suggestions how to fix 'her'
problem. Our other friend said none of them work (things like reinstall AOL).
We made a Win98/Opera computer for another friend who thinks it is broken and
wants to return it because the Epson printer we gave her is printing smaller
than the Star (both at 10 cpi) and it stoped working while she was printing
her grex email (she always prints it all on paper). What I think stopped
working was grex, not the computer. She gives up too easily. Another time
she said teh mouse stopped working (there is no DOS mouse driver, it works
fine in Windows). The other computer we gave her apparently won't do a Print
Screen but it prints fine from Windows - what might cause this? For a while
it would nto print at all after 'the printer thing fell into the computer'.
They screwed it back in but the ribbon cable was apparently loose. Might a
still-loose cable interfere with DOS printing but not Windows printing?
Win98 asked her for a password for some unknown reason (I did nto set it up
do to that). Her Win31 broke on a third computer. We are thinking of
reducign her to DOS only - kermit/grex and WORD for DOS and a DOS hearts game.
Less to break. Our friend is probably a typical Windows user - I wonder how
anyone else manages to use their computer at all, wihtout lots of help.
We fixed someone else by deleting Win31 and putting on a DOS chess game, which
he could restart with the power button as he always insisted on doing (like
a TV). His grex stopped working because it said to change the password.
Has anyone ever had a computer that won't do print screen on a working
printer?
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keesan
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response 333 of 475:
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Mar 11 15:30 UTC 2004 |
Monday will be six weeks from my last chemotherapy (Jan 26) if I counted
correctly. My digestion is slowly improving and things are tasting better
but still not quite right and my tongue still feels a bit sore. My fingertips
are still slightly numb (except maybe not the right pinkie) but my feet are
not numb (or I don't notice if they are). My legs are stronger but I could
use more upper body strength. I had trouble carrying a couple of printers
(dot-matrix are heavier than inkjet). The pains in the area of my spleen are
finally gone and my left hand rarely hurts where they put in all the IVs.
My sit bones still hurt, and the laryngitis does not seem any better than it
was a few weeks ago. Some days are worse than others. The hot flashes are
no longer happening every 45 minutes, they are at least an hour and maybe 20
hours apart. I have not been keeping good track.
The neighbor down the street called to go for a walk yesterday while it was
sunny but we had a visitor, someone new to grex who read this item and was
interested in linux. Today it is snowing and she won't want to walk. Jim
promised to bike in the snow (and dark, coming back) to replace the 56K modem
in the computer we set up for a friend of bruin's. It may be dying due to
nearly continuous use. THe owner now wants a cable connection or DSL - any
suggestions other than SBC? Does she have to pay for both DSL and AOL
separately?
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keesan
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response 334 of 475:
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Mar 11 16:34 UTC 2004 |
SBC is $35/month if you contract for a year (first year they don't require
the contract) and I think free 'DSL modem'. USOL is $50 and no free modem.
The hitch is that they require 266MHz and 64MB RAM. We don't have this to
give her (nor would I give anything that new for free to someone who can
afford DSL service, call waiting, and cable TV). I suggested that she try
Kiwanis for a faster computer and Jim would help set it up. We already gave
her our biggest monitor and speakers. Where else can one get a 266MHz used
computer, cheap?
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tod
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response 335 of 475:
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Mar 11 16:48 UTC 2004 |
This response has been erased.
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keesan
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response 336 of 475:
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Mar 12 03:11 UTC 2004 |
I forgot to mention that my hair has been growing for about 6 weeks and is
nearly 1" long, or about 1/2" per month as estimated by someone earlier.
I look like my father used to look in the 50s after his weekly haircut. An
improvement over the shaved look of last month, and it will let me take my
cap off when it gets a bit warmer.
The DSL line is no longer needed. Jim determined that the Compaq computer
which we made someone for AOL has started to have a noisy ISA bus, and
therefore would not work with either of two modems (or maybe it was PCI) for
more than 20 minutes. It was fine a week ago. Maybe it is the power supply?
Anyway, we tested the same modems in a matching Compaq and I was online for
an hour, so we will do a trade (move hard drives) and then look at the power
supply etc at our leisure. A temporary solution is an external modem.
The Star 9-pin printer given to us to figure out why two computers won't print
is not working with three other computers either. THe owner does not believe
it is broken - it was printing just the other day on her 486. We will let
her try again and in the meantime get her another printer, perhaps Rane's
Star.
There is a new version of Lynx for DOS out as of March 7 and I got it working
already (based on my previous similar version). Anyone want to know more?
It is newer than one grex is using. 2.8.5 release 1.
I wonder if we can test the 'noisy' computer by putting a radio near it to
see if there is strong static. We had a noisy power supply once before that
messed up several modems (not permanently) and we diagnosed it because when
we turned it on, the music turned into a loud buzz. Not that we have another
Compaq-specific (mini-tower) power supply. The thing is really close-packed.
You need to take it all apart to add a card.
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keesan
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response 337 of 475:
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Mar 13 05:10 UTC 2004 |
I now have another version of basiclinux going - dietlibc and Kernel 2.2.16.
It has a few bugs, some of which have been fixed in the second edition (which
came out three days after the first one) - wrong terminal in rxvt might be
why I don't get a cursor using cli programs like telnet. I cannot download
linux files - they get to about 75% and stall, with two browsers and wget.
Every time they stall at the same place. When I installed BL3 to a computer
with mono VGA I could not see the numbers I was typing for a couple of menus
but after I plugged in a color VGA monitor I saw what I typed even after
plugging back the mono VGA monitor and again when I rebooted a few times.
Lynx from Slackware 4.0 with two added libraries works but there is some
scrambling - might this be due to using an earlier libncurses.so ? Kermit
is not happy and wont' run, and also needs libncurses. I cannot easily
upgrade because I can't download files. I used another linux finally to
download and copied to this one. Most of our floppy disks wont' work on
several linux computers, which complain about I/O problems. I got plip to
work finally by reversing the numbers. Turns out I was sending to myself
rahter than the other computer.
A week ago my fingers, two of them, started to get shredding skin around the
fingernails, which had happend about 2 weeks after chemotherapy every time,
but this was 2 weeks after 3 weeks after therapy (when I would have had a 9th
if I had a 9th). Today I noticed my hair is starting to pull out a gain, 1"
hairs, which usually happens 3 weeks after therapy. Odd. Sort of an echo.
Kroger's $2 Deluxe Death by Chocolate tastes good for the first time, instead
of sour or odd. My tongue still feels a bit sore but ice cream is not
scratchy. My weight is finally up a bit, to maybe 115 wiht lots of clothing.
The hospital scale tended to weigh at least 3 pounds less than ours, but I
used to weigh 112 on ours for 3 years before getting hospitalzed. 108 a year
ago, 93 in August after all that hospital food. I still need to climb more
stairs. Maybe one more flight every day until I can run down and up 50
flights like Jim does without running out of breath, when he had to answer
the questions about this for an exam. He stopped when he could not talk and
walk at the same time. I am aiming at 118 or 120 so I will have a reserve.
Bought masa harina to make tacos rather than the premade ones that are too
thin and are only good for making corn chips because they get hard, and we
have lots of onions and tomato paste for salsa, to use before the onions
sprout, like the daffodils and crocus that we saw up today. It is much more
interesting to cook now that I feel like eating what I cooked.
On today's walk to the library and Kroger for exercise, we stoppped at Ann
Arbor Bedding and looked at all the 10" mattresses some of which have the
special foam that I bought. $1500 for a bed! For $200 you can buy 3" dense
foam which also would have worked for me. I met a small bulldog behind a
child gate. This year's beds are white, and not as slippery as they used to
be. No stripes. Our mattresses are striped cotton. To keep from getting
bored, Jim collected Kroger carts on the east side of Stadium Boulevard, which
he surmises people walked across to the bus stop and abandoned, pushed them
together, and returned them. We got the friendly cashier who likes to give
bag discounts. He gave us five discounts for the five items we bought. Says
nobody bothers him about this unless it goes over 10 bags, and thanked us for
saving the environment. Last time he let us use his Kroger card.
Tomorrow Jim will try to fix our doctor friend's garage door opener and I will
try to walk back from there (3 miles?) stopping at another friend's house half
way. I might not make it, might be 4-5 miles. I presume they will try to
help fatten me up. Nice Macedonian cooking.
We are running out of things to see on Stadium Blvd. We still have a video
store and a podiatrist and McDonald's. Stadium Optical. Toys with Noise.
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tod
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response 338 of 475:
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Mar 13 13:18 UTC 2004 |
This response has been erased.
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keesan
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response 339 of 475:
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Mar 13 18:07 UTC 2004 |
Probably a lot like a Romanian meal, including feta cheese. What is that
called in Romanian? Pita (with filo dough). Good bread. Soup. We are
leaving in half hour and I am not trying to walk that far.
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tod
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response 340 of 475:
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Mar 13 18:35 UTC 2004 |
This response has been erased.
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