“I put my heart and my soul into my work, and have lost my mind in the process.”
~ Vincent van Gogh
Scala, Java, Unix, MacOS tutorials (page 183)
“What is done in love is done well.”
That’s a quote from Vincent van Gogh. I always think you can tell when someone loves to do something, such as love in designing things and writing beautiful code. Conversely, you can always tell when something feels rushed.
Wow, the first available appointment for the leading doctor on this disease is in February ... 2018.
NURSE (on the phone): Is Wednesday the 14th good for you?
ME: Well, that’s Valentine’s Day, I like to keep that open. Do you have something available on the 15th?
NURSE: I completely understand. Let’s find something on the 15th...
While Zen people are notorious for saying things like, “Sit there and meditate” — without telling you how to meditate — a book called Practicing The Jhanas is the best book I know on the topic of meditation. It not only walks you through how to meditate, it also gets into the different levels of meditation, and what you can expect at each level.
(If you’re only interested in Zen, the book Zen Training is the best Zen meditation book I know.)
“Though it does taste like pond scum, Spirulina has some great health-boosting qualities.”
Here’s a video showing how Elon Musk’s SpaceX plans to take people to Mars:
ExtremeTech has a few more details.
When I began reading the book, Never Bet Against Occam, I told my doctors that it was like reading my biography. At the very least it read like the biography of my last few years and hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical expenses, trying to find out why I kept getting very sick and passing out, and why my lab results were jumping around like a rabbit, first showing signs of one illness and then another.
I just noticed that another reviewer wrote, “The book was like a romance novel that I could not put down!” I won’t call it a romance novel, but I know that once I started reading it, I didn’t put it down either. I was smiling at the stories I related to, and also wondered, “Why don’t my doctors know about mastocytosis and mast cell activation disease?”
For more information, here’s a link to Never Bet Against Occam on Amazon.com.
Last night was a rough night, and it made me think of the Joe Walsh song, Help Me Thru The Night. This morning when I was looking for that song I came across a song called, Help Me Make It Through The Night.
This version is performed by Willie Nelson, but it was originally written and performed by Kris Kristofferson. If Willie Nelson isn’t your cup of tea, here’s a link to a Norah Jones version of Help Me Make It Through The Night.
“Some people aren’t meant to stay in your life. But that doesn't mean they can’t stay with you.”
(from the terrific tv series, Limitless)
Netflix has a good, short article on their “journey to asynchronous programming.”
This image is another good answer to the question, “What are mast cells?” Note that mast cells can release tryptase, histamine, serotonin, superoxide, heparin, thromboxane, PGD2, and PAF. The image comes from this selfhacked.com page.
MastCellAware.com has this good answer to the question, “What are mast cells?”
I found their website when I was trying to learn about mast cell degranulation. As they state, “Each mast cell contains secretory granules (storage sacs), each containing powerful biologically active molecules called mediators. These can be secreted when mast cells are triggered, leading to allergic and inflammatory diseases.”
MastCellAware.com is a very well written and presented website about mast cell diseases. This image shows one section of this web page.
Two of the most important sentences for me are: “These mediators can cause a variety of unpredictable symptoms in both children and adults, including skin rashes, flushing, abdominal pain, bloating, nausea, vomiting, headache, bone pain and skeletal lesions, and anaphylaxis. Triggers can be heat, cold, stress (physical or emotional), perfumes or odors, medications, insect stings, and foods.”
Per Wikipedia, Kounis syndrome, also referred to as allergic angina, is “a group of symptoms that manifests as unstable vasospastic, nonvasospastic angina, or acute myocardial infarction and is triggered by the release of inflammatory mediators following an allergic insult.”
Lisa Klimas adds this: “The phenomenon we now called Kounis Syndrome has previously been called by names like morphologic cardiac reactions, acute carditis and lesions with basic characteristics of rheumatic carditis. It is sometimes still referred to as allergic angina or allergic myocardial infarction/heart attack depending upon the presentation. Allergic angina, which affected patients as microvascular angina, was first noted to progress to allergic heart attack in 1991.”
From my perspective as someone just learning about mast cell activation disease, it’s interesting to see that this was known in 1991, but mast cell activation diseases weren’t really recognized until 2007 to 2010.
I was just reading about Spirulina, and came across articles like this which share research about the effects of Spirulina on mast cells (and therefore mast cell diseases):
“Spirulina or Arthrospira is a blue-green alga that became famous after it was successfully used by NASA as a dietary supplement for astronauts on space missions. It has the ability to modulate immune functions and exhibits anti-inflammatory properties by inhibiting the release of histamine by mast cells. Multiple studies investigating the efficacy and the potential clinical applications of Spirulina in treating several diseases have been performed and a few randomized controlled trials and systematic reviews suggest that this alga may improve several symptoms and may even have an anticancer, antiviral and antiallergic effects.”
If you want to try to use functional programming techniques in Java, this is a slide from a slideshow titled, Javaslang - Functional Java Done Right.
This is a good quote from Dr. Afrin, from this MeAndMyMastCells.com page about diagnosing mast cell activation disease (MCAS, MCAD), which explains why it has taken this long to get close to a diagnosis of my illness. Regular everyday doctors, even the hematologist I saw last week, may know about mastocytosis, but they don’t know about mast cell activation disease.
Asked if he made the album feeling it would be his last, he said, “Not specifically, but at this stage in the game, you know that all your activities are subject to abrupt cancellation.”
Amen to that, brother. That quote is from this article about Leonard Cohen.
“There is nothing staid, nothing settled in this universe. All is rippling, all is dancing; all is quickness and triumph.”
~ A little Zen from Virginia Woolf