Locks of Love 2009

Locks of Love 2009

Originally uploaded by sindy

I cut my hair pretty short for the first time in a decade at the beginning of July this year. I’m sick of it already, but I did get a nice thank you card from the folks at Locks of Love after donating. And here’s a picture of the thank you note AND the donation itself to prove it.

Weed vs. Salvia

Again, from tosh.0:

Back

So, I haven’t had a substantive post here since last August, but I’m back now (hopefully). There’s lots of reasons I’ve been away– first off, I had a bout of pancreatitis last summer, which despite over a week in the hospital, was followed by repeat instances of pancreatitis (or some similar illness) for months after, resulting in a few more hospitalizations. After getting over my GI problems (sort of), I’ve been suffering from constant migraines, threw out my back (I have no idea how, but I could barely walk for days), and just had a car accident. It’s been a long nine to ten months and I’m trying to dig myself out of this hole. As my Facebook status reads, I am recovering from life. And with that comes a return to blogging, including my continuing coverage of IdeaFarm (the truck is back, alive and well parked on the corner of Castro and El Camino in Mountain View) and other random stuff, like my teenage infatuation with the Twilight series as well as my continuing love affair with Depeche Mode (I’m re-watching 101 as I write).

So, stay tuned.

Where you at?

You might have noticed that I have been MIA for a while now– my last, close-to-substantive post was on January 5. Fittingly, the topic of that post was the lumbar puncture I had had the day before and it was one of the many things with which I’ve been busy. As I may have posted in the the past few months, life has ben filled with visits to the doctor, medical tests, more frequent and increasingly severe headaches/migraines, and general malaise that worsens from time to time. Add to all this to the sudden increase in pain in my wrists and hands (from repetitive stress) and development of numbness and tingling in my hands, all the way through to all the fingers– both being so severe sometimes that they wake me up at night, keep me from falling back to sleep, and make it hard to do everyday tasks, like handwrite or get ready in the mornings, from gripping and turning faucet handles to blow drying my hair. I had some tendonitis from repetitive stress years ago when I first started working, but was able to treat it effectively through physical therapy, stretching and exercise, a more ergonomic work setup, frequent breaks, and the rest of the RSI rigamarole, managing to become relatively free of truly problematic symptoms.

However, the tendonitis suddenly became very severe a few months ago and is now accompanied by numbness and tingling that are certainly more annoying than the pain. The irony is that these “sudden” RSI symptoms started and worsened when I had actually reduced my work hours (only 40 hours per week!)– like most departments at Stanford do for significant cost savings, my office closes for a few weeks at the end of the year and aside from taking the long break (and even managing to avoid doing work despite being on-call), I even left for the break a week early. Since then, I’ve been out of the office more than usual due to illness (it’s largely a crapshoot everyday how I’ll be feeling) and a slightly ridiculous number of doctor and physical therapy appointments. I’m pretty sure I’m being punished for a life of playing piano and typing.

As of now, almost all of my test results are normal and one thing we’re pretty sure about is that it’s NOT lupus. So, for the most part, we’ve managed to rule out a number of things and otherwise, we’re back to the drawing board and I just need to suck it up while we figure things out. At the end of the day, I having basically decided that if I was a superhero, my powers would be tolerance of prescription drugs and the ability to stay relatively high-functioning despite constant pain.

In any case, I’m slowly starting to improve and get back to a somewhat normal life, including maintaining my offline social life and my online presence. Look forward to more frequent posting soon.

Lumbar Puncture

In the continuing efforts to figure out my chronic headaches, I had a lumbar puncture yesterday; in layman’s terms, you might call it a spinal tap.

When you have an LP (as you may also have heard it called, especially on something like House), there’s a 10-15% chance that you’ll get a severe headache with nausea, but that can usually be avoided by making sure you stay lying flat on your back for a few hours after the procedure and keeping your fluids up. A persistent headache can mean that a proper clot didn’t form at the puncture site and there’s a CSF (cerebrospinal fluid) leak– a microscopic leak, not one that comes oozing out your back, so the headache is the only real tip off that you have one.

Amazingly, after staying strictly in the supine position after the procedure at the doctor’s office and then at home (except for the brief trip to the car in a wheelchair and all and then up the elevator home), I avoided getting a severe headache and hopefully, a CSF leak. Imagine my luck, considering I otherwise have a headache everyday, often all day.

Anyway, thanks to Marina and Charles for taking me to the doctor and taking care of me all day yesterday. For the less squeamish, check out this video of an actual LP.

My Small Breasts and I

No, not actually my small breasts and I, but building on my brief claim to search fame for being the top hit for “blog breasts” back in 2004: it’s apparently Body Image Season on BBC Three and one of the latest episodes was a special on women with small breasts and how their breast size affects their body image, lifestyle, etc. Having the opposite problem, it was pretty interesting, especially watching one woman attach a suction apparatus to her chest every day in hopes of boosting her cup size.

However, the most interesting thing I learned about was the site myfreeimplants.com. Cosmetic surgery financing at its finest, the site basically pairs up women who want to get breast implants with men who are willing to “donate” money to their cause.

Only in America. You’ve got to love a free market.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to next week’s episode My Big Breasts and Me.

Hiccups

During lunchtime discussion today, I found out one of my friends/coworkers has had hiccups in the past for something on the order of 24 hours (I can’t remember if it was more). On top of that, it’s actually happened to him more than once– unbelievable! (There are often days when we discover fascinating things about him, despite his mild-mannered exterior).

After reading about hiccups in Wikipedia, I probably know more than I should ever know about hiccups, but here are a few interesting tidbits:

• In 1988, Francis Fesmire of the University of Tennessee College of Medicine published his research on “Termination of intractable hiccups with digital rectal massage.” In 2006, he was one of the recipients of the Ig Nobel for medicine for his research. Aside from being “research that makes people laugh and then think,” as the Ig Nobel folks say, the additional interesting thing about this is that there’s an episode of House where a patient who claims to be suffering from hiccups, after being told they will go away on their own, requests a specific treatment/cure that he read about, one that some guy one a prize for. Later, House throws the patient’s file on the counter, telling the nurse to make a note about “drug-seeking behavior.” Dr. Cuddy asks, “Morphine?” House answers, “No, anal-digital stimulation.”
• As recounted by my friend during our hiccups discussion, Charles Osborne, after slaughtering or weighing a hog (I’ve found conflicting reports on what he was actually doing, but it definitely involved a hog), suffered from hiccups continuously for 68 years, from 1922 to 1990. (He obviously holds the Guinness World Record for “Longest Attack of Hiccups.”) Contrary to what we thought earlier– that he had hiccups all the way until his death– his hiccups actually mysteriously disappeared on their own in 1990, a year before he passed away. Nevertheless, he still managed to live to the ripe old age of 97, marrying at least more than once and fathering several children.

Check out this interview of a girl who had hiccups for five weeks (the video shows her after about three weeks in):

The case of the double eyelid, part 3

Believe it or not, but yes, I have been asked to appear on the Montel Williams Show. Next week, they are taping a show on race and one of the topics they are focusing on is the idea of “erasing race.” One of the guests will be an Asian woman who has had Asian blepharoplasty (double eyelid surgery) to look more “westernized” and the representatives from the show contacted me to see if I (or someone I know) would be interested in appearing on the show as someone of Asian heritage who is against such surgery.

I assume they found me by stumbling on my 2005 blog posts on the topic (part 1 and the very brief part 2), but I’m not quite sure of the path they took to find the posts since, unlike some Google searches, I don’t show up as one of the top results for “double eyelid surgery” or “Asian blepharoplasty.”

In any case, while Montel is one of the more respectable daytime talk shows, it sounds like I would basically be going on the show to tell this woman that I think what she’s already done to herself is wrong. And to be honest, while I am against this desire among some Asian people to try to, as the folks at Montel say, “erase their race” and look more westernized, this desire to deny one’s own heritage, and (for the most part) purely elective plastic surgery in general, at the end of the day, like most things, I don’t feel so strongly about it that I expect other people to replace their own judgement and choices with mine. While I may not make the same choices, your body is yours and, as long as you’re not hurting anyone else, you are free to do with it as you wish. If you think double eyelid surgery or breast implants or liposuction will make you happy and you really want to do it, you should do it.

So, given all that, one of the things I’m really against is staged conflict (I have enough problems without having to create drama) and that is exactly what most daytime talk shows and going on Montel would be. Sorry America, I won’t be launching my talk show career just yet.

28 on 28 and life at the ER

2 IVs while at the Stanford Hospital ER
Originally uploaded by sindy

Thanks to everyone who wished me a happy birthday on Friday, including my co-workers who called me during my usual work-at-home-Friday to sing “Happy Birthday.” I turned 28 on the 28th!

Unfortunately, I spent Friday evening, into the wee hours, at the ER and then most of the afternoon and into the late evening on Saturday again at the ER. No, it wasn’t a “drinking related emergency” or any such fun– I had been suffering through five days of an excruciating headache and eventually ended up in the ER. The photo here shows the TWO IVs I ended up having put in on Saturday after they failed THREE times to get an IV in, finally got one in (the one in my hand) and then realized they needed to put a larger needle in higher for the contrast scan.

In any case, a total of fourteen hours later, I’m sick of the ER, but finally pain free and everything looks okay. (If you’re going to the ER and you have the chance, bring a book– you’re going to be waiting.) Thanks to the ER staff who, although they couldn’t get my scans to happen faster (who am I to trump a trauma?), were very nice and took care of me well.

Oh, the places you’ll go (on the Internet): phreequeshow

In this past week, not one, but TWO movies on cable with conjoined twins: Twin Falls Idaho and Brothers of the Head. In reading about conjoined twins on Wikipedia, I was led through the World Wide Web to eventually land on this website:

phreequeshow

Fascinating and, in many ways, inspiring. (You try to dress yourself, eat or any number of things without any arms or legs.)