It’s a Jat’s Life

This month we mourn the loss of a member of the local rock band that defined an era. The rock band that stayed true to its form. The rock band that defined or redefined some of us. A rock band that will never be the same again. Abdul Samad Mian, better known as Samad or Samad Lefthanded, passed away today (23rd October 2008).

Playing second fiddle to the band’s namesake, he was a much underrated guitarist. Having met him personally a few times through my old school chum, found him to be a very friendly and down to earth guy.

We will no longer get to hear the best, tightest, meanest Lefthanded line-up ever again, Nash, Man Kidal, Samad, Man Dayak, Yan.

Lefthanded can never be the same again.

Abdul Samad Mian, 26 September 1963 - 23 October 2008, Al-fatihah

Today marks the 3rd year that I was diagnosed with Chronic Myeloyed Leukemia (CML). It will always be an ironic day, much like the song sung by that Canadian songstress some years back. “Isn’t it Ironic, don’t you think?” For it was on a day normally associated with celebrating birth and life itself that one is made known of his demise.

Today and as for the last 2 years however, this day truly marks a celebration of life, not demise. From a life of singularity to a life of plurals, much is to be thankful for. A life I never imagined possible now experienced. The thoughts, emotions, sense of values, friends new and old, families both immediate and extended, are experiences refreshingly new.

Life is bitter sweet, but that’s what makes life delicious. There’s much to learn, teach, and ponder. So little time.

Thank you for a wonderful 3 years. Next stop, number 4!

Sometimes things happen to enforce my hatred for things Micro$oft.

Notebook Crashed!

My WinXP on my notebook blue screened while booting up last month. It has happened before but usually it was intermittent or something I can recover by booting from the install CD’s recovery console. This time my XP was totally f***ed up! (Sorry, just can’t find a better word for it!).

Tried various means to ‘repair’ XP without success. Basically gave up after a week or so and took another 2 weeks to recover back the data from the harddisk.

Reformatted the disk, re-installed XP and started installing the applications needed for me to do my work. That was about 2 weeks ago and I’m still setting up my notebook to the way I need it to be.

Note to self: Need to invest in a good disk imaging/backup software.

Phone Book Wipeout!

To add salt to wound, I wanted to re-sync my phonebook to my notebook via the newly installed ActiveSuck 4.5.

The Sync wizard prompted that I have to delete one sync profile from my phone as it can’t have more than 2 (or something like that). What it failed to tell me (or emphasize) was that I would lose the data on my phone. COMPLETELY! NO BACKUPS! What’s worse, I didn’t realize it until hours later! Man, was I in a foul mood! I do have a backup but it’s in my notebook backup data! I can’t wait that long! (It takes a couple of hours to restore the data from the backup. READ: tons ‘o data!).

Luckily I had unwittingly sync’d my phone book to an online site recently and luckily it had an export to CSV option. I just have to clean it up a bit and re-sync it back to my phone.

What a hasle. Usually I am extra careful when doing these sort of things but I was in a hurry that day. Now I’m going to backup my data in several locations.

But my appointments and TODOs are all gone. Hopefully I can still remember all of them.

It was the 1st in every sense of the word. A boy’s 1st birthday, the 1st time his proud parents are throwing their son a birthday party, a parents’ 1st child’s, 1st son’s, 1st birthday. Everyone is excited, not just the parents. The string of grandmas, grand uncles and grand unties, aunts and uncles, extended aunts and uncles, abangs, kakaks, adiks, are all excited just the same.

Although his birthday is not for another week, due to circumstances and such, the celebration was held yesterday. It was hectic for Mummy but the whole thing was a hit!

It’s just amazing to see how we manage to cramp in roughly 30 people in the confines of a small apartment. Eat your heart out David Copperfield! That’s with food & furniture to boot! The proud parents cum hosts were juggling conversations between the guests. That alone was no easy feat! Luckily my in-laws were there to help.

We actually celebrated 2 birthdays yesterday, my son’s and the daughter of my wife’s cousin. The birthday cake candle blowing event was a hoot! My wife’s niece who’s birthday is not until next month demanded everyone to sing her a birthday song and for her to blow out the candles as well. We all obliged of course to much laughter. Hey, she’s only 4 (well, almost). Kids around that age are very entertaining to watch.

Starting at 4pm, the last guests left only after 8pm. After cleaning up the house my extremly exhausted wife and I finally sat down with our son and my mum in-law and went through the gifts that my son received.

Uncle N & Aunt A of the Max Family gang gave my son one of those kiddy car complete with bells & whistles … electronic ones to boot! Flashing lights & sound theater on baby wheels! Our son was thrilled beyond words!

He even made this impossible to describe but absolutely cute smile when we took pictures of him on his new car! He was so thrilled by this new toy. That smile filled us with laughter and joy. Everyone forgot how tired we were. It was even more priceless than all those MasterCard© advertisements. All the trouble of putting the toy car together was worth it.

I find the feeling absolutely amazing to see your 1 year old son gleaming with joy. I guess that’s what all the parents that I have met and talked to were talking about. I guess now I’m beginning to get it. For me personally, if I had just dropped dead right after seeing that smile, it would have been worth it. My life would have been complete. My passing would have been complete as the last thing I had seen was the joy on my son’s face and the happiness that my wife felt at that moment.

I’m still alive though, and I hope to see and experience more of such events in our lives. I’m sure they’re going to be as joyous if not more. And I hope to live long enough to see him grow up into a man.

As I end this post, I’d like thank all those who came, especially the Max Family gang that made it, as well as those that couldn’t make it for your well wishes. An especially big thanks to N & A for your presence and present. Last but not least a big thanks to Uncle F for giving my son something to practice hammering turtles with. Love you guys!

Woke up late! Woke up late on a Monday morning and I have a hospital appointment to boot! My wife and I jumped out of bed and got ready in lightning time. It was almost like an F1 pitstop scene.

Anyway, it was 7.20am by the time we got into the car to head to Ampang Hospital. I was already dreading the jam that we were going to face especially with the MRR2 incident yesterday. Surprisingly, it was traffic free all the way until we hit the Ukay stretch. That is where the crawl started. Quite expected actually since that’s where I usually get stuck whenever I go for my hopsital appointments. Just like magic, it was smooth sailing right after the Ampang Point turn-off. That’s the culprit!

Reached the hospital at about 8.30am. Not too bad. Took a number, registered, made payment, and waited for my blood to be taken. This time around it wasn’t ‘Nurse Garang’ who took my blood sample so I was a little nervous. Rightfully so as it was painful! Man, I got to lose some weight as it’s getting difficult for them to see my veins.

Wish it was ‘Nurse Garang’ who’d taken my blood. She does it quite well even when she couldn’t find my vein. She’d go vein hunting with the needle still stuck in me and yet it isn’t unpleasant at all. She can be fierce (hence the nick ‘Garang’) but she’s actually very nice once you get to know her better. Plus the environment in Ampang Hopsital so much better for the staff then the old clinic at GH/HKL.

As usual, with blood taken, we ran down to the cafetaria for some expensive, not so great breakfast. Wasn’t in the mood to walk to the ‘mamak’ outside especially since we were lugging our bags and stuff. Plus the fact that I was already starting to feel sleepy. Met WM and MC there and caught up on things.

We all headed back to the clinic and met a newly diagnosed CML patient and her husband. Very nice people. But my sleepiness kept me from getting into the conversation. My wife and I sat and waited for my number.

Current Number: 1002
My Number: 1045
Time: 9:50am

My eyes were already in tears trying to keep awake as I sat with my wife waiting for my number to come up. I already know it’s going to be quite some time before my number is called.

My wife saw ‘Pak Cik Cabutan Bertuah’ (long story, maybe in a future post) at the nurses counter. We had just heard from MC that her wife met with an accident and broke her leg. We thought he came alone. A few minutes later in came along her wife on a wheel chair pushed by their youngest son. We had a good chat with them which killed some time. Pak Cik CB kidded, ‘the sick pushing the sick around’ referring to himself, a CML patient, pushing his wife who now has a broken leg around. That old man is one funny guy and with very high spirit.

My number finally got called at about 12:15pm. Nothing new. I was late anyway. My wife and I got into the room and this time I got Dr C. I forgot that he is now DDC. Those who know will understand.

Anyway, it was good news. DC told us that I’ve reached Haematological Remission which means that there’s no traces of CML in my marrow. My response to the medication is very good and DC is quite happy with the results. So am I. So’d my wife. If it weren’t for my severe sleepiness today, I’d be jumping with joy and shaking DC’s hand so hard it’ll come off its socket!

DC also asked about my reaction with the medication. Told him I still have cramps and feel like vomiting half of the time. We talked about that and he gave some suggestions.

DC did express his concern about my weight although he didn’t go postal about it. My wife was gleaming with joy when that subject came about. I grinned when DC said that my wife and I should go exercise together! Hey, it’s called moral support right? ;D

After the usual poking around and weight taking, I’m now 103.5 Kg BTW (that’s By The Way, not Berat Tanpa Wang), we’re sent of with the next appointment set in October. Picked up my new batch of drugs and headed home.

It’s been a long, long, long, really long time since I last blogged. Many things had happened, good and bad. Lots of joyous moments as well as sad ones.

Finally got a new host, a new blog engine, and successfully ported the contents from Movable Type to WordPress. I felt mt was just unnecessarily cumbersome. It’s not like I have lots of spare time to be meddling with mt. I’d rather spend that time with my wife and son.

Busting my mt’s template did it for me. Re-doing the template was such a chore that it put me off installing the new design I had for it. The design was ready. Installing it in mt was to tedious.

Anyway, in a couple of weeks we’ll be celebrating my son’s 1st birthday. Looking forward to that especially since we didn’t manage to celebrate much of the other occasions we had this year due to various reasons. Just our luck I guess.

Monday will be another one of those regular visits to the hospital where hopefully the results remain the same … negative. Negative is good. Good is negative. Negative means no signs of the CML lingering around in my blood or chromosome. Negative however doesn’t mean I am cured, but it does mean I can continue living normally and watch my son grow up. Hopefully I get to see him grow up into a man. Hopefully I get to live with my wife to a ripe old age.

Stick around. That bloggy feeling is starting to come back again. Hopefully it sticks longer this time.

I think I’ve blogged about somthing similar the last time but this time it was affecting logins to Yahoo! services such as Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! Messenger.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’m now on 600 mg of Glivec a day. So far so good. The Doc Chang increased my dosage from 400 to 500 last month and told me that he wants to put me on 600 as that was the optimum dosage.

The last time they increased my dosage, I ended up bed ridden for almost a month suffering from excruciating muscle and bone ache! Relapse was what ran through my mind.

Anyway, it’s been 2 weeks or so that I’ve been on 600 mg. So far so good. Let’s hope it stays that way.

It’s been a while hasn’t it? I guess I kinda took a break from blogging. After getting my internet line at home (screamyx) I got a little pre-occupied.
I’ve been traveling back to both (my wife and I) our home towns the last few months after the marriage to attend to family matters. It was definitely nice for me as before this, the last time I went back to my hometown was in 1996! Now it’s almost once every month!

Lots of changes in Alor Star, but it all somehow seems the same. The township has expanded but the old areas still look the same. The old bus station’s gone. That one has a lot of childhood memories for me.

Visits to my late grandfather’s house where one of my auntie and my cousin are now residing is now a must. Especially when I got news that it’s not going to be there much longer. The property is going to be sold. I have to take pictures of the place before it is gone. Way too much memories there.

How’s married life you ask? Great! Now why didn’t I think of it before? Hehehehe!

Workwise, things aren’t going as expected. But that’s life. I’m used to struggling to survive.

Anyway, there’ll be more blog entries to come. I should be updating this blog more regularly now.

After much hassle and waiting, we have Internet at home! Finally!