serendipti's Diaryland Diary 12:11 p.m. - Thursday, Aug. 26, 2004 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- life marches on i have the incessant need to feel connected. i love this about myself. indeed, i cherish it. i love that i just tried to get away with the use of the word 'indeed'in an everyday setting. there is a flip side, however, desafortunadamente. in trying to be 'connected' to people, via phone dates and updates and whatnot, I succeeded in averaging close to 3 hours per day on the phone this past month. i know that this is pathological, but I am trying to do something about it. I have not written in this journal in over two months, and this is one of the most important ways I feel 'connected' to both myself and those I love. And I have stopped using it completely. No more. I am back. I dropped off mainly because computer access was spotty, and then I ended up being lazy and relying on phone support instead. Since I last wrote, I have been to 5 weddings, about 5 more have been announced, I have taken the boards, failed the boards, moved my entire apt into storage by burdening those that i love, had my lupus flare up, left chicago early, passed out once, had sheila discover i have two gray hairs (i feel like I have waited for this moment all my life....i am officially wise AND sexy), i have sobbed inconsolably 4 distinct times....once in front of Amy, once on the phone with sri, once in a shower, hoping the water would drown out the sobs to the people outside,once in an empty apt in new york city.....I have had amy point out that the symbol I had drawn on the paper was not a peace sign, like I had thought, but a mercedes sign (further proof I am utterly disconnected from my berkeley roots), i got to officiate one of the weddings (more on this later), dad possibly has multiple myeloma, leading me to question why I am not married *repeatedly*, mom had arthroscopic surgery on her shoulder, Nimisha bhabhi got pregnant and so coming to a theater near you, one more member in Team Barot.....2 close friends have broken up with fiances, 2 close friends have new shitty health things they have to deal with.....1 close friend eloped....friends went to ecuador, jordan, budapest, cambodia, spain,italy....one friend started med school at an awesome place that begged her to come there.... in short, life marches on, whether recorded on unrecorded. I, myself, prefer the former. Here is my time saving measure to bulk this entry up. This is my 'update' email i sent to friends in chicago. next entry will be purely for you, promise. this one is a kick-off after so long, so be kind: Hello my lovely Chicago peeps, So I have been kind of out of touch for a while, and then I get a messgae from the Ciscinator (Francisco) asking whether the rumors are true that I have completely skipped out of town and left for good, so I figured it was time for an explanation, because I don't do the whole mysterious thing very well, and a lot of you have been calling or emailing to check in, and although I am all about the personal touch, I am compelled to so this massmail BS. Lo Siento. So after tanking the Boards royally, I was planning on a refreshing 6 week hiatus in Caifornia, because the thought of 12 hours a day in the E-stone alone was too much for me to bear. I was heading into the last week of my family med rotation, and the ole lupus started to flare. I knew it was time to cut my losses and go home, when Monday of week 6, I could barely push the BP bulb to take my patients BP, my fingers were so swollen and crippy. So I fly home early, miss my shelf, and see all my doctors who are like, you have had a flare up, and I was like, duh. I felt good within a week at home, although I had a scary incident involving me and a Gravitron, which I slumped over and passed out on, which made me feel very in control and master of my body. So I stopped the ACEi I was taking, and things are back in, I need to pass the bloody boards mode. Then, de repente, Dad has some weird back pain, and long story short, the last two weeks have been scary involving labs that say 'spike in the gamma region' and oncologists and bone marrow biopsies (the doc let me stay in the room when she did the biopsy cuz I am 'in' the field....it took eveything i had to not pass out or burst into tears from all my dad's blood and his moaning). So it looks like we are in the mutliple myeloma family of illnesses. Luckily, Dad does not have lesions in any of his bones yet, and he does not really have any major symptoms, and although his IgG is elevated as are his plasma cells (about 10-15% instead of 5%), his IgA ia not decreased. I am giving you these details cuz we're all in the field and we might as well know what's up, I guess. So they basically have two things on the differential, smoldering myeloma, which is like stage 1, aka indolent myeloma, or it could be this thing called MGUS...Monoclonal Gammopathy of Unknown Significance (I know, crappy acronym, I am sure they could have figured out a way to make it SMUG or MUGS....anyway...)....Dad fits 2 out of 3 criteria for each, so they can't give a definitive diagnosis. Anyway, this is kind of good news, in that we don't have to start thinking chemo or radiation or bone marrow transplant right now......and maybe if nothing changes, ever. Never would be ideal. But all we can do right now is wait and watch and monitor all of his labs and see what changes. So that has been what has been consuming me and I know I have been terribly out of touch but I am so glad that I failed the Boards so I have been here from day one when all this was unfolding. I miss you all terribly, and I am FO SHO coming back to beloved UIC....I might push back the Boards a little since I have not really begun to study at all....so maybe I will be back in late October or so....it is kind of up in the air....but I do have every intention to return.... I opened a phone bill and I believe the total number of minutes I was on the phone last month was over 5000.....yeah, that is three zeroes....as Amy and other loved ones have pointed out repeatedly, I have a phone pathology, and so I have been trying to go cold turkey and have been bad about calls, but I wanted you all to know about what is going on, and I think that we are all okay and that you should not worry.....our family has a tendency to go through some rough stuff, but we always get through! so that is it.....this has been really long, and I am going to send it to all of my friends I have in my address book, but if you think I left someone out who would want to know, feel free to hit forward. i love you all immensely. you guys are the best community I could ask for! class of '06 fo life! dipti! ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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