Wednesday, July 30, 2014

3 years and counting

Amazingly enough, it has been 3 years since the diagnosis of Hodgkin's lymphoma! I have been thinking about posting on the blog since June, because I knew that my Hodgkin's anniversary was coming at the beginning of July. It took awhile for me to get back here, but here I am.

Health wise, I am still suffering from the unknown fatigue and light fever (or elevated temperature, however you prefer to call it...) every 2~3 weeks or so, but the causal relationship between this symptom and the Hodgkin's treatment is unknown. My symptom has been continuing for so long that I am beginning to give up on curing them, and I'm fine with that. Many events happen in your life, and you just need to live with them sometimes. It sucks to experience fatigue every once in a while still, but this is not the biggest worry in my life.

I still take thyroid hormone for my thyroid hormonal level to be normal. My doctor talks about decreasing the dose every now and then, but whenever we change the dose, my body doesn't seem to cope with it very well. So we'll just continue on as is for now.

And what have I been up to recently? Since the last post, I've traveled some, and I was lucky and fortunate enough to get accepted into the PhD program at the University of Tokyo, and I've started my (hopefully) three year program last April. I just finished my first semester 2 weeks ago, and it has been busy but fruitful life.

One good news is that I was finally able to publish my first paper on a pretty good journal :) I have been wanting this for a long time, since I was sick as well, so I was very happy to receive acceptance on my paper. I even wished upon Daruma (shown below in purple)--I'm glad I was able to give him 2 eyes after 1.5 years!