It seems that right now I can sleep through the night for the most part. I am getting up around 5am and I tend to just stay up and start to do some work at that time. I have ideas and things that come to mind so I start working. Today I had to plan what I was going to bring to the cancer center for my food. I was not sure at first but then I decided to bring greek honey yogurt with strawberries, and granola in one container. A Portuguese custard tart and a container of baba ganoush with pita bread. For my drink I wanted chrysanthemum tea instead of coffee. Whenever I arrive at the cancer center I always get cranberry juice and take that with my medication. I actually do not mind going in as I know a lot of nurses and we have a fun time. The nurse today made a comment that when she gets me it makes her happy because she knows that I will make her laugh and I am always positive and fun. Setup for everything went well and while there I was tired for some reason and took a 15 min nap. I did work on my phone and managed to not open up my laptop. Apparently I do so much work while I am undergoing chemo that all of the staff notices. I saw the nurse that was in charge of education come by and she stopped by and I told her that the port was healing nicely and she checked it out. We had some lengthy conversations with the volunteers which is always nice. While at the cancer center I could feel the start of the neuropathy and boy did it hit hard. I have my gloves on and I am on the verge of not having manual dexterity. We will see how quickly I can recover this time and if it edges too close to the next treatment we will need to tell the doctor. Warming up my hands does wonders and allows me to actually work and do things. I managed to find one of my thin gloves that always works with using the trackpad and with my devices. The material on the fingers allows me to use touchscreens and everything so they are great.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Once we got home what I really wanted to have for lunch was rice and spam. Xavier made some rice, but he ate it all and there was none left. I was hoping that he made too much and I would have fried up some spam to eat. But I had some falafel instead which was just as delicious. My parents were delivering dinner so I did not need to do much for that. I worked all afternoon and ate throughout the afternoon. Unfortunately I forgot about the nausea part that I get sometimes on the first day and I may have pushed my food intake a bit further than I should have. I ended up throwing some mucous but I kept the food down. This has been a bi of a rough cycle for keeping my food down when I had no issues for while. I think that some of this might have been a bit self inflicted as I should have aborted a couple of bites earlier. I had trouble because both times it was seafood that I really liked. The first time was lobster and this time it was summer rolls made with shrimp. I had taken a nap this afternoon when my parents came so I did not get a chance to see them, I called my mom earlier and had a chat with her and she is getting better in not coming and waking me up when I am sleeping. I am not even sure if she checked up on me or not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Since it is Prime Days and there are a bunch of things that we have been waiting on, I have spent a bunch of money purchasing things for the house. I bought new cameras to watch for flooding and making sure that we can monitor that. The cameras that I purchased will allow for continuous recording of the area for days. I bought the largest SD card available as it was by far the best price and it connects to a home storage device. In the future I may expand on the cameras and move away from Nest as I do not need to pa for a subscription to this. Once the Nest products die we will start to move away from that Ecosystem because Google seems to be abandoning some of the parts of it and increasing the costs for other parts of it. I found something that I thought Olivier would like and sent him a message on discord. He has some interesting quotes that he always puts in his status and the one he had today was from Avatar the Last Air Bender I think. Uncle Iroh I think is a character in that anime, but the quote was “Failure is only the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.” I thought it was an awesome quote and it just reminded me of things in the past couple of months where at work we had some catastrophic failures with various things but we learned from them and the second time around it was much better. It amuses me that he gravitates to such positivity sometimes in his quote. Another of his favorite quotes is from Kung Fu Panda by Oogway, “”Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, but today is a gift. That is why it is called the present.” He was trying to figure out whether this pixel light box was worth spending his money on and he asked me alot of questions. He wants it but knows his room is a mess so he is hestitant on it. He asked me a ton of questions on functionality and I answered them all. If he wants it I will get it for him but I will wait. If Mel asks they sent it by mistake. I need everyone to help me with gaslighting her and since she does not read my blog she will not know our plan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I spent the evening in the backyard with Xavier and Melanie while they did yard work. Xavier has not mowed the lawn in 3 weeks so the grass was super long. At first there was no gas and then he filled that up. He did a bit of the lawn but it kept on getting jammed up since there was so much grass so he attached the bag instead of trying to mulch it and it worked fine. The issue was that he stopped the lawn mower and then could not start it again. I suspect he flooded it. He then used the new trimmer and did that for while. He got the lawn mower going again and then failed to get it started after. We eventually borrowed our wonderful next door neighbours Ego mower to allow Xavier to finish. When he couldn not start the mower he was willing to use his own money to go buy an electric lawn mower. When our neighbour brought over his mower I asked if he could start it and he did it on the first pull. So it was 100% user error with Xavier. I had tried to do it but I am so weak that I could not. I also had to do it with my left arm and I had the chemo bottle dangling in front of me. I am pretty sure that I would lose in a fight to a 5 year old. They would easily overwhelm me. I was out there to keep Mel company and I had started a fire with the help of Xavier chopping some wood for me. Overall it was a wonderful time, I had to leave because my hands were getting too cold as the temperatures dropped. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I am trying to write a bit of my childhood as we go along and another story that my parents relayed to me. As a child I never liked to sit around and spent all of my time on my trike or doing something. I was also the favorite child as I was the first born male child of my father who was the youngest. The only reason that my father was able to attend school was because he had scholarships, which is why he always pushed my sister and myself so much, especially as we were immigrants and we had a lot of things to overcome. As a child I always wanted to help out and what I would do is spend all day moving wood that was delivered to the back, one log at a time on my trike and wagon. I can see me doing something like that but I am not sure what the frequency was. If I was not doing that I would be running to the market talking to people and trying to score food from everyone. That was my daily life, working and then eating. It is no surprise that to this day that is all I really do, work and then eat delicious food. This previous weekend trip was the first one where the primary reason was to eat at restaurants and everything revolved around that. We have set a date for our Lobster Fisherman Club meal. It is abit tricky to coordinate for 20 people to drive to Toronto for a meal but we managed to do it so we will go and have some fun. This turned out a bit longer than I anticipated which is a good sign as it shows that cognitively I am fine. When we were trying to find some gas for the lawn mower I said to smell it and Mel relayed that people sniff gas to get high so be careful. I said I would do it so Xavier did not. Xavier said I should not because my best asset was me using my brain to think and come up with ideas for work. He said I should not because I am paid to think. Mel said I am old so I could. If I die in my sleep, the prime suspect is clearly Mel. Most likely for our collective attempts to gaslight her on my spending habits. Remember that we are in this together, if she comes after me, you are next.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Quoc Hao<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It seems that right now I can sleep through the night for the most part. I am getting up around 5am and I tend to just stay up and start to do some work at that time. I have ideas and things that come to mind so I start working. Today I had to plan…<\/p>\n