Remission phase II !!

I fell in love with soba noodles since I moved to Nagano...so good!!

A few days ago I had an appointment with my doctor to hear about the results of ultrasound test I went through about 10 days ago. When I entered my doctor's office, he stared at me for a second with a surprise, and exclaimed, "Your hair grew!" Yes, my hair has grown, perhaps about 1 cm since i saw him last time. The back of my head that had lost hair from radiotherapy is also no longer bald, it's full of  new born hair like baby's hair. It's awesome and I'm interested in experiencing how hairs harden and become stiff overtime.

So the super good news is that I cleared the second evaluation! Yay! Well, the ultrasound did detect something (dead lymphoma I hope) on my left lower neck, but they can't really determine the activity or the content of 'something', so t will need to go back in August for comparison.

Additionally, I began to notice the amount of saliva I produce in my mouth has decreased. This must be from radiotherapy, which was expected and explained by my radiology doctor earlier. Having less saliva is not going to kill me, but now I have to be careful of cavity much more, and I also have to worry about bad breath (since saliva helps clean inside your mouth).

Almost time for the next evaluation!

Solar Eclipse
On May 21st at 7:30am, I went out of the hotel to watch solar eclipse. It was first in 125 years for people on Honshu island (the main island of Japan) to be able to observe such a rare solar eclipse.  Although I understood the significance, I totally forgot to buy the proper glasses to watch the eclipse. Luckily (or more like intentionally) I ran into a kind dentist next door, who lend me his glasses for me to watch solar eclipse. The solar eclipse was beautiful! I couldn't take a good picture of it, but I took a a picture of 木漏れ日（sunshine diffracted through the tree, which normally exhibits circular pattern of light) that the kind next door dentist taught me (shown above). I hope you understand how exciting it was to see the waxing and waning of the sunshine pattern!!

Almost time for...
Next week I have an appointment with the hospital for ultrasound examination. As far as I touch my lower left neck, where lymphoma used to occupy, it doesn't feel like it grew back. I have a mixed feeling, I certainly hope there's nothing going wrong, but I also subconsciously became prepared for the worst case scenario. The feeling is similar to taking an exam at school; I just want to get over with it and hear the result, so I know what to do next, regardless of the result.

The other day I saw a short documentary on a member of a Japanese rockband, who had been diagnosed with malignant lymphoma. I couldn't watch the part where he was being dosed with chemo drugs, it still reminded me of old bad times. When he was going through the side effects, he told his wife that he had severe chest pain in the night that he thought was going to die. Then, his wife couldn't go to sleep because she thought he could die any minute, she had to place her hand on his nose to check if he was breathing every hour or so. When I heard that story, it was a little odd to me, because even though I experienced severe chest pain, stomach ache, nausea, and everything else, I never thought of an idea that I was going to die. I guess it's good that I was being positive in a way, but I just didn't think I would die that easily. I think I was also trying not to even think about it, because it only make myself and others sad. Well, the story is a little bit different with the rockstar because he seems to have been in stage III when he was diagnosed, and he is much older, in his 40s. I guess when you're young, you are, and you should be much more hopeful for the future ahead, regardless of the life you live in.

Fortunately the chemotherapy was successful for the rockstar, he started rocking the world again once he entered the remission stage, just like me.

Training period for getting back to school

A small shrine on the way to my current work place

For the past three weeks, I have been working in the lab for about 8 hours a day, from 8:30 to 18:00 on average. "Isn't that too much?", as some expressed their concern about my physical ability to work as an average young person. I like to believe that I am physically back to what I used to be, but I also had to remind myself that I had not been working for the past 6+ months or so. The result was that I started to feel fatigue and slight nausea when I worked for about 8 hours, so I go back home quickly when my body sends me that sort of signal that "your body can't work anymore." Recently I'm starting to think of my time at Shinshu University as a training period before getting back to school. It's nice to know beforehand about what I can handle at current state.

Other than that, I've been enjoying my time in Nagano. Many cities in this prefecture have histories from back in the 16th century, so it has been very enjoyable to walk around in such historic towns. Also, hanging out and working with people from my age group has also been fun, since I haven't had much interaction with people in general for the past few months.

Matsumoto Castle

What I've been up to

There hasn't been new posts because I was traveling and I have been quite healthy. On the last post I mentioned that my WBC# was low, but when I took the blood test again few days later, my WBC# was 4600, the number I haven't seen in months!! Although I had a light fever and felt tired by the end of the day usually even then, it was really nice to know my body's recovery.

Plum flowers in Ueda, Nagano

What have I been up to?

So the day after I went to check my blood for the second time, I went back to Taiwan with my mom and my friend Mary for one week. It was really great that my grandparents and I got to see each other after all the treatments.  They were definitely more worried about me than I was worried about myself, so I hope I was able to bring some relief to their mind.

The day after I came back from Taiwan, I was in Tokyo for a concert and had lunch with my uncle from Dallas. I had great time with my uncle, cherry blossoms were blooming.

Asakusa, Tokyo

Then few days after my trip to Taiwan, I packed up one suitcase and moved to Ueda city, Nagano prefecture, which is about 200 km northwest of Tokyo. I will be here until beginning of June, to begin again the research from I left at UW. I really appreciate my professor, my department, and Kimura lab at Shinshu University for providing me such opportunity. I have been pretty busy, a lot to be done everyday, and I've been enjoying it so far. I've been working about 8 hours a day, but I haven't felt fatigue or sick. I think this experience will not only be valuable to my academic learning, but also to recover fully before I go back to the life I left in Seattle.

Remission phase I

Mt. Fuji...so beautiful!!

The good news is that there was no sign of malignant tumor regrowth (forgive me for the less use of proper vocabularies) after 2 months of radiotherapy treatment!! I was nervous to hear the result, and I'm glad it turned out to be a good news. My next check up is scheduled on June 1st, for a ultrasound test. Then another one in August 3rd.


PET scan
Last week I had PET scan at a prefecture-owned hospital that was about 40 minutes north of my home. This is because Tsukuba University Hospital doesn't own PET machine, which was surprising to me since Tsukuba University Hospital is the largest and the only university-owned hospital in my prefecture, Ibaraki. Anyhow, the PET scan went smoothly, and it wasn't very different from the experience at the UW, the only thing is that patients were to be rested in a public room with a divider rather than a private room.

I learned that my fear for injection still exists, when the nurse was injecting contrast medium to my body I had to close my eyes because it reminded me of chemotherapy. Then I felt noxious after the PET scan was done, although that could be a side effect from contrast medium rather than Pavlovian effect.

WBC count low
Yesterday when I had a blood test womehow my WBC# was only 2200, where on average human has 4000~6000 WBCs. Both my doctors from haematology and radiology were unsure of the cause, thus I will need to go back to the hospital next week to check up my blood again.

Interestingly enough, my haematology doctor guessed that the low WBC# may be caused by radiotherapy. He guessed that the radiation may have hit bone marrow that it led to less production of WBC#. On the other hand, my radiology doctor said that the effect from radiotherapy is unlikely and he thinks the WBC# was influenced by chemotherapy.

I don't think they are necessarily trying to blame on each other, but it showed the difficulties of determining causation for any symptoms. And when one is specialized in a field, perhaps one is likely to point a finger to other fields, which is understandable, but we need someone to put the pieces together to show the big picture. This applies in any field.