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No kidney transplant for Simcoe, yet

Wednesday, Jan 4th, 2012 by pleia2 | 1 Comments

I mentioned Simcoe’s improved kidney function indicators in the last post, and they turned out to be game-changing when it came to our plans for a transplant. The transplant doctor had a talk with the hospital doctor and they feel the change in values have bumped her prognosis from “a couple of months to a year” to “multiple years” and with the risk of the transplant procedure being so high they’re not comfortable with doing it at this stage of kidney disease.

We discussed a plan moving forward with the hospital vet this morning:

We’ll continue with the renal diet she’s on, the 150ml of subcutaneously injected fluids every other day, and daily acid reducer (Famotidine) and fatty acids (Welactin). Over the weekend I finally gave her the SubQ fluids, MJ had been doing it because he was more familiar with the procedure and we thought this would just be temporary until the transplant.

We’ll be holding off on further toxoplasmosis testing at this point since she’s asymptomatic and the only risk is post-transplant.

We’re making an appointment with her primary care vet to get a full dental cleaning and have the removal of her infected tooth completed. The dental work does worry me, but it needs to be done and with the improvement in her blood work and extra precautions the risks are less than than from where we were standing a week ago.

3-4 weeks after the dental cleaning we’ll have blood work done again and evaluate.

Assuming no further symptoms, we will then do blood tests quarterly to evaluate the progression of the kidney failure. Symptoms which do develop (there are many possible) will be handled as they come.

I’m very thankful that we have such a great team of doctors, they’ve all gone beyond our expectations by doing additional research, pouring over test results as they come in and working together to draft the best plan moving forward. I’m also glad that the Feline CRF Support Group exists, I haven’t posted to it yet but I’ve been reading and it’s an amazing group of very helpful, caring folks who bring together a wealth of information and experience.

Filed under: simcoe

Engagement, travel in 2011 and looking on to 2012

Saturday, Dec 31st, 2011 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

The biggest news of 2011 for me was MJ surprising me on July 1st with an absolutely amazing marriage proposal in Sonoma. I still grin ridiculously when I think about what a perfect night and weekend it was.

Details and more photos are on our site here: http://www.mjandlyz.com/engagement.shtml

But it wasn’t the only exciting thing I did in 2011. I logged almost 50,000 miles in the air, gave six talks, one of which was a keynote, participated in one panel and went to two Ubuntu Developer Summits.


FOSSCON Keynote, Philadelphia, July 2011

Travel:

  • February: LAX for SCALE9x
  • April: San Juan, Puerto Rico for vacation
  • May: Budapest, Hungary for UDS
  • May: Fort Lauderdale, FL for a family event
  • May: Edmonton, Alberta to visit my sister
  • July: Philadelphia, PA for FOSSCON
  • September: Phoenix, AZ to visit family
  • October: Philadelphia for work and fun
  • October: Orlando, FL for UDS


Beach in San Juan, April 2011


St. Stephen’s Basilica in Budapest, May 2011

We also did a couple of mini-trips, heading up to Sonoma for our engagement over the 4th of July weekend and down to Monterey over Thanksgiving.

Talks and panels:

It was an amazing year, just as 2010 was. I have thoroughly enjoyed the flexibility and opportunities we’ve had to travel these past couple years.

2012 is shaping up to be a different kind of year. Work travel will be more limited for both of us, we’re saving up and planning for a wedding in 2013 and now with Simcoe’s health problems we’ll be tied a bit closer to home. This isn’t a difference that disappoints though, we live in a beautiful city that I love where there is never a shortage of things to do. I’m very much looking forward to time I spent traveling last year to be spent focused on projects, learning and spending more quality time exploring our city. Bring it on, 2012!

Filed under: EOY, life, reflection

Simcoe’s 2 vet visits

Friday, Dec 30th, 2011 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

Thursday morning we dropped off Simcoe at her primary care facility, All Pets Hospital, to complete the remaining testing to evaluate her health overall regardless of where we go from here and to see if she qualifies for the kidney transplant, this included:

  • Total Health Plus blood workup
  • Urine Prot/Creatinine Ratio
  • Radiographs – 2 Views
  • Cardiac Ultrasound
  • Blood Pressure

We picked her up Thursday evening.

Today we had a vet appointment for both her and Caligula at San Francisco Vet Specialists. Caligula was going in for a slightly early follow-up to some abnormal blood work results he had earlier in the year, we decided to do it early given Simcoe’s condition to make sure her kidney failure wasn’t something environmental that Caligula may have been exposed to as well. Simcoe’s visit was to get familiar with our local hospital vet and get his trusted opinion of her condition and the plans for transplant. We left the hospital feeling confident that we were going down the right track.

Shortly after the vet visit we received a call from her primary care doctor with results from her blood work on Thursday. Much of the blood work came good, and we got the exciting news about the direction in which her Creatine and BUN levels had gone.

12/10, first visit:
BUN: 93 (normal range: 14-36)
Creatine: 5.4 (normal range: .6-2.4)

12/13, after 2.5 days of fluids:
BUN: 90
Creatine: 5.8

At this point we were pretty much convinced that the hydration hadn’t helped and these values were true, she had stage 4 kidney failure.

However…. yesterday, 12/29, after at home care for 2 weeks:
BUN: 56
Creatine: 2.9

Much better! It points to a less severe stage kidney failure, which is good news because there are some other issues…

First is dental disease. She has one badly infected tooth that will need to come out and she could use a full cleaning. All of this requires anesthetic and needs to be done before the transplant so the infection doesn’t cause problems once she’s immunosuppressed. They are concerned about the risk of anesthetic on a sick cat, but the risks should be lower now that we know the realistic values surrounding her kidney disease.

Second was a slightly positive toxoplasmosis result. It’s unclear how she would have ended up with this (indoor cat, doesn’t eat raw meat), but at the very least they believe she’s had exposure to it at some point in her life. If it’s an active infection it needs to be treated with aggressive anti-biotics over 3 weeks before transplant is considered. There are 2 more tests we’ll need to do to determine if it’s obviously active, if those tests come out negative we’ll re-check her bloodwork in 3 weeks to see if the results have changed any, if it goes up we have a problem, otherwise we can probably plan to move forward with the transplant.

Phew! Today was certainly full of mixed news, but fortunately nothing deal-killing when it comes to the transplant and we have a path forward. We’ll be scheduling the follow-up toxoplasmosis appointment soon and then the dental work. For now we’re going to relax and enjoy our holiday weekend, we all earned it!

Filed under: simcoe

Aunt Elaine Visiting

Tuesday, Dec 27th, 2011 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

My Aunt Elaine came to visit this past weekend, it was the first time since moving away from home that I had a relative visiting over the winter holidays and she was happy to pass on Christmas to celebrate Hanukkah with us.

She arrived Thursday evening and I headed down on BART to pick her up at the airport. From there we dropped her things off at home and headed off to Union Square for dinner at Burger Bar.

Friday morning we headed out early to go to the San Francisco Zoo. The weather was stunning and we had a really enjoyable time. The zoo does a series of celebrations for the holidays around this time of year and that day it was time for the lions to open delicious presents, I uploaded a video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kjg8h-ZXgYI. It was also fun to see their Nile Hippo out playing.

We met up with MJ for lunch at The Boulevard Cafe in nearby Daly City. Their mac and cheese was delicious, and it’s healthy if you eat it with a salad, right?

The late afternoon was spent at The Walt Disney Family Museum. Having read Walt Disney: An American Original and been a general Disney cartoon fangirl for much of my life, I was at least somewhat familiar with much of what the museum had to offer. The museum is new so they were able to take advantage of the latest in display and touchscreen technologies in exhibits and incorporate them very tastefully with old media too for beautiful exhibits. The whole museum was a delight and I’d love to go back on a day that is less busy so I can spend time reading everything in the galleries. I really wish it was easier to access via public transit, even the drive out there was a bit tricky due to the massive amounts of road construction around the Presidio.

When the museum closed it was dark out and we took a drive over the Golden Gate Bridge to show Elaine the view of San Francisco. We also met some raccoons. From there we drove back to the city and had an Irish coffee at The Buena Vista, dinner Brandy Ho’s and came back to wrap up the night with ice cream at Ghirardelli Square.

Saturday we enjoyed lunch at the Ferry Building Farmers Market overlooking the bay. We were fortunate enough to catch the 1818 up the Embarcadero, the one street car on the F line which has been decorated inside and out for Christmas.

We took a walk down Pier 39 to see the sea lions and the view of Alcatraz. We then walked down to Pier 45, Fisherman’s Wharf, where the San Francisco Maritime Park Association has the USS Pampanito submarine docked for tours. It’s a WWII era sub, but Elaine was able to recount some of the time she spent on a ship that serviced some Naval subs in the 80s and 90s. It was a fun tour, and I hope to visit more of the ship museums in the area in the future.

We enjoyed dinner at Bistro Boudin and took the 1895 street car home.

Sunday morning we spent relaxing and watched The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947), which has now earned a spot as one of my favorite romance films (I’m not usually one for romance, but this is a goodie). We spent the afternoon at the Contemporary Jewish Museum which offers free admission on Christmas. Their Houdini: Art and Magic exhibit is well worth the visit, it’s only up through January 16th, and I wish we had more time for the California Dreaming exhibit which explores “Jewish Life in the Bay Area from the Gold Rush to the Present” because it had a lot of interesting facts about the Jewish population of the Bay Area that I’m finding fascinating in my new quest to learn more about Jewish culture with MJ, fortunately that exhibit is up through October of 2012 so we’ll have plenty of time to go see it.

Elaine’s flight was in the early evening, so we dropped her off at SFO (sad!) about 90 minutes before her flight. MJ and I ended up at Fang Restaurant for dinner.

More photos from the weekend are here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157628578115049/

It was an awesome time, but I have to admit I’m looking forward to staying home this weekend. The only plans so far are for Simcoe who has a day-long vet visit on Thursday for a series of tests and MJ and I have Friday off from work for the holiday so we’ll be bringing both cats for a checkup at San Francisco Veterinary Specialists. We better get used to vet visits, they won’t be decreasing in frequency any time soon!

Filed under: animals, family, life

Simcoe’s visit to the transplant doctor

Saturday, Dec 24th, 2011 by pleia2 | 4 Comments

Thursday morning we made the drive up to Santa Rosa to PetCare Veterinary Hospital for an appointment with Clare Gregory, one of the pioneers of kidney transplant procedures in cats and has done over 400 of them. The visit was a consultation to get some of our questions answered about the procedure and to see whether Simcoe’s current status made her a good transplant candidate before investing in further tests. The news was all good, based on her BUN and creatinine levels now and overall health we’re moving forward with the additional tests and hopefully we can keep her healthy enough so she won’t need dialysis prior to the procedure.

Going in we had read the Feline Renal Transplantation Information Sheet on the Pioneers in Veterinary Kidney Transplantation PetCare site, but the chat with Dr. Gregory gave us some specific insight into it all.

The risks of the surgery and the crucial year following tended to boil down to latent infections or cancers which manifest when the animal is in surgery or immunosuppressed or blood clots which may form during or just after surgery. There is also acute rejection which happens pretty quickly and chronic rejection where the remaining immune system that isn’t suppressed with the twice daily suppressant drugs slowly picks away at the new organ, causing the cat to eventually die from kidney failure (this can happen with human transplants too).

As far as quality of life, if she survives the transplant and the first year (about a chance for 90% each) she should go on with a normal life with the exception of medication every 12 hours and the requirement for medical boarding where she’ll be kept away from any possibly infectious animal every time we travel. She’ll be able to eat regular food and the doctor mentioned that some transplant cats even end up overweight because their owners tend to spoil them once they’re healthy again. She’ll also be able to go under sedation and have other procedures done in the future, as long as the operating doctor is familiar with her condition.

She has a couple of vet appointments next week and we’ll take things from there. If everything goes well with the tests we then need to make a decision about the donor cat. Caligula isn’t a great donor candidate because he’s 8 years old and they’d rather use a younger kidney. My mother has a few cats and so we may get a couple of hers tested for compatibility and fly one out if it works out, but one step at a time!

She’s been very active these past several days and eating well. How ever things go we’re very happy to have this time with her!

Filed under: simcoe

First Half of December

Saturday, Dec 17th, 2011 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

We’ve been quite preoccupied with Simcoe’s medical problems this past week. Prior to that my month was quite busy with work, a bit of a fractured schedule that resulted in a couple afternoons off during the week and loss of a couple weekend days. This weekend I’m enjoying my first full weekend since Thanksgiving and am very much looking forward to a couple of long weekends coming up for the holidays.

On the subject of holidays we attended a holiday party earlier this month hosted on the USS Hornet Aircraft Carrier. It’s the aircraft carrier that picked up the Apollo 11 astronauts upon their return to Earth and it’s been converted into a museum that stays docked over in Alameda so they had a whole space exhibit. Several short tours were offered throughout the night, including a delightfully dorky ghost tour (several ghost-related shows have filmed there) and tours of the navigation and control areas of the ship. It was a really fun evening, we’ll have to go back some time during the day when they’re open and doing full tours.

More photos from the USS Hornet Museum here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157628263115001/

December 7th was the 70th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor and the 7th anniversary of my father’s death. I kept busy during the day and caught Caltrain down to Mountain View for SVLUG that evening. I hadn’t been to an SVLUG meeting in over a year, but the “Linux-Based Personal Robotics” topic was too good to resist. It was given by Tully Foote, an engineer for ROS (Robot Operating System) at Willow Garage and in addition to lots of great information about the ROS open source project itself he brought along a little TurtleBot for some demos. I wish I could come up with a practical reason to get one.

Speaking of practical, I’ve been bitten by this Gmail bug. The worst of it is that I sent out the Ubuntu Weekly News to thousands of people with this newline issue (see the mess here). It’s nice that they’ve followed up to say a fix is in the works, but until then I’ve been able to work around it by just using Firefox rather than Chrome when I’m sending emails I copy from elsewhere. Ah, the joys of using a closed-source email option.

Last week we headed out to Oakland to see an acquaintance’s band, which is not a usual move for me (“clubs aren’t my scene”) but ended up being pretty fun. That Friday I headed out to Walnut Creek to meet up with the folks at the Diablo Valley Linux Users Group and finally see Grant Bowman who had recently returned from a 3 month stay with Dreamfish in Kenya.

Throughout the past several weeks I’ve been dedicated to my new workout routine, going to the gym at least twice a week and sticking to the routine established during my training session in November. I’ve also made a better effort at improved diet, which mostly means sticking to the set of foods I know are good for me and I should eat to stem impulse eating. It’s going well so far, I’m getting out of the mood funk I was in during November and feeling better in general.

My aunt Elaine from Phoenix is coming to visit for the Christmas weekend, from Thursday evening through Sunday evening. Our plans include a trip to the zoo, general San Francisco “tourist stuff” and a visit to the Jewish Contemporary Museum on Christmas (she doesn’t celebrate Christmas either and is fine with our celebration of Hanukkah). I realized while planning the visit that this will actually be my first Christmas with a blood-related relative in 12 years, the last one was when I was 18 before I moved from my childhood home in Maine to New York. I’m really looking forward to it.

Simcoe is doing well at home so far. We’re still working through the feeding logistics since their diets are almost opposites but so far we’re managing and already learned that she’ll happily eat the dry renal treatment food if I hand feed her. Tomorrow we’ll be giving her the first at home subcutaneous fluids, hopefully that will not be too difficult (for her or us!).

Filed under: life

Simcoe is Home!

Friday, Dec 16th, 2011 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

We picked up Simcoe from the vet this evening following her 72 hour diuretic treatment. Unfortunately the blood tests haven’t shown much improvement, but she did manage to put on some weight and has seemed more energetic.

The vet sent us home with a whole bag of stuff to continue with her care at home:

For now we’ll be giving her subcutaneous fluids every other day, and an acid reducer (Famotidine) and fatty acids (Welactin) daily. She also has special kidney formula food that we’re working to figure out how to feed her. Having two cats that have to eat two very specific foods (diet food for Caligula to manage his weight) is not an easy task, for now the plan is to offer her the kidney formula soft food twice per day and hope she eats that instead of too much of the diet dry food.

We went ahead and made an appointment at PetCare Veterinary Hospital in Santa Rosa on Thursday to discuss the kidney transplant option and get a preliminary exam done. There is funding coming together for further stem cell studies, but it’s unclear whether that’s a real, useful option at this point. Beyond that, management of the disease and symptoms is the most common treatment, but is limited in how much it can do to prolong a healthy life with poorly functioning kidneys.

She spent this evening cleaning herself and sleeping on my lap.

We really missed her, it’s so nice to have her home. I’m over the initial shock of the diagnosis and ready to do what we need to do to care for her.

Filed under: simcoe

Ubuntu at ITT Tech, Linux Format and SCALE

Friday, Dec 16th, 2011 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

Wednesday night I held a well-attended Ubuntu Hour and Debian dinner here in San Francisco. Lots of great discussion at both meetups, huge thanks to everyone who came out!

Last night I gave another (first was in September) “Introduction to Ubuntu” talk for a Linux class at ITT Tech in Oakland.

After my short talk (slides here: pdf, odp) the class was small enough for me to be able to give everyone an Ubuntu 11.10 CD that they could try live on the lab PCs (with the blessing of one of the folks from IT) and I was able to bring up one on the projector to show everyone the basics of Unity. Thanks again to Professor Michael Roth for inviting me out, it’s always a pleasure to talk to people who are truly interested in learning more about Ubuntu and F/OSS.

Back in October Laura Czajkowski put me in touch with Paula Graham who was doing research for a Women in F/OSS Linux Format magazine article. I gave her details about the Ubuntu Women project, a quick blurb about my own journey and some photos from Ubuntu Women gatherings. The article titled “Women, know your Linux!” appeared in Issue 152 of Linux Format. I was quite honored to be the second of two profile blurbs in the article, the first of which went to the amazing Valerie Aurora, a Linux kernel developer whose latest project is the Ada Initiative (donate now!). The Debian Women and Ubuntu Women projects also got a nice sidebar in the article.

Finally, the Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE) is coming up in just over a month! I received notification on December 5th from the SCALE committee that my talk “Bringing Linux into Public Schools and Community Centers” had been accepted in their Open Source Software In Education track on Saturday, January 21st. The Ubuntu California team itself has been working to put together details and volunteers for an Ubuntu booth at the event like we’ve done in years past and Nathan Haines has been working with other volunteers to put together an Ubucon for Friday the 20th.

Ubucon

I’ve submitted a talk proposal for a casual “Get involved with Ubuntu” Ubucon session where I’ll outline basics of getting involved with various areas and then open up the floor to specific involvement questions from the audience. There is still at least one slot open for Ubucon speakers, so if you’re interested see the details here (yes, the stated deadline has passed, so please submit proposals ASAP if you’re interested).

Filed under: events, LoCo, tech, ubuntu planet

Simcoe has Kidney Disease

Wednesday, Dec 14th, 2011 by pleia2 | 10 Comments

Last week I noticed that little Simcoe had lost the pouch of fat on her belly. At the time I assumed that it was just the diet food we’d switched both cats to in order to manage Caligula’s weight. MJ had a look at her too and we realized she’d actually lost more than just her pouch of fat, she was quite skinny. A vet appointment was made for Saturday the 10th.

At the vet visit on Saturday we learned that she had dropped from 9.09lbs in January to just 6.06lbs. Her temperature was low, she was dehydrated and a physical exam caused the doctor to be concerned about her kidneys. They ordered a full blood panel and urine analysis for her.

Simcoe the Siamese at the Saturday vet visit (Caligula came along too)

The results would be in on Monday, and I spent a fair amount of time on Sunday reading just how bad kidney problems were in cats. Very upsetting, but I was hopeful that her activeness, appetite and absence of vomiting were good signs.

The results that came in on Monday were not good. Her kidney function was very low and all kinds of levels were wrong. We made an appointment to drop her off for an ultrasound Tuesday morning. I spent Monday evening hanging out with her on the couch, it was clear at this point that her energy levels were lower than normal.

The vet called Tuesday afternoon with the crushing news, severe kidney disease and a prognosis of a few months to a couple of years to live. We moved forward with the suggested initial treatment of a 72 hour diuretic treatment to flush out bad stuff and to increase hydration. She’ll get to come home Friday evening.

Last night we went to visit her and was able to speak with the vet for a few minutes. The treatment includes regular subcutaneous fluid therapy, special diet and managing of symptoms, but in the end it’s still a non-curable disease because servery damaged kidneys don’t heal. Non-experimental kidney transplants for cats are available these days, and there is a transplant facility just an hour north of here (one of just 11 in the country), but transplants are very expensive, hold a fair amount of risk, require adoption of the donor cat, and twice daily medication for the rest of her life.

The vet called this morning to say she’s responding well so far to the diuretic treatment and even ate some food this morning after some petting to calm her down.

We’re in research mode now. Soaking in information from felinecrf.com and joined a Feline CRF Support mailing list. We’ll be exploring all the options.

Mostly though? I’ve been crying. Last night I was in the haze of shock. Simcoe just turned 5 years old last month and has never lost her kitten-like playfulness (that, combined with her size, causes me to still call her a kitten). Her and Caligula been my companions through some tough times these past few years. We love this little cat so much.

Filed under: animals, simcoe

Xubuntu Stickers, Twitter and Site Update

Wednesday, Dec 7th, 2011 by pleia2 | 2 Comments

Last month I took over as the Marketing and Website Lead for Xubuntu. Thanks to the rest of the team for supporting me!

There have been several ideas floating around the Marketing wiki page so I decided to start here and make some laptop-worthy Xubuntu stickers.

I went with Moo.com because I really liked the how the Partimus stickers came out (and have survived a lot of abuse living on my netbook these past few months).

The result:

The black border you see does not show up on the sticker itself, it’s just beyond the cut. I’ll try to fix this up during my next order.

And an action shot of the sticker on my netbook!

I’ve included the instructions for how to make these yourself (including the image I used) on the Marketing page under our new Current projects heading.

This week I also created a Twitter account for the project, you can now find us @XubuntuLinux on Twitter. For now we’re just going to aggregate our blog posts and release announcements here, but in the future we may expand it to more if we have more volunteers to help out with it.

Have some ideas for marketing? Please let me know (lyz@ubuntu.com) or just go ahead and add your ideas to the Further ideas section of our Marketing wiki page.

Finally, website update! As I’ve mentioned before we’re moving to WordPress and have been hard at work doing theme and content reviews. Our last site sprint for this was this past Saturday, I’ve summarized the results of that sprint here. Huge thanks to knome, madnick and GridCube for attending and to beardygnome for his work on a new “About Xubuntu” page that’s coming together.

Filed under: tech, ubuntu planet, xubuntu
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