please help

If you read this you probably already know about this or got an email from me about it, but I'm going to hope there is one person who reads this who I don't know or who is otherwise unaware. A student at my school is fighting leukemia for the second time, and needs a bone marrow donor. Please consider signing up in the marrow registry to see if you could be her match, or someone else's.



TO REGISTER AS A DONOR:
http://www.marrow.org/JOIN/Join_Now/join_now.html
From NOW until May 4: Use code APAMSA509 for FREE REGISTRATION
For more information about Natasha and donating, visit:
http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/group.php?gid=65568844747&ref=share

Also, there is always great need for minority donors.

The support of our school for Natasha reminds me of how presence matters within a group, regardless of what the concrete connections between people are. It's easy to acquire a sort of distaste for the impersonal nature of being in a group, of wanting to remove yourself from it so as to differentiate yourself. To the extreme I think this can end up being something to regret. This is not, of course, to say that we should identify ourselves solely by the outlines of a group at the sacrifice of forgetting what we want and value as individuals. But it seems to me that being your own person doesn't require denying that you are part of something. Even with everything else that goes in the world these days, it's something I often forget. I think the microcosm of school, and the need for people within any sort of community (the limited one of our university and the all-inclusive one of people in general) to remain aware of one another, reminded me of it.

So many people work their entire lives to impact others, in different ways. They acquire skills, build organizations, talk to people. In your jobs, in your personal lives, there is a sense of making some sort of impact, whatever that may mean to you. And I mean impact in a general sense, because so much of what we do is to shape our own lives or those of others, from the small things of going to class or consoling a friend, to the big things of building a family and career, and that is all impact. This takes five minutes of your time, and when else will it be so easy to have the huge impact of possibly saving someone's life?

Once you sign up, you'll receive a simple kit that involves swabbing your cheeks with Q-tips and sending them back. As for the marrow donation itself, please see below for myths and facts. Please consider signing up, and PLEASE spread the word: email your friends, post it on facebook, blog about it. Post the video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAvv-7L3J-k), or the facebook group link (http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/group.php?gid=65568844747&ref=share). It's not spam. She's only 26 years old, and really needs your help to find a donor and survive beyond the next six months.

*
Myths and Facts about Bone Marrow Donation
MYTH: The bone marrow donation procedure is painful.
FACT: General or regional anesthesia is always used for this procedure. Donors feel no needle injections and no pain during marrow donation.

MYTH: All bone marrow donations involve surgery.
FACT: The majority of donations do not involve surgery. The patient's doctor most commonly requests a peripheral blood stem cell (PBSC) donation, which is non-surgical and does not require a stay in the hospital. If marrow is requested, it is a surgical procedure, but there is still usually no stay in the hospital.

MYTH: Pieces of bone are removed from the donor.
FACT: Pieces of bone are not removed from the donor in either type of donation. A PBSC donation involves taking the drug filgrastim for five days leading up to donation in order to increase the donor's needed blood-forming cells. On the fifth day, blood is taken from the donor through one arm, passed through a machine that separates out the blood-forming cells, and returned through the donor's other arm. In marrow donation, no pieces of bone are taken; only the liquid marrow found inside the bones is needed to save the patient's life.

MYTH: Donating bone marrow is dangerous and weakens the donor.
FACT: Though no medical procedure is without risk, there are rarely any long-term effects from donating. Only five percent or less of a donor's marrow is needed to save a life. After donation, the body replaces the donated marrow within four to six weeks. The NMDP screens all donors carefully to ensure they are healthy and that the procedure is safe. The NMDP also educates donors, answers questions at every step, and follows up after donation.

MYTH: Donors have to pay for the donation procedure.
FACT: Donors never pay for donating. All medical costs are paid by the patient's medical insurance or by the patient, sometimes with NMDP assistance. The NMDP reimburses donors for travel costs, and may reimburse other costs on a case-by-case basis.

Source: www.marrow.org

genius

 There is much to say about my dad who is amazing, some of which I hope to share in the future. For now, this earned an entry all to itself. What is this? I asked the same thing of my dad, the maker of this mighty contraption. It's a book-binder.

My dad builds a lot of things. Without any prior experience for any of his projects, he browses Home Depot, buys what he thinks he needs, and builds. An outdoor stove, a storage house, the stone landscape leading to our front door. But I think this one most sums up why I am so crazy about my dad. My dad reads a lot of Vietnamese books. He decided that instead of buying them, he'd make them. He finds them online, copies them into word documents, and proofreads and edits them (he also proofreads books he already owns). Because he prints four pages on a piece of paper (two on each side), so that they can be folded and read like a normal book, he must first place them in Word accordingly. This is a bit hard to describe, but what it means is that from left to right, pages 4 and 1 are printed on one side of a paper, and pages 2 and 3 are printed on the other, so that when it's folded it reads 1, 2, 3, and 4.

He built the above with some slabs of wood, and this other silver and black device seen that was designed for another purpose (I don't know what), which allows him to change the length of the contraption and keeps the pages bound in the width that he wants. He places glue across the binding, waits for it to dry, and gets to work on the covers...the end product is this:
 
The zoom of my camera lens was too high for me to hold a book open with one hand and take an adequate photograph with the other, so I used a stapler to showcase it. My dad would've come up with a better solution but I ended up liking this aesthetic. After I asked a million questions about this meticulous process and commented on the many details this entails, he laughed and said, "When you actually do it the details keep arising!" When I told him I was impressed, he laughed and said, "If you can think up something, you can do it." These sorts of things have always sounded more right to me in foreign languages.

blindness

I have a throbbing headache, of a kind that would follow lots learned in a compact time but in my case is the result of considering the ONE thing I learned today that I'll actually remember. So we learned about a disease where the blood vessels in your head are inflamed, and when this affects the vessels to your eye, you can suffer sudden blindness. You have to treat this immediately with steroids, to save the other eye from blindness. Something I appreciated from lecture that can't be read from books was the comment on the context of the patient. The professor noted that because patients with this disease are often elderly with numerous co-morbidities, treating them with steroids is no light decision. Steroids affect just about every part of you, and it will worsen your diabetes, osteoporosis, and heart disease, all of which one elderly patient probably has. With perhaps not a very extended time left to live, the question arises of whether saving sight is worth exacerbating life-threatening conditions. Our professor posed this question and answered yes, because when blinded, the elderly often pass away within a few years. Such loss is difficult to adjust to, and depression is a co-morbidity as well, even as its path to loss of life is not as clearly defined as say, a stroke. While blindness leads to concrete things that affect health and may lead to death, like falls and fractures, it's really the general state of not seeing that is harmful.

The image of a body whose many parts have lost their respective vitalities, fighting for its sight, made me a little sad, but it also seemed right. I'm glad that when people choose to struggle, it's not for subsistence but for substance.