The is sorta a technical post, but at the end of the day - its about doing your job.
My job, as an IT person, is to provide quality service to my end users in a timely manner while keeping downtime to a minimum. To do this - I rely pretty heavily on technology and help from the Gods or RAID. Raid is an acronym that has a couple definitions but they all pretty much mean: Redundant Array of Independent Disks. In my situation - I use RAID 1, often called a mirror. It has a lot of overhead, but should give you the most protection.
I say should because as I waited for my work mail server to respond to a request (I'll cut to the chase, it went unanswered), I was wondering if the RAID had failed. In a perfect world - a single drive would fail and the other MIRRORED drive would pick up the slack. I would then casually come into the office on Monday and swap out the bad drive and the RAID would rebuild itself.
Sadly - it didn't work that way so I'm currently rebuilding a mail server with a new single drive (that I will clone weekly) and restoring from a backup (that runs nightly). Its a hassle and will probably eat up about four hours of my Sunday - though this is preferable to having an outage in the middle of a work day.
Before all of this went down, I was able to have a really nice morning with my super extended family including my mom/dad, Kristin's mom/dad, Eli/Maris and Kristin.
Well, better get back to my restore...looks like the status bar started moving again.
Showing posts with label macintosh. Show all posts
Showing posts with label macintosh. Show all posts
Sunday, July 27, 2008
Thursday, March 6, 2008
Good Day.
Its not that I felt all that great today, but blood results heading in the right direction always makes me feel better. Starting now, I will lead with my most recent blood results with a little background for the newbies.
Whities - 2,600 (normal is 5,000 to 10,000)
ANC - 1.5 (normal is 1.5 - 8.0), percentage of fighters is up to 57%
Hemoglobin - 12.5 (normal range...if I was a woman)
Hematocrit - 37 (sadly, again normal if I was a woman)
Platelets - 90,000 (woo hoo! they were down to 64,000 on Monday)
So there you go. I go in to see Dr. Dugan (my oncologist) on Tuesday and I'll be interested to hear what he thinks of my progress. I've generally been giving blood 2x a week but now that the levels are going in the right direction - I think we'll be back at weekly visits.
I had my first follow-up appointment at OrthoIndy today. For those of you who did not know - the abnormal MRI I received at Ortho is what triggered the blood test that ultimately led to my diagnosis. My doc (Dr. Brokaw) is just awesome. Great sense of humor, brilliant and most importantly...calming. Many of you know that I like technology more that just a little bit. Today I got a copy of my MRI and proceeded to find an open-source viewer. I can zoom in and out of my leg, look at cross-sections and so much more. I am only going to include two pictures, but they may help my hundreds of loyal readers better understand what was going on in my body.
Without further adieu:
1. Hematoma. Large and in charge.
2.
Bone. It ain't right.
Anyway, if you have questions - I can probably answer them now...complete with visual aids.
Whities - 2,600 (normal is 5,000 to 10,000)
ANC - 1.5 (normal is 1.5 - 8.0), percentage of fighters is up to 57%
Hemoglobin - 12.5 (normal range...if I was a woman)
Hematocrit - 37 (sadly, again normal if I was a woman)
Platelets - 90,000 (woo hoo! they were down to 64,000 on Monday)
So there you go. I go in to see Dr. Dugan (my oncologist) on Tuesday and I'll be interested to hear what he thinks of my progress. I've generally been giving blood 2x a week but now that the levels are going in the right direction - I think we'll be back at weekly visits.
I had my first follow-up appointment at OrthoIndy today. For those of you who did not know - the abnormal MRI I received at Ortho is what triggered the blood test that ultimately led to my diagnosis. My doc (Dr. Brokaw) is just awesome. Great sense of humor, brilliant and most importantly...calming. Many of you know that I like technology more that just a little bit. Today I got a copy of my MRI and proceeded to find an open-source viewer. I can zoom in and out of my leg, look at cross-sections and so much more. I am only going to include two pictures, but they may help my hundreds of loyal readers better understand what was going on in my body.
Without further adieu:
1. Hematoma. Large and in charge.
2.
Bone. It ain't right.Anyway, if you have questions - I can probably answer them now...complete with visual aids.
Monday, February 18, 2008
Another Day, Another...
$4,000. Who knows how much today's tests cost in real dollars.
After all the ER theatrics I had this weekend - I went to my oncologist for a follow up. When talking with them - they decided to admit me for 24 hours and run some test on my lungs and heart to make sure they were functioning correctly.
I think I mentioned on Sunday that the preliminary CT and X-ray showed clear lungs, but as a follow-up they just sent me down to nuclear medicine for some test's I've never heard of.
The first one was some sort of ventilation imaging where I inhaled a mixture of O2 and a Xenon isotope 133. The machine then images the release of this isotope and shows concentrations of oxygen or areas that are not being fully utilized. Apparently the body is smart enough to know that if an embolism or some other sort of blockage is present - it will reroute to a better function area. Pretty cool really.
The second test was an intravenous one with another radioactive isotope. They inject me and then take a series of 8 pictures (2 minutes per picture) as they rotate around my lungs. This shows more about circulation and less about physical anatomy.
Neither test was painful or uncomfortable and when you have Leukemia - people wheel you from location to location on a nice bed. The entire imaging sequence only took about an hour - most of which I spent talking with the technician who was servicing one of the camera units. I was amazed to see that most of the nuclear imaging machines were actually attached to Apple PowerMacs...12 year-old PowerMacs. To put it in perspective, one of the hard drives had just crapped out on one of the units and the technician got a replacement off of eBay. I'm sure Anthem would be delighted to hear that the $2,000 test I just got is stored on a $10 eBay purchase (plus shipping of course).
I miss being home with Kris and the kiddos and am really frustrated that I cannot be more useful around the house right now. I keep asking the question, how much can one woman do and Kris' actions continue to say "all of it".
Admittedly, It's really nice to be here at Methodist in these uncertain times and I can relax while I'm here knowing that my care is unparalleled and I have hundreds of lifesavers around me at any point in time.
The nurse just checked in and told me that my white count is now 5,200. That is another 4,000 drop in the past two days. Most of my other levels are solid so now its just a waiting game until we hear back from the heart doc.
Miss you all.
After all the ER theatrics I had this weekend - I went to my oncologist for a follow up. When talking with them - they decided to admit me for 24 hours and run some test on my lungs and heart to make sure they were functioning correctly.
I think I mentioned on Sunday that the preliminary CT and X-ray showed clear lungs, but as a follow-up they just sent me down to nuclear medicine for some test's I've never heard of.
The first one was some sort of ventilation imaging where I inhaled a mixture of O2 and a Xenon isotope 133. The machine then images the release of this isotope and shows concentrations of oxygen or areas that are not being fully utilized. Apparently the body is smart enough to know that if an embolism or some other sort of blockage is present - it will reroute to a better function area. Pretty cool really.
The second test was an intravenous one with another radioactive isotope. They inject me and then take a series of 8 pictures (2 minutes per picture) as they rotate around my lungs. This shows more about circulation and less about physical anatomy.
Neither test was painful or uncomfortable and when you have Leukemia - people wheel you from location to location on a nice bed. The entire imaging sequence only took about an hour - most of which I spent talking with the technician who was servicing one of the camera units. I was amazed to see that most of the nuclear imaging machines were actually attached to Apple PowerMacs...12 year-old PowerMacs. To put it in perspective, one of the hard drives had just crapped out on one of the units and the technician got a replacement off of eBay. I'm sure Anthem would be delighted to hear that the $2,000 test I just got is stored on a $10 eBay purchase (plus shipping of course).
I miss being home with Kris and the kiddos and am really frustrated that I cannot be more useful around the house right now. I keep asking the question, how much can one woman do and Kris' actions continue to say "all of it".
Admittedly, It's really nice to be here at Methodist in these uncertain times and I can relax while I'm here knowing that my care is unparalleled and I have hundreds of lifesavers around me at any point in time.
The nurse just checked in and told me that my white count is now 5,200. That is another 4,000 drop in the past two days. Most of my other levels are solid so now its just a waiting game until we hear back from the heart doc.
Miss you all.
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