*names have been changed to a randomized letter for privacy protection
Happy belated Familygiving, Friendsgiving, and Thanksgiving!
I apologize for the delayed updates regarding my health status, but I figured no major news is good news. Life has been treating me well lately, and I am honestly very grateful that I’m not spending the holiday season heavily isolated within the confines of four walls. However, it has gotten increasingly busy — my desk alone is brimming with paperwork.
Health:
With the help of my awesome nurse practitioners (they remind me of Florence Nightingale) and cardiologists, I’ve been able to increase my heart’s ejection fraction from 21% to 37% since mid-October. (The normal parameters for a healthy ejection fractions runs approximately from 55% to 70% to the best of my knowledge.) This is definitely progress in the right direction, and admittedly I was kind of surprised that it jumped up so quickly in a month. Combined with weekly moderate exercise and healing foods, my goal is to reach the normal parameter by June 2011.
Blood counts are excellent. I got my flu and Tdap vaccinations!
Patient efforts:
I’ve been working with my dear friends and the hardworking staff at the Asian American Donor Program (clearly running out of adjectives to describe all of these under appreciated heroes) to identify more patients in need of a marrow match. Recently, we were able to help connect 18-year old Samir (South Asian) and 38-year old Erick (Hispanic/Latino). Samir came to my indirect attention from one of my best college friends, *E (who is marvelous and studying to become a physician assistant!), and Erick’s need has been relayed to AADP by my amazing social worker, *T. To find out more about Samir and Erick’s need, please visit www.aadp.org and click the “Stories” tab and “Now Searching”.
The power of knowledge:
I have to get back to studying, but I wanted to leave you all with a Christmas gift. It’s actually not in the form of a physical gift per se. A lot of you have asked me about how cancer has changed my life — and to be honest — it has made me become very self-aware and concerned about preventing other people from suffering the onslaught of any type of cancer.
At the risk of sounding overly didactic and as if I’m a college professor assigning reading to students, I feel strongly that everyone should read the following two articles (I’ve provided the links below):
1. Time Magazine’s “Cancer, Cancer Everywhere” : Published in May 2010, they have investigated the top 10 ways we can reduce our risk of getting cancer.
2. Yahoo’s “Is Your Health on the Line?” : Published in November 2010, they examine how the 21st century’s wireless technology and communication networks may negatively affect our health in discrete ways and the measures we can take to become safe consumers of major electronics we find somewhat hard to live without…
Happy holidays! Back to studying…