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On Tuesday, I got the name of my competitor: Acute Myleoid Leukemia.

That day there were a bunch of things due to happen.  Aside from a bunch of blood tests, they needed to do a biopsy of my bone marrow to be able to properly identify which kind of leukemia I have.  They also said they had to put in a Hickman central line, instead of the normal cannula which was put in on Day 0.  This runs a catheter into a major vein with two dangling tubes hanging out of the chest so it’s simple for them to draw blood, add medicine, etc., instead of repeatedly pricking little spots all over the back of your hand.

Taking the blood samples was a real pain because my dehydration made it hard for the phlebotomist to actually get a usable vein.  She was also supposed to take a whole bunch of vials, but it wasn’t working out.  The nurses checked with the doctor, and they collectively decided to only do 2 or 3 of them in the morning, and wait until the central line was in since it’d be really simple to draw blood after that.

Doozy #1

The biopsy was by far my oddest experience, ever.  (Apparently most of the initial odd experiences will be centered on this particular day.)  They use the pelvic bone, and applied  a lot of local anaesthetic.  The doctor doing said it shouldn’t be a sharp pain, but I’d definitely feel something.  For an example, he said it’s similar to when a doctor pulls a tooth.

He kept loading anaesthetic until I confirmed that I didn’t feel anything.  To get at the bone marrow, they have to get through the skin layer and then use some monster of a needle (which thankfully I didn’t see) to penetrate the bone and get at the marrow.  I expected the marrow result to look something like breadcrumbs, for some reason.  But it was more like watered-down blood.

During the process, which took about 10-15 minutes, there were two instances where I could actually feel what must have been the flow of the marrow in the bone, or at least some impact on the nerves around the bone.  They weren’t expected, and quickly corrected, but wow did they happen.  Both of those times, as I told the doctor later, I felt what must have been the time you say “10” when asked, “on a scale of 0 to 10, with 0 being no pain and 10 being unbearable pain.”  Each was for less than a second, but it was like someone had put a blindfold over my eyes and could be aware of absolutely nothing, save what I was feeling in that instant.

Doozy #2: Central Line

I had a small break after the biopsy was done, then they rolled me (lying on my bed, making me feel like some spoiled celebrity who likes to stay in bed, always) to the Radiology department where they were to put in the Hickman central line.  It was a big operating room, and looked nice and clean and new—not the ceramic tile TV crap.  The central line gets put in through the neck right near your jugular, and comes out a little bit further down in your chest.

Wise-ass male me had to accept that the nurses had to shave away a bunch of chest hair in order to actually do it.  In retrospect, it was better—the number of times I’ve had sticky tape yanked off my arm/chest/tummy in the last few days makes me really happy that they’ve gotten rid of some of it.  (Yanking off those things always reminds me of just how much I’d never want to be a woman buying into the obsession of going for a waxing.  Jeeeeeezus that hurts.)

My head was tilted to the left so they could put it in the right side of my neck.  (Anne Rice moment.)  They draped a few sheets of some kind of paper over where I could see, letting me look out towards the side of the room but nowhere else.  Then came the anaesthetic, and a funny experience where the anaesthesiologist (?) began asking where I lived, how long I’ve lived in Ireland, etc etc.  I remember answering a couple of the questions—and then woke up out in their department’s open area back on my bed.  The skin around where they did this is still a bit sensitive, but that’ll go away after a couple more days.

All of this before lunch.
Q-Tips

Every Tuesday, they give people four sanitary Q-Tips with plastic tubes to hold the result.  The intent is to test every patient in the hospital so they can catch any cross-infections or new infections which might be contageous.  With one, you swab in both of your nostrils.  With another, you swab both sides of your groin.  (Warning: I’m not gonna go too far, but I’m also not going to omit, either.)  The last two are two external rectal samples.  Every Tuesday.  I’ll be doing this for weeks, and I don’t think it’ll get any more comfortable. 😉

Giving It A Name

In the early afternoon, my doctor and her impressive team of like six people all appeared: the biopsy identified my disease as “acute myeloid leukemia”.  This is the better of the two choices for what I could have, and there is a 70% success rate for people going into remission after their first treatment.  (Being a fan of Dollhouse http://www.pressthebuttons.com/2009/05/would-you-like-a-treatment-anticipating-a-dollhouse-video-game.html , hearing things about “treatments” is really entertaining.)

Chemotherapy would start that night.  It’s not the getting-zapped-with-radiation I expected it would be.  Instead, it’s two sets of liquids.  The first, Daunorubicin, is in a big tube of what looks like Kool-Aid and inject it slowly through the central line.  It turns your pee red—they told me not to think I’m peeing blood, it’s just like food coloring.  There’s a second, Ara-C (Cyterabine), which is a small liquid bag which is put in over about 30 minutes via the normal IV line (like the one they use for Potassium Chloride and Sodium Chloride).

I’ll be getting the chemo for 10 days, then they wait for 2-3 weeks to make sure my blood cell counts are back up to where they should be.

There’s a possibility of nausea at some point in the next week or so, and within the next two weeks I’ll start losing my hair.  How ironic: on New Years Eve in 1999, I said I’d try a resolution to shave off my beard and see what it’d be like to live without one.  That lasted at most 3 days–apparently I looked too much like my brother, which just weirded her out. 😀  So this time I can’t back out; having had a beard for more than 20 years, I’ll probably have trouble recognizing myself.

Brendan has actue myeloic leukemia. He has been admitted to St Vincent’s Hosptial in Dublin, on St Anne’s ward. He’ll be here for at least a month, as he started chemotherapy last night. While he’d love to see everyone, and say hello, right now it’s just not possible. Patrick was able to come in this morning for about a half hour, and tomorrow we’re hoping Eoin does too, if B is strong enough for it. Again, that’s what this blog is for, virtual visits to him (and questions) and he or I will answer as much as we can. We think the hospital has blocked Facebook, so posts there won’t get seen by B, but he does check Twitter a little.

Today we met with a social worker to discuss what is going on, and how they can help us with pretty much everything. It was wonderful to know that other safety net is there (beyond you all, I mean). The meeting wore out B quite a bit, he’s napping while I type this next to him. He has a chest xray scheduled for this afternoon, so he’s saving himself up for that.

I’ll be heading home to the boys soon, and hoping I can come back in tonight. His room is lovely (it has a view of the bay) and he has a roommate who seems nice, but sleeps a lot.

P has a playdate today, and tomorrow as well. Eoin does too, which is great for them. Yes, they know. Eoin is too young to get it, but P got it pretty well. Seeing B was helpful for him I think, esp since Eoin tomorrow might end up being his last visitor for a while other than me.

Cards, emails, videos, stupid cat jokes, all are welcome (flowers aren’t allowed on the ward). We do feel all the good vibes coming from all over the world, and it helps keep us afloat in this wild sea.

We’ve made it through Day 1.

Yesterday was Day 0, when the doctor said I didn’t have the flu—instead, because of an insanely high white blood cell count, I had some kind of cancer.  Pause for about 5 seconds, then he specified: he was fairly certain I have leukemia.

The world and any concept of reality kind of fell to a crawl for both of us; the world went yellow for Elana, and she couldn’t breathe.  I thought I was hallucinating—my face expected the doctor to quickly correct himself, after realizing he was talking to the wrong people.  Unfortunately, his diagnosis was for me.

Week – 1

On a 4-day work trip to Eindhoven in The Netherlands, I started feeling constant headaches, didn’t have much of an appetite, and a regular dry mounth no matter how much water I guzzled.  Despite not feeling nautious or having diarrhea, I figured it was some variant of the flu which would go away.  But the consistency of the headaches, and the fact that other symptoms, like coughing, only happened once in a while.   But the other catch was, I was constantly exhausted.  I had trouble sitting up for an hour, but I was also waking up at 3 or 4 in the morning, feeling dehydrated.

Day 0

At the encouragment of some friends, we made an appointment with our GP to let us at least get some meds to make the headaches stop.  The recurring headaches worried him, given my history of a traumatic brain injury back in 1993.  (Here’s some interesting timing for you: an interview I did a couple of weeks ago with Dick Gordon, a nationally syndicated radio show.  It aired online—today.)

I was getting dizzy when he tried to draw a blood sample, and even if he could take it, we’d wait until the late afternoon to get the results.  Instead, he suggested we go into the St Vincents hospital in Dublin where they could do those tests much faster, as well as any others.

We went up to the A&E (Emergency Room) at about 10 in the morning, and I spoke first with a triage nurse, and then with a triage doctor asking me for all sorts of details.  She ran me through a battery tests we realized were to make sure I wasn’t suffering from a stroke, and then asked a bunch of other questions.  She wanted to talk to the Registrar (sort of the on-call A&E docter), who came to ask lots of the same questions.  He decided they should get some blood tests done, and would come back to us with more information.  The all had the theory that it was some sort of flu variant.

A while later, he came back, introducing the doctor who’s in charge of Hematology.  He’s the one who tried to ease us into the information, but at one point he had to just spit it out.  He said because of the condition, we had to start working on it immediately.

They moved us to a bed in the hall (Irish hospitals are overcrowded), and after a wait they offered us tea and toast.  We could sip the tea, but neither of us could stomach the toast.

Finally an administrative secretary said they had a room for me, in their cancer ward.  Can’t really remember a lot of detail of exactly what happened between then and when Elana finally went home and I lay down to try to sleep.  I know I was set up with a saline drip, and had to not drink or eat anything starting at midnight for procedures the next day.

Trying to sleep last night was hard, waking up constantly.  Lots of it was to pee, but plenty was just my hyperactive brain hitting any and every piece of information you can imagine.

More about today (Day 1)  tomorrow.

We’ve passed through the 2 hardest days in this entire journey.  And we’re still here.

I’ve got rkhunter installed on our Debian Etch box after a recent break-in on a home machine (long story, the short version involves silliness on my part changing to make my desktop receive incoming SSH connections—and leaving the patrick dummy account with its silly original password).

Every day I was getting two separate messages: one from rkhunter itself complaining

Warning: This operating system is not fully supported!

and the second from the daily cron job of running it, saying

/etc/cron.daily/rkhunter:
lsmod: QM_MODULES: Function not implemented

To hush the first, I edited the /var/lib/rkhunter/db/os.dat file and added the line

156:Debian 4.0 (i386):/usr/bin/md5sum:/bin:

I just read through the /usr/bin/rkhunter script to come up with the right syntax/values for this.

To make the daily cron mail stop, I edited the /etc/cron.daily/rkhunter script and changed the invocation line to redirect stderr to the log file (adding ‘2>&1‘) as well:

$RKHUNTER --cronjob --report-warnings-only --createlogfile /var/log/rkhunter.log > $OUTFILE 2>&1

Fingers crossed this does the trick.

The version of rsync installed with Tiger Mac OS X 10.4.11 isn’t the best … you can followsome great instructions and build the 3.0.6 version instead, getting a bit of a speed boost-up.

Anything to avoid typing commands you already know, and apply patches for changes someone else already did. 🙂

Our LaCie 500GB Mac Mini Hub drive, now a few years old, started a horrid clicking noise recently, and wouldn’t mount. Try as I might, it just kept failing. Crap, we lost everything on it! But a bunch of posts in different places, including the Mac OS X Hints Forum, talked about the power supply causing this sort of problem—and the disk itself is fine.

Elana had the great idea of taking the physical drive out of the LaCie case and putting it in an external drive enclosure. (Cuz I’ve amassed far too much stuff.) And voila, it worked just fine! Now I just need to get a cheap 500GB disk which I can use to mirror the contents of this disk, responding to the harsh reminder of how easy it is to lose vast amounts of data.

Some of which actually matters.

This is what I got to say at Patrick’s primary school today, introducing the President of Ireland before she gave her remarks in front of the kids and staff at the school:

Today is a very special day for the Dalkey School Project. As Chairperson of the Board of Management, it gives me great pleasure to welcome President McAleese to the school. The last time she visited the school was for the 25th birthday celebrations.

However, for many people here, this is their first time experiencing a Presidential visit; we look forward to hearing the President’s address. It is an honor for me to invite the President to speak.

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, the President of Ireland, Mary McAleese.

Earlier this year I got a SheevaPlug, a little box with some Flash memory and an ARM processor running Linux. It’s so friggin’ awesome! (Technical term.) My main motivation for getting it, aside from a cool toy, was its much lower power consumption compared to the Mac Mini.

For a few years now our Mini had been doing most of the maintenance efforts for our home network, including: DHCP; DNS; running the No-IP client so I can SSH in via our dynamic DSL connection with its random addresses; acting as a printer server; and work as a local NTP server (still to do). (My email folders were also on the Mini thru an IMAP server, but I’ve moved that onto my desktop for the moment.)

The SheevaPlug is now doing all of it. In particular, I’m finding name lookups for Web browsing is vastly faster than when the Mini was doing the effort.

This list offers the details of what I’ve done to use the SheevaPlug. I’ll add to it (to mirror my local ChangeLog) as we make any other tweaks or fixes. It’s not a lot of effort and the end result is great.

(Note: I still need to finish fixing the formatting of this for readability.)

Accessing the box
After initial power-on, logged in as root with the default password nosoup4u. Then I changed the root password to something I’m used to typing.
General Usability
1. As noted on “SheevaPlug”, edit /etc/dhcp3/dhclient.conf and comment out the the line
   

   #OFF#supersede domain-name-servers 127.0.0.1;

2. Ran dhclient eth0
3. Make sure APT will work by doing: mkdir -p /var/cache/apt/archives/partial
4. Install ntpdate with apt-get install ntpdate.
5. Edit /etc/rc.local and comment out the line
   

   #date 012618002009

   and add

   ntpdate ntp.maths.tcd.ie

6. Edit /etc/hostname and change the name from ‘debian‘ to ‘inara‘.
7. I should note the boot sequence for the SheevaPlug still specifies a different subnet:
   

   Nov 14 13:52:19 inara kernel: Kernel command line: console=ttyS0,115200 mtdparts=nand_mtd:0x400000@0x100000(uImage),0x1fb00000@0x500000(rootfs) rw root=/dev/mtdblock1 rw ip=10.4.50.4:10.4.50.5:10.4.50.5:255.255.255.0:DB88FXX81:eth0:none

8. * /etc/rc.local: Comment out
   #OFF#insmod /boot/fat.ko
   #OFF#insmod /boot/vfat.ko
   and add
   chmod 1777 /tmp /var/tmp
9. Edit /etc/fstab and add the lines
   

   tmpfs /var/log tmpfs defaults 0 0
   tmpfs /tmp tmpfs defaults 0 0

   to make the most frequent activity not actually write anything out to the flash memory. Too many writes to flash can accelerate its demise.

10. Also change the root partition in /etc/fstab to specify noatime to also reduce unnecessary “disk” writes:
    

    rootfs / rootfs rw,noatime 0 0

11. Install wget (to download stuff), sysstat (to see how things are running), and rsync (to download/upload stuff) with : sudo apt-get install wget sysstat rsync
Network Time Support
1. Update the list of packages, then install NTP: sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install ntp
2. Edit /etc/ntp.conf and change the server line to be the Trinity College server: server ntp.maths.tcd.ie
3. As suggested on “New Plugger How To”, ran dpkg-reconfigure tzdata
   and selected Europe -> Dublin.
Logging in over the USB serial port
1. Follow the instructions at “Setting Up Serial Console Under Linux”
2. On my desktop (running Ubuntu 9.04), ran
   * On homer:
   sudo /sbin/modprobe -q ftdi-sio product=0x9e8f vendor=0x9e88
   sudo apt-get install cu
   sudo chown uucp /dev/ttyUSB1
   so I can then log into the SheevaPlug over a serial line with
   * sudo cu -s 115200 -l /dev/ttyUSB1
   This is really helpful when you make a typo and the box is no longer getting on your network properly!
Network Connection
1. Edited /etc/network/interfaces and changed it from doing DHCP to a static address:
   

   auto eth0
   #iface eth0 inet dhcp
   # /usr/share/doc/ifupdown/examples for more information.
   iface eth0 inet static
   address 192.168.20.8
   network 192.168.20.0
   netmask 255.255.255.0
   broadcast 192.168.20.255
   gateway 192.168.20.1

DHCP Server
1. Installed the DHCP server with: apt-get install dhcp3-server
2. Copied the /etc/dhcpd.conf file over from the Mini.
DNS Server
1. Install BIND with: apt-get install bind9
2. Edit /etc/bind/named.conf.local and add
   

   options {
   // use this to get faster lookups that we cache:
   forward first;
   forwarders {
   // Eircom:
   // BACKUP plan when DoS attacks hit eircom (2009-09-02)
   159.134.237.6;
   159.134.248.17;
   // as per http://broadbandsupport.eircom.net/ under Broadband Settings:
   // 213.94.190.194;
   // 213.94.190.236;
   // Try going straight to the Netopia box
   // 192.168.20.1;
   };
   allow-query { localhost; 192.168.20.0/24; };
   allow-transfer { localhost; };

   };
   zone “20.168.192.in-addr.arpa” IN {
   type master;
   file “192.168.20”;
   };
   zone “network.home” IN {
   type master;
   notify no;
   file “network.home”;
   };

3. Add files /etc/bind/192.168.20 and /etc/bind/network.home from the Mini.
No-IP Client
1. Get GCC off the CD that comes with the SheevaPlug box in SheevaPlug_Host_SWsupportPackageLinuxHost.zip.
2. Extract gcc.tar.bz2 from it, then extract files from that.
3. Download No-IP.
4. Extract the noip sources; may be in a directory noip-2.1.9-1.
5. Expecting ‘gcc’ and ‘noip-2.1.9-1’ are in the same directory, edit the makefile to have
   

   CC=../gcc/bin/arm-none-linux-gnueabi-gcc -O3

6. Do ‘cd noip-2.1.9-1’ and ‘make’, then copy the binary to /usr/local/bin/noip2.
7. Run “/usr/local/bin/noip2 -C” and answer its questions; you’ll need to have registered on no-ip.com to have a username and password to use with this free client.
8. Create the file /etc/init.d/noip2 using the example at http://www.togaware.com/linux/survivor/No_IP.html.
9. Do “chmod 755 /etc/init.d/noip2” and then “update-rc.d noip2 defaults” so it’ll run when you boot.

The Akismet plugin for our wordpress blog here on zen.org has stopped—get ready for it—a total of 537,920 spam comments. In two years. That’s half a million.

The peak was in June 2008 when more than 71 thousand attempts were made.

The original IEEE Transactions on Communications paper A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication (as a PDF) by Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn describing the seed that made the Internet come to be. Geek mana. I don’t know how long Princeton will keep it up there before I’ll have to delete the link.