May 29th – Attending a family friend’s church group bbq proved to be more exciting than I initially thought. At this bbq, I got to meet Kimmy 老师, my first piano teacher in Hudson that I hadn’t seen in 9-10 years. It was a very surreal experience talking to her now as an adult after not seeing her since I was basically in elementary school. She told me to not burn out and enjoy the music once in a while after hearing the repertoire I was currently learning 😅 (subtle asian compliments…). Once she heard about my CS major, she also started talking about her two daughters who were also UChicago and Carnegie Mellon CS grads (both with very similar high school backgrounds and also currently at big-name tech companies), even going so far as to give my contact information to her younger one who’s currently the youngest tech manager at DoorDash (age 26)—how’s that for networking by happenstance? Besides Kimmy, I also saw old piano friends I knew from way back when I was living in Kent, OH (before 2008) and played some Euchre with them (a card game I hadn’t touched since high school). Really, if it weren’t for my dad’s situation and me being back home, I don’t think I would’ve gotten the chance to talk to so many old friends and experience so much nostalgia during this time, and for that I’m grateful.
May 30th – Memorial Day! Incidentally, also the Dartmouth Symphony Orchestra’s senior send-off brunch and I dropped by quickly in the morning to say goodbye to my favorite ‘22s 🥺
May 31st – Suddenly Accredo is going to stop being our temozolomide provider because we switched insurances. So, naturally I called our research nurse at CCF to be told that they had sent it to CVS Specialty Pharmacy instead, only to have CVS tell me they never received the prescription, and by that time, it was already past 4pm and no one was there to pick up the phone in Cleveland anymore.
June 1st – One of the heaviest but briefest thunderstorms I’ve seen in my life hit in the late afternoon, downing multiple dead trees on our property (including one we were planning to cut)… as well as cracking in half a huge Bradford Pear tree right next to our large living room glass panels. Thank goodness it was only gutter damage and nothing much more (see pictures). The basement exercise room almost flooded due to a leaf-clogged drainage pipe, and I had always wanted to take a shower in the rain so I took the heroic action of going out and keeping it unclogged. We also found multiple leaks in our roof. As expected, we lost power around 6pm (as did most of our town).
June 2nd – The power came back around 8:30am. Stuff in our fridges was already melting despite not opening them at all yesterday. I had lunch with another high school friend at pretty much the only downtown burger joint, again finding it strange to meet people I never expected to see again under such circumstances. We decide as a family that now was the opportunity to put our home insurance to use and call a tree removal and roofing contractor with the intent to entirely re-shingle our 20-year-old roof after they remove the tree precariously leaning against our house. (When a storm as large as this one hits, insurance will be more likely to cough up since everyone will be dealing with similar problems and we won’t look suspicious as the only people with these claims).
June 3rd – The whole research-nurse to prescription fulfiller pipeline is an unnavigable maze. The temozolomide he needed finally came by noon, but not the Ondansetron (anti-nausea) pills that also came from CVS Specialty Pharmacy. In case the roofing and tree contractors came today, I stayed at home to ensure communication while my parents and great aunt went to Cleveland for his first clinical trial appointment (aunt was only there for the grocery shopping). I finished binging The Man in the High Castle today as well. Dad took his first temozolomide pills today—double the dosage of the first month of chemoradiation.
June 4th – Dexamethasone withdrawal (either that or the chemotherapy) hits again this morning with a small headache that got better in the afternoon after he had his medicines. I also spent probably the entire morning wading through medical bureaucracy with nearly 10 different phone calls to various parties to try and get his prescription fulfilled by a local CVS (instead of CVS specialty). We finally managed to get the prescription in our hands by 2pm. After fixing the final rundown bike in our house, I “mountain bike” with Wilton in the afternoon at a local park on his newly-rideable hardtail under the guise of “exercise” (according to my mom). And for that reason, I was again reminded me of even the small inefficiencies of car-centric development. The kind of “exercise” that my parents go on about is solely due to our sedentary suburban lifestyle—meaning that whenever I’m to exercise, it’s the low-effort activities that Wilton participates in—and nothing against him, it’s just that he’s a kid and can’t keep up if I were really biking for the purpose of cardio. If I were really to spend time exercising, I would do it at a gym in an effort to build muscle, not by walking or cycling for the sake of doing those things: hence why one doesn’t need to do cardio when they’re on campus, a necessarily walkable environment.
June 5th – 6th – just more temozolomide.
June 7th – Wondering about why there was a lot of fluctuation in the billing page of our patient portal, we called to ask about it and also requested for them to resubmit a claim to our backdated Medicaid insurance on some parts. We also found out that the bill from the original hospital stays and surgery back in February was available and much lower than originally estimated, and we were pleasantly surprised that our insurance at the time (CareSource) did actually cover most of it. They just forgot to send a statement back when they first got it, so we’ll have to pay (hopefully) the largest medical bill of this ordeal (a few thousand dollars) sometime soon. In other news, the a group of eight tree cutters came today to earn their paycheck in the morning drizzle, while also almost damaging our landscaping in the process:
June 8th – With seemingly no adverse effects from this double dose of chemotherapy, he’s finished with the first round and will wait 23 days before the next. It was also Wilton’s last day of 2nd grade, and we happened to celebrate by taking him to meet his new violin teacher, Wei-Fang Gu, who is definitely going to be a step up from our current Suzuki teacher and certainly much stricter (which Wilton needs at this point).
June 10th – Wilton went into the newly built Hudson Middle School this morning to re-test for the gifted program he missed out on back in February. Without knowing it, the prep books we bought him were for the exact test he took (and not the one that we thought he would be taking—a stroke of good fortune). Afterwards, he was rewarded with a box of donuts and vanilla ice cream that he’s always been asking for.
June 11th – Feeling like it’s a little wasteful to drive a few miles when I could just bike there, I went to get lunch with Ethan (HS friend) downtown. I first biked to his house (3 miles, very hilly) and admired the fleet of bikes his dad owns (he himself is a cycling enthusiast), and then biked downtown with him and grabbed lunch. While locking our bikes, I forgot the combination to the lock I put on his bike and didn’t check before scrambling (whoops!), so I put my lock-picking skills to the test and cracked the code in under two minutes. It was one of the super-cheap 4×6-digit ones, so it’s to be expected. We then biked back to his house and spent the afternoon chilling in the nice weather, mostly talking and sometimes feeling doomer while complaining about the life choices and morals of “consultants”, the current U.S. populace, and how the country has mostly given up on COVID. I finally biked home before dinner, absolutely exhausted but not regretting it with these kinds of gas prices; and for such a typical suburban town, the sidewalk infrastructure is somewhat there and slowly improving (though not on the roads next to my house).
June 12th – Three days off dexamethasone and withdrawal symptoms seem manageable. Another day of caretaking for Wilton—no time to do my own things. This blog might as well be called “Adventures in Child-Rearing” for how much I talk about this kid on here.
June 13th – Wilton starts summer camp. I spend the afternoon changing out another set of brake rotors and pads on our Lexus and getting Wilton into a new hobby with his first plane.
June 14th – Strawberry picking! And my own annual doctor’s visit, now with bloodwork as well since I’m 21.
June 15th – Our water softener got clogged a week back and a contractor came to clear out the gunk blocking the pipe. Afterwards, the salt used for filtration drained twice as fast so I had to haul six 40-lb bags of sodium chloride from Lowe’s in one of June’s biggest heatwaves.
June 16th – a whole day spent hanging with friends (including another two 3-years-ago geezers). Good for my mental health to be away from family for the entire day. And kind of Ethan to lend me his bike while he’s not using it (the best bike I’ve ever ridden in my life).
June 17th – Priming Vaccine shot #2 for dad was at 8am this morning, so everyone else left at 7:15am while I drove Wilton to summer camp. While I sat at home making mac and cheese and eating leftovers, they skipped along to Chinatown and had authentic rice noodles. Good for them! He felt tired after the shot with a small 99.5 Fahrenheit fever in the afternoon but was otherwise fine. Having a reaction like that for both shots as opposed to no reaction makes me think that he is getting the actual vaccine and not the placebo, but maybe that’s the whole point and they lace the placebo with a reactive compound. We’ll know for sure in two years. I also unboxed the equipment that Amazon gave me today for the internship. They literally sent me a TV screen for a monitor and I am 100% down for it.
June 18th – Occasionally he will wake up in sweat at night, reason currently unknown. No more fever after yesterday, but for the past few days after waking up, he’ll sometimes feel pain in his neck/lower back head which goes away after breakfast time. I also had to take our Lexus to get a 4-wheel alignment.
June 19th – Father’s day means a trip to West Branch State Park to learn how to fish (but catching none) and Applebee’s for some authentic American grub. It’s T-1 day until my internship starts tomorrow morning.
June 20th – After my first day of work, all I can say is that even with a standing desk, staring at a screen for 8 hours is not the best thing for my sanity, nor is consuming company propaganda while completing onboarding tasks. I was additionally thrown in the deep end by my manager for choosing a Mac as my work laptop, which when you’ve been using Windows keybinds to be productive for most of your life, was a real dampener on my productivity (how do you even arrange your windows and stay sane without a taskbar??). Regardless, I still got through it mostly alive. For those curious, I’m working remotely with a team in Minneapolis that works on middle mile logistics (transportation for Amazon warehouses/distribution centers), with my intern project already well defined in a document written by my mentor relating to front end. Almost all of the tools they use there are internal so there will be a lot of relearning things as I go.
June 21st – Day 2 of work piled on the stress when I got an email saying my I-9 form hasn’t been submitted when I had submitted a month earlier. (No I-9 by day 4 means 30 days of unpaid suspension…). I also got the honor of bringing Wilton to his first violin lesson with our new teacher.
June 23rd – Dad fixed the AC outside my door in the morning while I worked, making for quite the racket during my daily standup meeting. In the evening, I visited my friend before he left for Europe for two weeks.
June 25th – The funniest part of my internship is when I discovered that the team I’m on at Amazon is the exact same team my referrer from last year (Sean) was on. In fact, I was nearly put on the same project were it not for them hiring a second intern this summer. He and I called and chatted about his current internship with ~Meta~ (FB) and what it was like there (plus the fact that he was graduating 1.5 years earlier due to all his AP credits).
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1) YOU DIDN’T MENTION THE CAT! Who/what/when/where/why!!
2) I 10000% feel you for the staring at a computer for 8 hours a day. That’s what I’m struggling with now, though Jiakung has no problem haha …working from home really does help though.
Oh forgot to mention that you should have asked Mr. Feng to help with cutting down that tree 😂
yeahhhh ikr, i’m actually developing tennis elbow on my right hand from bad mouse habits and just bought a vertical mouse to see if it can help, but it’s really scary given that it’s also affecting practice on the piano…
the cat just happened to get caught in our raccoon trap lol, we let it go on the spot instead of driving it somewhere else like we do with the raccoons (even though that’s technically illegal in ohio because raccoons are vectors for rabies…)