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Simcoe’s Dental Visit

Monday, Jan 16th, 2012 by pleia2 | 4 Comments

When Simcoe was diagnosed with Chronic Renal Failure (CRF) they also identified a badly infected tooth that needed to be cared for.

She’s now been through a number of tests and since we decided to hold off on the kidney transplant for now we went ahead and scheduled her dental work. We picked up some antibiotics last week and had been giving them to her since Saturday. Unfortunately they caused her to vomit twice, which we reported when we dropped her off at 8:30AM this morning.

We were all pretty apprehensive about the dental work, and I was worried about her all day. Fortunately her vet has been really great and worked with the anesthesiologist to make sure she was given as little sedation as possible to make it through. With renal cats there is always a major worry about uncontrollable blood pressure drop during procedures, which can be fatal. They also decided to take some x-rays during the procedure and do a full cleaning to reduce the chances that we’d need to bring her in again for dental work in the near future.

Around 3PM I got the call from the vet letting us know she was waking up and doing ok. Hooray!

The infected tooth ended up being worse than they thought, with the tooth showing severe infection but the roots remaining buried deep in her jaw so it took a considerable amount of work to get everything out. Fortunately the x-rays showed no more damaged teeth, and aside from a drop in blood pressure that was controlled with fluid treatment she did well through the procedure.

They sent her home with a new form of antibiotics that we hope will be easier on her stomach. She’s also on Buprenorphine for three days to handle pain from the extracted tooth.


Simcoe Medicine!

We picked up a prescription for her Lactated Ringer’s solution and the needles to go with it as we’ll be continuing the subcutaneous injections every other day, I’ll head over to the pharmacy tomorrow to place the order for the first case.

The next vet visit is 10 days from now as a routine follow-up to the dental work.

She’s clearly in pain tonight, very restless, but she’s been trying to eat and drink so we’re hopeful she’ll recover quickly.

Filed under: simcoe

Ubuntu Hour, SCALE 10x and Ubuntu User Days

Thursday, Jan 12th, 2012 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

Last night I hosted the monthly San Francisco Ubuntu Hour. We had a last minute change of venue due to the coffee shop we meet in deciding to close early without warning (ah, the joys of local small businesses), but fortunately we were able to use the lobby one door over and people managed to find us. We got an install of an eeePC going for a new user who had previously been using the Xandros install that shipped with his system, but was finding it increasingly insufficient since support went away for it.

Afterward the Ubuntu Hour one of the members of the Ubuntu California team showed off his clever plans for an Ubuntu-themed candy display for our booth at SCALE 10x next weekend. I’ll be sure to take lots of pictures.

SCALE 10x. I’m flying out on a 6:47 PM flight on Thursday evening, putting me at Los Angeles shortly after 8PM. This is much better timing than my late flight last year that didn’t get us to the hotel until after 1AM, and I had a talk at 9AM. Unfortunately with all of Simcoe’s medical stuff going on we decided MJ will have to skip this one to take care of her (in the future we hope to medically board her, but we’ve put her through a lot this month already). This year my SCALE schedule is quite packed, I once again have the 9AM Friday morning slot at Ubucon, this time doing a talk on Getting Involved with Ubuntu. Saturday morning at 8:30AM we’ll be putting together the Ubuntu booth and then coordinating with volunteers to keep it staffed through Sunday evening. Later that morning I’ll be giving my Bringing Linux into Public Schools and Community Centers talk for the Open Source in Education track of the conference. Sunday morning at 11AM several of us are meeting in the lobby for an Ubuntu Women gathering. Throughout the conference I’ll be at the Ubuntu booth as needed. At 5:30PM we pack up the Ubuntu booth and head to the airport for my 8PM flight back home. Should be a fun, if exhausting, weekend.

But before SCALE is this weekend, when we have Ubuntu User Days! I’ve worked primarily with the Ubuntu Beginners Team to recruit volunteers to present at this event, so huge thanks to them for being such an enthusiastic group of folks. It’s all on IRC (joining in instructions here) so while helping run the day I’ll also be doing final prep work for SCALE and catching up on project work and email.

Full schedule can be found on the User Days wiki: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UserDays including the schedule with links to the UTC time converted to other time zones.

Filed under: events, LoCo, tech, ubuntu planet

Community Council Begins Ubuntu Mailing Lists Review

Thursday, Jan 5th, 2012 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

At the last Ubuntu Developer Summit it was brought to the attention of the Ubuntu Community Council that lists.ubuntu.com had become quite crowded. There was concern that it was overwhelming for new contributors looking for a mailing lists to join and they may find it confusing or discouraging if they join lists which are inactive.

As a result, the Community Council has been working with Canonical IS to get activity details on mailing lists so we can do a more thorough review.

The following lists were identified as candidates for deletion, reasons in the parentheses:

The following emails (with $list and $reason filled out) have been sent to the list owners of these lists:

You are being contacted as the list owner for $list.

At the last Ubuntu Developer Summit it was brought to the attention of the Community Council that there were many mailing lists with little or no traffic whose presence on lists.ubuntu.com only served to discourage and confuse new contributors. Your mailing list was identified as one which we’d like to move forward with deletion because $reason.

Please reply to this email if you have any objections (quiet time in project? plans for it in the future?), otherwise we will be closing this list in approximately two weeks.

Thank you for your time.

Elizabeth Krumbach,
On behalf of the Community Council

If you are a member of any of these teams and wish to speak on behalf of the mailing list to prevent deletion, please contact the Community Council at community-council@lists.ubuntu.com within the next two weeks.

Please take note that this review is by no means a judgement on the teams who use these mailing lists or a withdrawl of support. If a team with a low-activity mailing list wishes to keep their list they can. We are simply seeking to make it easier for new contributors to get involved with active mailing lists they for projects they are interested in. Also note that LoCo Team and Translations mailing lists are exempt from this review as we understand that traffic on these fluctuates greatly over time.

Filed under: tech, ubuntu planet

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
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