Follow-up CT Scanby Angie
19 Jun 2008
9:06 pm1
A couple of weeks after my CT Scan in February, I got a call from Dr. Murphy to inform me of the results: No major clots, but there is some clotting in the artificial conduit that was added to my circulatory plumbing last May. He is certain now that I need to begin a Coumadin regimen – I expect to start after I meet with him in July. Interestingly, the CT scan also identified two little “swollen patches” on the surface of my heart that completely baffle Dr. Murphy and his colleagues. They don’t think the spots are problematic, but he wanted a follow-up CT scan in a couple of months to check on them again – if they’re changing at all, there might cause for concern.
So! Today was the fateful day and I made my way once again to LPCH: to the eternally long waiting room in the basement, and to the tiny, hot unit that houses the CT machine right in the midst of a bunch of construction. In fact, the construction cramped things to such a degree that the nurse who placed the IV in my ankle had to sit on the floor to do so, while I sat in a rolling desk chair and tried to hold still. Luckily, it only too two pokes this time. Once the IV was in, I had to lie flat on the scanning table, be hooked up to an EKG machine, and hold my breath for 7-, 15-, and 20-second intervals, as the radiologist directed. When they injected the dye – oh, my stars! It’s hard to describe… I felt overwhelmingly hot and suffocated, but the sensation was all coming from the inside out. It was very bizzare. In any case, I lived through it!
Now it’s back to waiting for results. Blah.
Google’s Complimentby Angie
16 Jun 2008
10:06 am3
So, just for fun, I was playing around on some search engines to see what kind of search terms it would take to find our blog. When I typed “angie & jim” to Google, an RSS feed for our blog posts came up as the third result. When you use Google, it has a link after each of the possibilities to search for “similar pages” so, I decided to click on that and see what Google considered “similar” to our blog.
What was the top result? Check this out:
A Happy Storyby Angie
12 Jun 2008
9:06 am6
Once upon a time, beyond the stormy mountains but this side of tomorrow, there lived a king and queen with five lovely daughters. All five grew up into beautiful ladies; when our story begins, two were already wed to handsome princes. Four of the five princesses lived within a day’s ride of their parents palace, but the second princess and her husband made their home far, far away, on the boarders of the great sea.
A great celebration was soon to take place, to honor the queen’s birthday (who, due to a fairy gift, only looked younger and more beautiful every year), but the youngest and loveliest princess noticed that her queen mother seemed very sad. This was because a dragon had attacked the kingdom of her second daughter several weeks before and, though the prince had defeated the dragon, the queen wished desperately to visit her daughter and help with repairing and restoring the kingdom.
The youngest princess had a magic mirror that could speak to another mirror at her sister princess’s castle. She called and told her sister that she wanted to use her magic to send their queen mother to the kingdom on the shores of the great sea to visit. What a wonderful surprise! The arrangements were soon made: The queen would be traveling in a great coach pulled by magical winged rabbits, who could fly the great distance in an hour. They would land in a forest of oak trees, where all such magical transportation landed: it was called the Oakland Hare-port.
Well, the great day of conveyance arrived and the queen kissed her husband, the king, and began her journey. The second princess and her handsome prince also set out from their castle in a carriage to meet the queen and bring her home from the hare-port. While the magnificent horses jogged along, the carriage passed the hovel of an evil, iron-nosed witch. This witch had been glad when the dragon attacked the kingdom because she hated the prince and princess. When the prince had defeated the dragon, the witch was disappointed, but at midnight she had sneaked to the dragon’s body and magically stolen his power to breathe fire, which spark was still alive, deep inside.
When the iron-nosed witch saw the royal carriage passing by, she grabbed her broomstick and rushed outside, mounted, and began to fly alongside. She made herself invisible to the prince and princess and planned to breathe hot fire on their horses so the steeds would overheat and fall down dead. That way, the royal couple would never reach their queen mother! The prince, however, was very wise and a good horseman. As the invisible witch began to breathe out her fire, the prince saw the horses shiver and begin to sweat. With her next big breath, he notice their wild eyes and tossing manes. As the witch prepared to take her largest and hottest breath of all, the prince suddenly steered the horses off the road and pulled the carriage to a stop, so he could tend to them and find out what was wrong. The witch, meantime, could not stop her broom very quickly and was so angry that she didn’t notice where she was going. She flew right into a sign-post and burst into a million pieces. The fire-breathing magic burst out of her as well, and landed in a little red brick oven in a village in the oak forest.
The wise prince and his princess waited for half an hour to let the horses cool down and rest, and brought them water from a magic well nearby to drink and be refreshed. Then they resumed their journey and arrived just in time to meet the beautiful queen at the hare-port, who hadn’t had to wait very long at all. A great feast was held in the oak forest, where they ate pizza cooked in the red brick oven. Finally, the royal family returned to their castle and there they are all living still, happily ever after.
Post-Op Appointmentby Angie
10 Jun 2008
5:06 pm1
Jim took a half day off work to drive with me to Stanford today for my post-op appointment with Dr. Jacobson. Everything looks good! The last of the bandages are off and now I can drive and swim and all sorts of fun stuff!
She did say, however, that the one thing I shouldn’t do is sit-ups: not for another month. I think I can live with that. 🙂
Love & Sympathy for the Chapman Familyby Angie
9 Jun 2008
7:06 pm0
Many of you know that one of our favorite music artists is Christian singer/songwriter Steven Curtis Chapman. You may not know that in addition to being an incredibly talented musician, he is also a wonderful husband and father. In fact, after having two sons and a daughter of their own, he and his wife, Mary Beth, adopted three more daughters from China.
We just learned that last week the youngest of those three, five-year-old Maria Sue, was killed in an accident last Wednesday. Our heartfelt love and sympathy go out to that wonderful family. I know this must be a terribly difficult time for them, and they will all be in our prayers.
Here is a sweet video of Steven and Maria washing dishes together, including music and dancing! If washing dishes were this much fun at our house, there would never be a dirty dish left in the sink 🙂 (for those of you who checked out the links above, it is the same as the second video in the mlive.com article).
Recovering from surgeryby Angie
2 Jun 2008
2:06 pm1
Thank you, everybody, for your prayers and well-wishes for us since my surgery. I am doing very well and hope to be back to normal in a couple more weeks. I have been very well taken care of: My wonderful, adorable, thoughtful husband has been at my beck and call as much as possible since I got home from the hospital. He and Jon spent a large portion of their Memorial weekend entertaining me (playing “Secret of Mana”
with me for hours on end). 
My mother-in-law, Kathy, visited for a week to keep our house running smoothly. I received phone calls and visits from wonderful friends in my ward and from family members all over the country (thanks, Audrey!). I even had my own pet therapist on hand: Jaquie wisely stayed off my lap, but spent long hours curled up next to me on the couch or my bed.
Getting around the house is still a little difficult because of the incision (for those ladies who have had a C-section, you probably know what I mean), and I can’t carry very much or drive yet, but I’m certainly improving. My doctor called when she received the lab results on the cysts they removed to report that everything was benign – hooray!! My post-op appointment is next Tuesday, so if there is anything else interesting to relate, I’ll keep the blog posted.
Fortuitousby Jim
31 May 2008
12:05 pm6
I apologize for the long post, but I really have a lot to say. (It seems whenever airports are involved, my posts quadruple in length…) Bear with me, I think it’ll be worth it.
A few days ago my dad asked me to do a little project for him which involved burning some video to a DVD. My computer had been having issues, and I had decided to reinstall windows to hopefully fix those issues. (It had been a really long time since I did a full reinstall.) I decided to give Windows Vista a try since I hadn’t yet and I wanted to give it a fair chance. There is so much opinion about Vista out there and I really shouldn’t say anything until I can form my own. So, last night I installed Vista. Everything went smoothly.
The video project my dad wanted me to do is 56 gigabytes, so I figured I should free up some space on my hard drives by removing my (no longer used) Linux partitions and resizing the NTFS partitions with the new unused space. Well, most other times, this operation took at most 20 minutes. This time, I had a 500 GB hard drive with a 366 GB partition to resize. The problem was the block size had to change because the drive was so big. Basically, there are only so many address spaces the drive can use and when I grew the whole drive, the individual address spaces had to each grow too (because I already was using the most number of address spaces I could). So, it took my computer about 7 hours to do the complete resize. When you edit the partitions, you DO NOT stop in the middle, unless you want to have corrupted data. There was really nothing I could do; my computer was tied up for several hours. Fortuitous event #1: A couple days ago I copied the entire 56 GB project to a network drive to free up some space for my new Operating System. Even though my computer was occupied for many hours, I could still get to the project my dad needed me to finish.
I forgot to mention that my mom needed to be brought to the airport for a 6 am flight this morning, which means we had to leave at about 4:30 am (so she could be an hour early at 5 am). I was in a little bit of a time crunch. After I realized that I wouldn’t be able to use my own computer to work on this project, Angie suggested that I use her computer. Fortuitous event #2: About 3 weeks ago, I bought Angie a new computer. I had noticed that her computer was nearly 8 years old and showing its age. Angie was so good to not complain about it and just be patient with it. So, as a surprise, I bought her a new computer which is faster than my own. There is no way I could have used her old computer to work on this project.
So, I installed Adobe Premier and Encore on Angie’s computer and got to work. It took about 90 minutes to copy the 56 GB project. Angie’s computer is the only one in the house not connected to the gigabit network, so the copy was slow. (I guess I should have bought a new network switch while I was upgrading her computer.) Once I got started, I ran into the same problem that prevented me from completing the project months ago. I found a solution from a google search and was able to finish the DVD just minutes before having to leave with Mom making fortuitous event #3. I would have liked to have more time, but Dad needed something and this was all I had.
We hopped in the car and started the drive out to the Oakland airport. Things were going just fine, but as we pulled off the freeway on 98th Ave., warning lights started flashing on my dashboard. I realized my power steering was gone, so I quickly got in the turn lane of the offramp and turned right on 98th Ave. and pulled over to the side. My car had overheated. Fortuitous event #4: My car had died 2.7 miles from the airport. I can’t say how glad I was my car died in a place where I could safely get off the road. We called AAA and had a tow truck there in 15 minutes. I only got 5 miles for free from the towing service, so I asked if he would take us to the airport. He seemed a little surprised, but took us there nonetheless. When we pulled up at the curb to drop Mom off, a security guard gave us a funny look as I jumped down from the truck to go get Mom’s suitcase out of the trunk of the car being towed. We must have looked very strange. Anyway, we only lost 30 minutes and so (fortuitous event #5:) Mom was able to make the flight!
I asked the serviceman to drop me off at the nearest gas station. He unhooked my car and I went inside to buy some coolant. He was kind enough not to charge me, even though I think I went over my 5 mile limit (probably only by a mile). I got the coolant and he even helped me put it in the car and get it running again. With the engine running, he noticed that I had thin streams of coolant squirting out of my overflow tank. I thanked him for his help and bid him farewell. I had brought the GPS, so I was looking for repair centers nearby and considering waking up Jon (my brother living in Emeryville a few miles away) to help me out when fortuitous event #6 happened: Dad called to check up on me. We talked about the car and he figured that by refilling the coolant, I would probably have enough to get home. We had poured nearly the entire container of coolant into the car, so it had been quite empty. With his assurance, I started the trek home.
Fortuitous event #7: The last couple days I have felt a cold coming on, so I have been getting to bed on time (a rarity for me). The last three nights I’ve gone to bed at times ranging from 8:30 to 10:30 pm and slept for at least 8 hours. I couldn’t afford being sick with so little sick leave after Angie’s surgery, so I wanted to make sure I didn’t get sick by doing whatever I could to keep my body strong. With such a good sleep pattern the last few days, I hardly felt tired driving home at 6 am even though I had been awake for over 24 hours (and I don’t feel sick anymore). I arrived home to find my wife and my cat peacefully sleeping in bed. I put on my pajamas and got under the covers and went to sleep.
The more I think about the events of the last 24 hours, the more I realize just how fortunate I was. Seemingly terrible things happened to me, but in the end, everything worked out just fine. My computer is in perfectly good shape, Mom made it on her flight, Dad got his DVD, and I got home safely. I really felt like these events were more than just luck. The Lord really does look out for us and answer our prayers. Days like this help you realize that.