Tom's Journey

I just finished another order from REI for some tubes and tires for my bike, and started to realize that how much stuff I have already ordered from REI since I bought this bike, every now and then, it's going to be some orders to buy stuff for the cycling, this week, tubes/tires, last week, a bike trainer and a blocker, so that I could 'spin' in my garage in winter time, the week before that, hydration system, then on and on and on...

Maybe I should really think the affiliate system more seriously, :-)

这两天正在加紧看《中国式离婚》，只是听朋友说“压抑”，看了一半，就觉得一句话 - “真TMD的累”。据说陈道明说"中国式离婚"就是“想离离不了”，我看是“到底离不离？麻灵儿的！”

天不下雨，地上全是旱的，
天上下雨，地上全淹了，
成群的蚂蚁排着队，每支都扛着干粮，
我蹲在旁边的土坡上，拿着绿色的小水壶，
笑着，看着可怜的蚂蚁们。

地似乎永远是那么的静
穿流的车辆，在各条公路上奔着各自的命，
当地震起来的时候，
什么人蹲在不远的天上，攥着无形的杠杆，
笑着，看着可怜的人们。

Reading the "Bicycling" Magazine, Oct 2004 issue, on page 31, there is
small paragraph:

Driving Miss Piggy
Ride your bike to work -- and live near the mall: A study of more
than 10,500 Atlanta residents found that their odds of obesity
increased by 3 percent for every 30 minutes spent driving each day.
People living within a half-mile of the stores were 7 percent less
likely to be obese than those living in primarily residential areas.

Just can't help laughing at what our 'advancing in science and
technology' is making us, come on, do you really need to study 10,500
people to know that? Well, I guess for the percentage.

Here are 2 of my research results:
A study of 10 people around me found those who eat often will less
likely be hungry, and those who think often will less likely be
stupid.

Yeah, I should patent my findings, haha

Sickness and Health
A Wife's Struggle
With Cancer Takes
An Unexpected Toll

As Lizzie O'Donnell Recovered,
Tensions Rose in Marriage;
Angry Words in the ICU

A Truce Over Twin Beds

By AMY DOCKSER MARCUS
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
September 8, 2004; Page A1

In their more than three decades together, one issue has posed the biggest threat to James and Elizabeth O'Donnell's marriage: cancer.

Nearly 10 years ago, Mrs. O'Donnell found a lump in her breast. At first, she wasn't worried. A routine mammogram a month earlier showed no signs of a tumor. But the lump grew so quickly during a two-week vacation in Hawaii that Mrs. O'Donnell went to see her doctor days after returning home to Indiana. The doctor ordered an immediate biopsy. The 42-year-old mother of three boys was diagnosed with advanced breast cancer and told she had only a 5% chance of surviving the next year.

She proved the doctors wrong. Mrs. O'Donnell began chemotherapy treatments in February 1995, underwent two surgeries, including a mastectomy, and finished her chemotherapy in August 1995. She is now considered cancer-free. She and her husband call that a miracle and say they know how lucky they are. "We had the same goal," Mrs. O'Donnell says, "to keep our family together."

Her survival came at a price. Mrs. O'Donnell, now 51, has chronic health problems arising from her cancer treatment. Just six weeks after her last chemotherapy session, her heart failed -- a side effect of the drugs used to eradicate the cancer. She underwent a heart transplant in June 1996. That, in turn, caused other problems.

Elizabeth and James O'Donnell

The medications she must take every day to ensure her body doesn't reject the heart have weakened her bones, causing spinal deterioration and making her walk with a slight limp. In the past 18 months alone, she has endured shingles, double pneumonia, kidney disease, and two incidents when clots blocked her pulmonary arteries, causing her to be hospitalized. She never stops wondering if the cancer will return someday.

The cancer and related health problems have put the O'Donnells' marriage under siege. "I ponder sometimes how much has been lost ... as a consequence of sweet Lizzie's illnesses," Mr. O'Donnell wrote in 1999 in a journal he keeps. "Her breathtaking good looks; her shapeliness; her breasts; her lovemaking; her lovely tummy; her walks with me; her ability to be counted on for X or Y; her hair on her head; her not needing to shave; her constant need of medical care; her silence when sleeping."

These "all have been 'little deaths,' " Mr. O'Donnell added, "that have powerfully tugged me to despair and grief."

Thanks to advances in medicine, more people are surviving cancer these days, creating new kinds of personal challenges. Even as attention is starting to focus on the many physical and emotional issues cancer survivors face, marriage remains a topic that makes many uncomfortable. "We tell patients that if they had a strong marriage before cancer, they will have a strong marriage after cancer," says a spokeswoman for Living Beyond Breast Cancer, a support group.

Michael Glantz, an oncologist who treats brain-cancer patients at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center in Worcester, recently conducted a study looking at whether couples divorced or separated more frequently after a cancer diagnosis. Among 214 couples in which one of the partners had a malignant brain tumor, the rate of divorce was six times as high as the control group. The vast majority of divorces were in cases where the wife was sick, not the husband. This led Dr. Glantz to conclude that "being a female diagnosed with cancer is a risk factor for divorce," and to call for more study.

The question of whether cancer is a factor in divorce is controversial, because the overall divorce rate is high and this is still a new area of research. Some centers, including Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston and the University of California San Diego Cancer Center, are experimenting with ways to help couples. New programs mark a shift from focusing on the individual patient to looking at "how the couple is faring as a couple with cancer," says Karen Kayser, a professor at Boston College Graduate School of Social Work in Chestnut Hill, Mass.

Summer Getaway

Despite the steady decline in Mrs. O'Donnell's health, every summer the couple spends several weeks in the Catskills. They come to the home in Elka Park, N.Y., owned by Mrs. O'Donnell's family, where she spent summers as a girl. Staying in the house, filled with the same furniture and paintings that have always been there, allows them to remember a time before cancer transformed their relationship.

This is where they met in 1967. Mrs. O'Donnell, then 14, was painting sets at the local theater where she met Mr. O'Donnell, who had the lead in a summer-stock production called "Fancy Meeting You Again." He was a 19-year-old college student working as a tennis instructor. They had their first kiss in her parents' kitchen after he brought her home from a dance. They married four years later, in a church down the road, when she was 18.

After more than two decades of marriage came Mrs. O'Donnell's cancer diagnosis. The couple had just moved to Huntington, Ind., from an affluent Boston suburb. Mr. O'Donnell had given up a banking job to teach economics at Huntington College, a 1,000-student Christian school. The Victorian house they bought near the main campus had a tarp on the skylight and no running water in the kitchen when they moved in.

At first, they tried not to let cancer overwhelm their relationship. When one of them felt frightened by Mrs. O'Donnell's treatments, they asked the other for a "cancer free" period. It could last an hour or a day, but during this time, they agreed not to talk about anything related to her health crisis.

On the two-hour drive to Indianapolis for chemotherapy treatments, Mrs. O'Donnell, an avid gardener, drew sketches, designing an arbor she asked her husband to build for climbing plants. A stay-at-home mother, she tried to ensure her sons' lives continued as normally as possible. She arranged for neighbors to take the boys to school and sports practices. Her mother moved in for a while to take over cooking and cleaning.

The couple soon discovered they had extremely different coping styles, and this became an area of contention. Whenever someone asked Mrs. O'Donnell how she was doing with the chemotherapy, she gave a relentlessly positive answer -- even if that someone was her husband. Mr. O'Donnell began calling her "Svetlana," saying she reminded him of a communist-era newscaster who put an upbeat spin on any news and gave out no real information.

In September 1995, about a month after Mrs. O'Donnell had finished her last chemotherapy treatment, Mr. O'Donnell brought her to the emergency room. She had a cold and felt weak; they wanted to make sure nothing was wrong.

The doctors admitted her for tests and that Sunday, when her husband came to visit, he found her lying in an intensive-care unit, hooked to a heart-monitor machine. Mrs. O'Donnell handed her husband some documents explaining the condition doctors had diagnosed. The drugs that killed her cancer tumor had also severely weakened her heart muscles. Without a heart transplant, she would die.

Mr. O'Donnell read the information in a panic, his eyes welling up with tears. But when he looked up, he was shocked to find that his wife had a smile on her face. "Jimmy," she said, her voice upbeat. "I don't have cancer."

The pity and sadness he felt seeing her lying in the hospital bed quickly gave way to another emotion: anger. "Why are you smiling?" he recalls demanding, his voice rising to a yell. "You have heart failure. You could die."

Looking back on it now, Mr. O'Donnell, 56, says his outburst occurred because "I felt managed by Lizzie, when what I wanted most of all was her honesty about her fears."

Mrs. O'Donnell remembers that moment differently. She says her greatest fear had been a recurrence of cancer, and she felt relieved to learn that she had heart problems instead. "I had grown to respect and fear cancer as a pernicious and sneaky enemy," she says. "I felt the doctors knew a lot more about how to treat heart failure."

They realized their journey as a couple had suddenly diverged. They lived through the same events but experienced them in completely different ways. "We had always said we were in this together," says Mrs. O'Donnell. "But we weren't moving through it the same way."

If Mrs. O'Donnell was a half-hour late from a shopping trip, her husband feared the worst and lost his temper when she returned. He kept asking doctors questions at appointments, long after Mrs. O'Donnell felt there was a need. By April 1996, when Mrs. O'Donnell was admitted to the hospital to await her heart transplant, she no longer told him when the doctors would be coming to see her. She gave him only the broadest outlines of what the doctors said.

Once, Mr. O'Donnell learned that his wife had seen a gastrointestinal specialist only after he saw an unfamiliar name on a bill. When he asked her about it, she told him that one of the consequences of her weakened heart was that other organs were starting to shut down. "I picked and chose what to tell him based on what I thought the toll would be to him," she says. "In preserving Jimmy, I was also preserving myself."

Holding Back

Mr. O'Donnell constantly wanted to talk about what was happening. But his wife held back, because she started to feel that talking about it was a waste of time and too depressing. "Jimmy was always aware and ready to discuss what everything was like," she says. But how could she explain how it felt to have their youngest son, Jonny, then 7, visit her at the hospital, and her pain at having to say goodbye, unsure if she would ever see him again? "I don't think he could understand what that was like, leaving the children," she says. "I thought even if I talked and talked, there was no way he could ever know what that was really like."

Mr. O'Donnell says he was overwhelmed. "I wish for relief," he wrote in his journal in 1996 while his wife stayed at the hospital awaiting the transplant, "but it doesn't come." A born-again Christian like his wife, Mr. O'Donnell continued to go to church and keep up with a Bible-study group they had joined. But he found that his faith -- not only religious faith but also in his marriage's ability to withstand such chronic stress -- were being tested.

"There was never an issue that I would be unfaithful to Lizzie in finding someone else," he says. "It was an issue of being unfaithful by not being loving."

At the time of her mastectomy in 1995, Mrs. O'Donnell worried that the loss of her breast would affect their relationship. "I knew the adjustment would be hard," she says. But Mr. O'Donnell had an even more difficult time accepting the dramatic body changes that took place following Mrs. O'Donnell's heart transplant in June 1996.

Within weeks after the heart transplant, she gained more than 60 pounds. The high doses of steroids she was given to prevent her body from rejecting the new heart caused hair to grow all over her body. She says she had "so much hair on my arms that I could braid it, and rolls of fat on my back." The sudden transformation, she says, "was horrifying to me."

Mr. O'Donnell says he often watched their son Jonny play with his mother, oblivious to the fact that she looked completely different. "It didn't matter to him how his mother looked, that her face had grown round like a moon because of the steroids," he says. "He loved her and was blind to those changes and I was not. It is not something that I am proud of."

Since Mrs. O'Donnell's cancer treatment, Mr. O'Donnell's own health had started to deteriorate. He couldn't sleep at night. During the day, he felt his heart racing. He was anxious all the time. In 1997, he fell asleep at the wheel, drove off the road and ended up in a swamp. He emerged without a scratch.

The couple could no longer do the things they had always enjoyed -- walks around the neighborhood after dinner, trips abroad to explore gardens, spontaneously deciding to go out for the evening. Mr. O'Donnell started taking on household chores his wife no longer had energy to do: making beds, washing dishes, laundry, vacuuming and grocery shopping. He dropped Jonny off at the bus in the morning and was there to pick him up in the afternoon. Sometimes Mrs. O'Donnell would feel better and be able to return to some of her old routines, but "it was always unpredictable," says Mr. O'Donnell.

He felt guilt, he says, about his inability to cope with all the changes. He even wondered if stresses he had put on her had somehow contributed to her cancer. But what he felt most, he says, was fear, that his wife would die and he wouldn't know how to carry on. When he pressed her to write letters about her wishes for her children that he could give to the boys if she died, she refused. She says she felt that doing so would have been admitting she was giving up. "You're going to slip away and I won't know key things," Mr. O'Donnell told her.

Four-Page Letter

Over the years, he kept pressing his wife to talk more. In March 1999, he wrote her a four-page letter outlining how overwhelmed he felt by taking over household chores, while continuing to work. He felt they needed to talk more about how their lives had changed, and that knowing how she felt might help him deal with his own fears. She thanked him for the letter and said they would discuss it. But when two weeks passed without her raising the issue again, he took matters into his own hands.

The couple had been attending Bible-study sessions every other Sunday night with male professors from the college and their wives. The couples met to discuss a particular passage and share events in their lives. At an April 12, 1999, session, Mr. O'Donnell brought up his communication problems with his wife. He asked the group members to pray either for the couple to communicate better or for Mr. O'Donnell to accept their level of communication as it was.

Mrs. O'Donnell was shocked by the unexpected public airing of their difficulties, even among people she considered friends. She ran from the room crying. When they got home, she spent the night in the bedroom downstairs and refused to discuss the incident. "I felt at that point that there had been enough talking," she says. "Things are a mess," Mr. O'Donnell wrote in his journal that night.

From time to time during Mrs. O'Donnell's illnesses, she slept alone downstairs. Sometimes she stayed there when side effects from her chemotherapy treatments kept her in the bathroom all night long. Before the heart transplant, she was simply too weak to climb the stairs to their bedroom on the third floor. But even after the transplant, she began sleeping downstairs more often.

Talking about the physical changes in Mrs. O'Donnell's body didn't seem to alter the tension. "I remember telling Jim, 'I can't help what's happening,' " she says. "It didn't make any difference to Jim. I could see the look in his eyes." Yet, there were times, she says, when she understood her husband's difficulty adjusting. When she looked in the mirror, she didn't recognize herself. "It struck me over and over afresh every morning, just like it did Jim," she says. "I was not blind to what was happening to my body. Neither of us liked it."

When Mr. O'Donnell was invited to a function at the college, she would spend considerable time dressing up and fixing her hair. "I did absolutely the best I could, and there was no comment, no 'you look nice tonight,' " she says. "There was nothing. It was a great sorrow that I carried." Mr. O'Donnell doesn't dispute the hurt he inflicted. "I was a monster," he says.

Each evening, Mrs. O'Donnell would suggest that she sleep downstairs so she wouldn't disturb her husband. Sometimes he would protest, but in the summer of 1999, he stopped. Mrs. O'Donnell snored at night, most likely due to physical changes from the medications she was taking. The medications also resulted in her having uncontrollable leg spasms at night, causing her to kick him. For three months, they didn't sleep in the same room. "I was giving up," he says about that period in their marriage.

But Mrs. O'Donnell insisted they find a way to be together. She suggested giving up their queen-size bed and buying two twin beds. Mr. O'Donnell resisted, saying they had to sleep in the same bed or in different rooms. Hoping to save their marriage, he eventually agreed to the change, and they started sharing the same room again. He bought ear plugs and a sound machine to deal with the snoring.

He also spoke with a doctor about his constant fears, and was taking medication that helped lift his depression. Mr. O'Donnell says he began to accept the idea that "there is to be no closure."

In some ways, he says, his prayers at the Bible-study session that caused his wife to cry had been answered. Mrs. O'Donnell tried to talk more about her feelings. And he began to realize that her refusal to endlessly discuss her fears was one of the ways she kept going. "I started to wonder if by pushing her to cope in a different way, I might be hurting her, maybe even shortening her life," he says.

While their communication has improved since then, the issue still comes up. A few weeks ago, Mr. O'Donnell wanted to talk again about all they had endured. Mrs. O'Donnell demurred. "These are the good times," she told him. "Everything is fine."

Both of them have spoken about their experiences in efforts to help others in similar situations. Earlier this year, a collection of Mr. O'Donnell's letters about his wife's cancer diagnosis and heart transplant, called "Letters for Lizzie," was published by a Christian publishing house. The letters chronicle the vicissitudes of Mrs. O'Donnell's illnesses and some of the difficulties they faced in their marriage.

At the back of the book there is a picture of a much younger Mrs. O'Donnell, holding Jonny as a baby. Her dark hair is cut in a fashionable style, and there's a wide smile on her face. It bothers her, she says, to hear her husband talk at book readings about the toll her illnesses have taken on the way she looks. She says it makes her feel he's implying, "I was once so beautiful and then poof." He says he doesn't feel that way.

When she is feeling well, Mrs. O'Donnell now volunteers 20 hours a week at a hospice where she was once a patient. Mr. O'Donnell says he is moved by her commitment. He recently nominated her for an award recognizing exceptional volunteers who work under challenging circumstances. Mrs. O'Donnell won the award this year for Indiana. Sometimes, Mr. O'Donnell says, he wonders "if she tells the patients things about her sickness that she won't tell me." Mrs. O'Donnell says that isn't the case.

As the years have gone by, they have increasingly found themselves alone. Their older sons, Nick and Andrew, have finished college. Nick is married. Jonny is now 16 and has his first girlfriend. He didn't want to come to Elka Park this summer with his parents. They realize this may have been the last summer he'll spend with them.

In the past few months, there have been what the couple calls "moments of grace." Mrs. O'Donnell has felt better and had more stamina. She is taking fewer steroids these days, so the side effects are less severe. Earlier this year, she suddenly started losing weight. At first, she thought the cancer was back and had her doctor run full body scans. All the tests were negative. Doctors don't have an explanation for the weight loss but it has marked a change in their relationship.

"I don't feel beautiful to myself," she says, "but I recognize myself again. I look more like the way I imagined I would look at the age of 51." Mr. O'Donnell has been more relaxed and affectionate, she says. Mr. O'Donnell acknowledges the weight loss has made a difference. "I regret feeling put off by her. I knew it wasn't right," he said. "I look at what is happening now as a gift."

Last month, Mrs. O'Donnell's sisters came to visit. They sat on the porch with the couple and recalled the two years when Mrs. O'Donnell had cancer and then a heart transplant as a nightmare that had thankfully ended. But for Mr. and Mrs. O'Donnell, it is never over.

Mrs. O'Donnell says she is always aware that the average transplanted heart lasts 10 years and that she has already had hers for eight years. If the medication she is taking to help her kidneys work loses effectiveness, she faces the prospect of dialysis or a kidney transplant. They don't make long-term plans. "I never think about what we'll do together when Jim retires," says Mrs. O'Donnell. She says the furthest out she has planned is this Christmas, when her son and daughter-in-law will visit.

They also try to see themselves as any middle-age married couple. On a recent day, Mr. O'Donnell, dressed in khakis and a blue polo shirt, brings out lemonade and they sit next to one another on wood chairs painted the same lime green as the porch, their feet touching under the table. Last month, they celebrated their 33rd wedding anniversary. They still like to take long drives together, explore old homes and find a new restaurant to try.

Last summer, Mrs. O'Donnell was too weak to walk in the hills surrounding the house in Elka Park. Her husband, sons and daughter-in-law hiked to a monument erected in 1868 by a grieving husband whose wife died in childbirth. Mr. O'Donnell wanted to take a group picture at the top for the family's Christmas card, and Mrs. O'Donnell was upset she couldn't go. This year, she and her husband walked there together. She climbed to the top, looking out at the trees and mountains, "and saw a view I thought I'd never see again," she says. The next day, she was so weak she spent the entire day in bed. But she believes, "If Jim and I didn't have these tiny moments together, we wouldn't make it."

A few weeks ago, Mrs. O'Donnell was in the kitchen of their Elka Park home when Jonny suddenly asked her, "Mom, do you think that someday I will be happily married?"

The question caught her off-guard. She thinks the issue was on his mind not only because he has a girlfriend but also because of what he has seen his parents endure during the past 10 years. She says she didn't hesitate with her reply. "Yes, Jonny," she told him, "I think you will be happily married."

Does she consider herself happily married? "Yes," she said. "I do."

Mr. O'Donnell's reply was more cautious. "In an imperfect world, I am as happily married as I think anybody can be," he said.

A look of surprise seemed to flicker across Mrs. O'Donnell's face. The plate of pasta she cooked and was about to serve remained suspended in her hands as she considered what to say next. "That sounds like a qualifier to me," she said, her voice calm and soft. "But I think I know what you mean." Then another meal together got under way.

和XY经常一起讨论些各地方言的发音不同问题，她尤其注意和我学北京音（普通话），可我发现她每次和台湾朋友聊完天儿，口音就会往回跑，前两天，她又和我 讲起她的一个朋友离婚的事，讲道：“他们结分（婚）的时候，……” 惹得我大笑不已，难怪他们得离，他们结的是‘分’啊，那离的时候呢？是‘昏（分）开’喽？

I read this quite touching, interesting article from WSJ a few weeks
ago, and kept reading it several time, finally decided to post some of
the excerpts here, since it's not accessible on the web without
paying.

A Wife's Struggle With Cancer Takes An Unexpected Toll
By Amy Dockeser Marcus, on WSJ, Sept 8, 2004

In their more than three decades together, one issue has posed the
biggest threat to James and Elizabeth O'Donnel's marriage: cancer.
Nearly 10 years ago, Mrs. O'donnell found a lump in her breast. At
first, she was't worried. A routine mammogram a month earlier showed
no signs of a tumor. But the lump grew so quickly during a two-week
vacation in Hawaii that Mrs. O'donnell went to see her doctor days
after returning hoome to Indiana. The doctor ordered an immediate
biopsy. The 42-year-old mother of three boys was diagnosed with
advanced breast cancer and told she had only a 5% chance of surviving
the next year.
She proved the doctors wrong. Mrs. O'donnell began chemotherapy
treatments in February 1995, underwent two surgeries, including a
mastectomy, and finished her chemotherapy in August 1995. She is now
considered cancer-free. She and her husband call that a miracle and
say they know how lucky they are. "We had the same goal, " Mrs.
O'donnell says, "to keep our family together."
Her survival came at a price. Mrs. O'donnell, now 51, has chronic
health problems arising from her cancer treatment. Just six weeks
after her last chemotherapy session, her heart failed - a side effect
of the drugs used to eradicate the cancer. She underwent a heart
transplant in June 1996. That, in turn, caused other problems.

早就知道Email被国人称为'伊妹儿'，并不常用，久而久之，渐渐忘却了，最近上网，偶然发现一新词：'鸡妹儿'或'鸡妹'，稍作思索，豁然顿悟：乃'gmail'是也。不知以此类推，google是否翻译为'孤狗','姑苟'?!

another one.

What's more interesting was after the work, and snacks, we were allowed to stay to see the rehearsal for Saturday's show, and we saw a lot of ladies who were obviously not only not professional models, but also some cancer survivors, maybe even cancer patients.

Friday afternoon, Xiaoyu and I volunteered to help prepare for Marin County Breast Cancer Council's fashion show "Stepping out to celebrate life", we helped to build a trellis for the entrance,

There were two great stories that I read this week, one was on Wall Street Jounal, the other from Bicycling magazine, since neither of them were easily available online, I decided to excerpt some of them here. First the one from October 2004's Bicycling manazine, titles
"Third Time's a Charm" After going three rounds with cancer, Kristen Adelman is taking her fighting spirit on the road.

Sixth-grade algebra teacher Kristen Adelman of Elkridge, Maryland, was training for an Ironman triathlon when she learned that what doctors originally deemed a sinus infection was really non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. A massive tumor between her heart and left lung was causing swelling in her neck and head. Four years, two stem-cell transplants and 15 rounds of chemotherapy and radiation later, Adelman, now 34, will ride across the country in the Bristol-Myers Squibb Tour of Hope, a partnership with the Lance Armstrong Foundation in
which 20 cancer survivors, researchers and caregivers will ride from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C.

You were so strong and fit at the time. Did you think, "No way. Wrong diagnosis"?
I knew something was wrong. My head and neck looked like a linebacker's. It was stunning to hear "cancer," but once it sunk in, I figured, "I can handle this. In one year I'll be back to my regular life." Then I ran home and ordered a Trek 5200.

What? The first thing you did was buy a bike?
It had been my dream bike for a while. It's also the bike Lance won the 1999 Tour on after coming back from cancer. It was June 2000 -- he was finishing his journey with cancer, and I was starting mine.

And it was an epic journey.
Oh, yeah. Turns out, I was chemo-resistant. So, the tumor grew through all the initial treatments. Next was a bone-marrow stem-cell transplant, with my own heathy cells. It went great--four months later, I did a half-Ironman. I felt awesome until a checkup two months after the race, when my doctor told me my cancer was back--on my lungs, on a heart valve, on a kidney, everywhere. I needed another stem-cell transplant. This time it had to be a perfect sibling match, the odds of which are very slim. Incredibly, my brother was a match. My doctor enrooled me in a trial at the National Cancer Institute, where I stayed for two and a half weeks, while they literally saved my life.

And did y ou take that sitting down?
No, I did what I call the NCI Century -- my slowest ever! I needed a reason to get up in the morning, so I asked for an exercise bike in my room. I rode that old LifeCycle about 7 miles every day, until I hit 100. It was painful, but it reminded me what I was fighting for.
The hardest part is that six months after that ordeal, the cancer returned. I was so sick of being bald and fighting what felt like a losing battle. But it's like being in an 11-hour triathlon. There are times you don't think you can keep going, when you really don't want to, but you dig deep, pray harder, and find the strength. Thank God, after another does of my brother's cells and three rounds of chemo, I've been cancer-free for two years.

Training for races must be cake now
Definitely! Blisters and sore muscles are nothing when you've had bone marrow sucked from your spine. AFter my NCI stay, I could barely get off the couch. When I did, it was to go to 7-Eleven for chili dogs, Ben & Jerry's and those little pink snowball cakes -- stuff I never ate, but suddenly craved.
For my comeback, I clenaed up my eating and completed the Mohican 100 Trail Run earlier this year. It was my way of sticking it in cancer's face. Now, I'll ride across the country. My doctor said that if I hadn't been in such exceptional shape, I wouldn't have survived all these treatments. Even in tragedy, there are miracles. But you need to work and believe.


I was very moved by Kristen's story, not only because I am bike fan, Armstrong fan now, but also because my mom died from exactly the same disease she had, "non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma" (only now I know the correct English name of it, but when I read the name, I had no doubt that was it, 非何杰金氏淋巴癌), back in 1994, the first year I came to the US, a strange country at the time. I will NEVER forget what that year meant in my life.

I am glad by the medical improvements in these years, I am not sure if that would have save my mom's life had all those stem-cell transplants been available to us 10 years ago in China, but I am sure a lot of people have been saved, the same way Kristen was.

More than anything, I am deeply moved and encouraged by her courage and spirit. I just hope we can all share that, and remember, "Even in tragedy, there are miracles. But you need to work and believe." I wish someday, I will remember this, if I were to be challenged the same way or similar.

After writing this story, I wasted no time, and went to the Lance Armstrong Fundation Store and did the thing I have long been wanting to do, buying the yellow ribbons!

I have been using FireFox since their 0.7 version (if I remember correctly), and have been really happy with it, almost as happy as with my gmail. So I'd like to thank them by:

Well, it should be me who say 'Thank you', thank you for covering this
side of the world, and thank Chronicle for publishing it.

It is really sad, my sister has been wanting to come over to see my
life, but have been withholding her dream for 4.5 years now, and I
don't know when I will feel OK for her to apply again, without even
thinking of the "non-refundable application fee of RMB 830" (which is
$100), that's about 1 week's salary for a lot of average Chinese
salaryman, and she paid double the amount, because she applied for me
niece as well.

On the other hand, my brother-in-law, who is a prominent scientist in
Chinese language processing field in the world, had actually
come to the US for conferences before (and could come if he wanted
to), after 9/11, he said gradually, all the conferences are moved
to Europe/Asia, people tried to avoid US now. Isn't that sad? We were
avoided/ignored by rest of world, even hated by some of them, and we
still think beating them up is the solution, and our
beat-them-and-invade-them should not be seen as 'terrorism' by
them? Sad, Sad, Sad, Wrong, Wrong, Wrong


On Wed, 15 Sep 2004 09:50:46 -0700, Estrella, Cicero
wrote:
> Tom,
>
> Thanks for your note. Very funny (and at the same time sad) story about
> the the angry man. People from Lithuania to Japan have e-mailed me with
> similar horror stories. Thanks again.
>
> Cicero

I carpool with my neighbor YA almost every morning to San Francisco downtown, she is an executive in a CPA firm in SF, and also a Philipino.

Yesterday morning after we finally passed the Bay Bridge, all of sudden she just started laughing, I asked her what she is laughing, she pointed to the license plate of the car in front of us, it's "4NOL4#4", seeing me still in deep question, she explained: "First of all, 4 is a bad number in Chinese, it means 'death', it has 3 of them, also 'NOL', in tax, it means 'Net Operating Loss'"

I have never imagined such a plain license plate to me, would mean so much to her, but again, I am not an Asian CPA, trained to be sensitive to NOL, and bunch of 4s, haha.

I absolutely share their story, and I have personally heard many cases
from my Chinese friends, some were successful, some were not, but it's
rediculous, that it's not consistent what they heard from US INS.

My sister was rejected visitor's visa twice in 1998 (the day after US
bombed Chinese Embassy in Yogoslavia), and 1999, first time there was
basically no explanation, and my sister contributed it to the bad
timing between US and China. The second time, the INS officer
questioned her salary, then her intention to come to the US, even with
her intentionally left her husband in Beijing, instead of coming with
her, the request was rejected, she got the message of 'you make too
little money, so you will stay in the US if you come'.

As people are trying to have family members over to visit them, there
are all sorts of 'tips', 'tricks', 'stories' circuling around. One of
my favorite was:

A guy was rejected visa by US consulate, out of angry, he shouted "Who
wants to go to your US, do you think you have anything valueable for
me to see?!", then turned around to leave. Then the consulate stopped
him, said "I will let you see what's valueable!", then he was approved
his visa. After that, people are obviously using it, I guess when the
story spreaded to me, it's already obsolete, I actually suggested it
to my sister, of course, out of the same angry, but she laughed and
said to me "it's been used 100s of times, no longer useful".

I think one of the mistakes that INS is making, which I hope they
don't continue to make is they are still treating China as what it was
10 years ago, when lots of people wanted to flee over to the US, and
other western countries to live, to work, to study. Wrong! China is
not even the China two years ago! My mandarin students going to
Beijing to attend venture capital meetings, sent me a 3-page letter
appraising the Beijing she saw, "Tom, if you have not been back for a
while, you won't recognize the place.... It's unbelievable. ", the
other student wrote me: "(Tom, Susan is right, you
won't recognize Beijing with it's ongoing changes).". I just can't
imagine that the US INS (now homeland security dept.) are not
adjusting. Talking about Cold-War mentality.

Another thing sort of echoing this was, during my recent trip to
Florida, I visited Key West, a lady owning a small store selling Cuban
stuff, told me that before 9/11, US citizens who wanted to visit Cuba,
usually took a detour through either Mexico or Canada, since they
don't stamp your passport, the INS wouldn't know. But now, even if
you don't have stamp on your passport, 'THEY' will know, and they'd
love to knock on your door, one month after you coming back, and hand
you the $10K fine for violating this law.

Tom

The other day, I was proofreading for SMS on his dissertation, and
thought the usages of 'optical illusion' was not used correctly, so I
searched on Google about "optical illusion', and found href='http://www.michaelbach.de/ot/index.html'>Michael Bach's
collection of 46 Optical Illusions, pretty cool!

# posted by Dongming Lu @ 5:37 PM 0 comments

I was debating for two whole weeks whether I should go to San
Francisco to see the T-Mobile ProCycling race, maybe even do the crazy
thing of going to Fillmore St early in the morning, and I was glad
that I got XY's strong support, however the withdraw of Lance
Armstrong seemed to make that very simple. I decided to stay at home
on Sunday to see it from TV.

However, I seem to get confused of when it would be on TV, I had
expected it to start at 10 AM, when the Men's race was scheduled to
start. So after tuning all the channels without finding it, I finally
checked the internet and found it wouldn't be on until 1pm. I then
seemed to have all the reason to be a TV bug, and stuck on TV for the
whole morning and afternoon, and I got to see the sad losses for both
Raiders and 49ers (on and off during the commercial breaks of PCT).

After the whole day, it's a kind of interesting ending, both Terrell
Owens and Jeff Garcia made huge days in their respect teams opening
games, TO made 3 touchdowns and a win, JG had a huge game, and gave
Cleveland their first ever win at the opening game. Weren't they used
to be in the same team, called San Francisco 49ers? I don't know why
some times players either not getting along with each other, or not
getting along with the coach, but when they are traded, somehow they
are given their new wings, and all of sudden they are performing so
well, I guess they are themselves again.

In retrospect, I don't think we look at ourselves often enough to
check if we are given the wings we wanted/needed or not, or sometimes,
we are the ones that are holding other people's wings, hope that's not
often the case, or we could realize that quick enough, and return the
wings back to whoever deserves them.

前两天，和老同学XD一起看国内的网站，特别看到我们的同班同学GY的贴子，更是一番品头论足，FB一次时时冒出来，正在我大惑不解的时候，XD的太太OY用教育的口气告诉我们：FB就是‘腐败’呀！

我似乎恍然大悟，连忙细细品味这一新的网络用语的用法，没曾想看到这样一个喷饭的问题：“FB和FBI有什么关系？”， FB和FBI? 腐败和FBI? 哈哈。

玩笑之余，赶紧到google上搜索，不仅找到了FB的真正含义是指“吃吃喝喝、聚聚的交友活动”，象：
“我们三个返回营地的时候，FB分子们正在热火朝天的打扑克。”
“婚宴非常FB，嘿嘿，但热闹、成功，”
“要吃大餐，真吓人，一看就是老猫手下，整天想着FB。”

还发现，原来国内已把FB和FBI在某种程度上紧密的联系起来了：

像一个吃坛的介绍说道：“既然以吃为事业，吃坛的主要活动当然是吃吃喝喝，这类活动的代号是“ＦＢ”——和ＦＢＩ有点相似，其实是“腐败”的缩写。”

另一个贴子评论建筑市场的腐败时说道：“美国有个fbi,中国有个fb，建筑市场的腐败，总有一天会毁掉我们的长城基石”

最可笑的是这么一句： 没有了I(我）, FBI还不得变成FB?

Another picture of the Salt Ponds in San Francisco Bay Area.

You know where this is? This picture was shot from the plane over Redwood City, it's actually the salt ponds.

Another sailboat with backdrop of sunset

Taken from a trip on a boat at Key West, the southernmost spot in the US, the beautiful sunset casts a nice color on the sailboat. One surprising thing, when they saw us waving our hands, they actually fired a gun or some explosive (hopefully a friendly gesture, :-) )

提示：最新的网络用语，查查google?