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A Blue Christmas Reflection

I would really like to get back to writing, but am finding not much time for it. So while I wanted to do a detailed post on a "blue Christmas", let's just keep it short.

I can completely understand why people get blue around the holidays. There can be many reasons. For me, the last few years I had trouble "getting in the holiday spirit" because of limited funds for Christmas, all while waiting for the next episode of medical procedures for Kerri. This Christmas, of course, is the first without her. In some sense, there is relief as there are no more trips to the ER, no more chemotherapy, radiation oncology, and a list of other things that would likely horrify those who have not gone through the experience of metastasized cancer. But this Christmas, while we have many friends and family that we plan on celebrating with (and we will celebrate!), there will be an empty chair. Rather than a feeling of waiting for the next crisis to happen, this Christmas feels hollow knowing Kerri will not be celebrating with us.

I find my life in the last few years was lived between two realities: the reality of suffering, and the reality of "the world which is to come", as John Bunyan has said. I find by being honest with myself about my feelings, and not stuffing them deep down, I have found a deeper appreciation for Christmas, and especially the Advent season. I find that having gone through great loss, and giving myself permission to grieve, the emotions during Christmastide and Epiphany are just as strong but in a positive way, since Christ's birth and appearance in the world bring great hope.

For instance, in the Revised Common Lectionary, the readings in the Old Testament (such as Isaiah 61) mention situations in which Israel was crying out to God and acknowledging their need for deliverance. Advent shows us our need for God, in the midst of pain and suffering. In order for Advent to become meaningful, in my opinion, one cannot push past the unpleasant thoughts too quickly. For instance, reflect upon the words of "O Come, O Come Emmanuel", and see how the song writer portrays in a somber tone waiting and expectation.

There are really not great answers to why bad things happen. No matter which way I look at things theologically, there are always more questions and issues. If simple answers work for you, that's great, but not for me. I struggle to answer the kids when they ask "why did mommy have to die?" I do know, that Advent makes me desire the day when there is no possibility of having the hard conversations, such as telling the kids that mommy doesn't have long to live. Advent allows me to hope that one day, the vocabulary such as "monoclonal antibody", "code status", and other such phrases are not part of our language anymore. Until that time, it is enough for me to wade through the difficulty knowing that "In Him, all things hold together" (Col 1:17)

Here's Margaret Becker's rendition of O Come, O Come Emmanuel:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-Mpf5nEFO0#t=0m58s

I pray that if you are hurting or struggling this Christmas season, this was of some encouragement to you.

FreeBSD 10.1 and Amazon AWS

In the build I'm using on Amazon AWS, I had trouble compiling from the ports wizard. I got an error: "clang frontend command failed due to signal". After searching message boards, I found that this is related to an issue running FreeBSD 10.0 (and apparently 10.1 in my case) in a virtualized environment.

A workaround is to add:

vfs.unmapped_buf_allowed=0

to /boot/loader.conf, and then reboot. This fixes the problem, but the exact causes are unknown. More information here:

https://www.freebsd.org/releases/10.0R/errata.html#open-issues

Faith that Survives

During the time between Kerri's first bout of cancer, and the recurrence, I started to get interested in researching theodicy. Theodicy is the consideration of the "problem of evil", and "why bad things happen". Also, I started reading many books on medical chaplaincy, as I found them quite interesting. I read two books that stood out to me, and have been meaningful. One book, "When Suffering Persists", is written by Frederick K. Schmidt. In this book, he coins the term "Triage Theology". The idea is that in the medical field, triage comes from a French word meaning "to sort". Just as a nurse triages patients in the Emergency Department, to sort how to best and quickly meet the needs of patients, when trauma happens in our life, we naturally "triage" our beliefs. Schmidt's book speaks of how Christians can develop a "theology of suffering". Here are some reasons why from his book: A conversation on suffering is: a necessary counterpoint to our culture of denial an important exercise for people of faith a means of negotiating the tensions between our experience of suffering and the assumptions we make about the way in which God works a corrective to the logic of the health and wealth gospel a means of nurturing emotional and physical well-being a means of nurturing moral responsibility a necessary resource, because we are all the authors of our own triage theology One other point from the book is that with Romans 8:28, it is important to remember that while all things work together for good for those who love God, not all things are good. While God may use events and circumstances in His plan, the things themselves are not always good. That is why I have said in the past that I see cancer as a natural evil. On June 4th, 2014, I was sitting in the hospital room. I was told later the nurses told everyone that I should have some time alone with my wife. I was wondering why everyone had left, except for the chaplain. My wife was in the active phase of dying. I had asked the palliative care APRN a few moments ago what we were looking at, and she said "probably a day at most." The chaplain and I were just sitting there in front of the bed. Finally, the chaplain turned and asked me "Will your faith survive this?". I'm sure I looked like a very hurt puppy at that point, but I answered confidently with a weak smile "Of course." I can certainly understand how a person's faith may be shaken to the core. I was glad I had started working through these issues many months before, as the idea of abandoning faith was a very distant idea at that point. So what to make of a severe emotional trauma of losing your wife to cancer? Well, for starters, the chaplain had also said "This is kind of like birth, isn't it?" My mind went back years ago, in the same hospital, as I waited and watched the physical signs of labor as my children were born. Birth is a process, and for a cancer patient, the body follows a process when shutting down. I hadn't thought of death like this before, but it made sense. The best book I found as I was running "triage" on my thoelogy was a book by a Lutheran entitled "God and Human Suffering" by Douglas John Hall. He presents several ways of looking at suffering, in light of Luther's Theology of the Cross. As Luther said in his Heidelburg disputations #20 and #21: "he deserves to be called a theologian, however, who comprehends the visible and manifest things of God seen through suffering and the cross. A theology of glory calls evil good and good evil. A theology of the cross calls the thing what it actually is." By looking at suffering through the lens of Christ, we see that suffering is a reality, through our suffering, it is a means of becoming and transformation. In both books I mention in this post, they speak of how many Christians emphasize God's power as being most important. While I don't think anyone denies this is an important attribute, by giving it such a large position in how we think of the world, it doesn't work in some circumstances. It is in times like this I believe (and the authors suggest) it is better to see God's love. So for me, as I sat watching my wife transition from this life to the next, my thoughts weren't "Why God, can you not spare her life", but instead, my thoughts were of the outpouring of love from family, church family, friends, and others that God has used and continues to use in our lives. By no means am I saying that God can't do miracles. But at some point, when biologically it seemed that the illness would lead to death, seeing the love of Christ was more of a comfort to me, than thinking that God could come in like the "deus ex machina" (God of the Machine) found in plays, and totally change the situation. As those of us who think on issues of Christianity and science often say, rather than seeing God in the gaps of what we don't know, I'd rather look for God in what I do know. There are probably more things I could say, but this is where some of my theological triage led me.

I just supported MBC Awareness Day on @ThunderclapIt

The full title of this article did not come through on Tumblr, but reading this academic study of communicating hope and realism was helpful to me as a caregiver. I would agree that hope in this setting to me would be a good quality of life for the person I'm caring for, even if their lifespan is shortened.

Comprehensive intravenous dilution, Dosing calculators, Total parenteral nutrition, heparin dosing, gentamycin dosing, kinetic dosing.

This is one good site, especially for calculating equivalent doses of drugs.

John Wesley quote, round 2 (for Mother's day)

“I learned more about Christianity from my mother than from all the theologians in England.” - John Wesley

I would suggest that I learned more about how to _practice_ Christianity from my mother, which is worth more than the theology I've learned.

The speed of video game processors are being used to promote research that is aimed at improving patient care, a new study says. In recent years, video game processors, known as graphic processing units, or GPUs, have become massively powerful as game makers support increasingly elaborate video graphics with rapid-fire processing. Now medical researchers are looking to these GPUs for inspiration. One practical application is reducing the time required to calculate the radiation dose delivered to a tumor during proton radiotherapy, for example. The faster video processors can reduce the time of the most complex calculation method from 70 hours to just 10 seconds.

My thoughts:

This isn't the first time someone thought to use a GPU to solve complex problems, but it caught my eye because of cancer patient care.

Keep in mind: We live in a world now where if you have a problem that requires lots of computational horsepower, there is nothing stopping you from signing up for Amazon Web Services with a credit card, firing up a GPU instance (or as many as needed), and designing an application to crank through issues quickly. What other kinds of problems might be solved because of this technology?

How to get Zoiper on Windows Phone 8 to work with RingCentral

I had a hard time geting the Zoiper client to work with RingCentral. Unfortunately, RingCentral does not have a Windows Phone 8 app, so you have to rely on others. To make Zoiper work, here is what I did:

In the account settings, fill out all the fields for username, sip domain, password, authentication number and outbound proxy. These all need to be in place to make Zoiper register.

However, I still had audio problems after this. To fix them, go into the settings for the RingCentral account on Zoiper, and do the following:

Under Rport, change to "Signaling and media". Enable STUN, and use the server "stun.zoiper.com". Port and timeout defaults are ok.

It should now work. Took a bit of guessing and trying settings, but now I can place calls with it.

#voip #ringcentral #ippone #zoiper

Besides my ASA subscription, I'm always glad when the journals arrive from across the pond (England). More reading material on faith and science!

Here is a good viewpoint on suffering. One thing I note in this article is how their focus in previous years to their child's illness was on God being all-powerful, but their thinking shifted to God's love. I see this pattern in medical chaplaincy books quite a bit, that sometimes our problems with evil and suffering is our emphasis on one or two attributes of God (all powerful and sovereign), and forget there are others.

This video explains the mechanism of action of Kadcyla (T-DM1), what promises to be a huge change in the way HER2 positive cancer gets treated. Now, a more potent chemotherapy (emtansine) can be delivered to overexpressed HER2 positive cells without bad side effects, using trastuzumab to seek them out.

Kadcyla was just approved early 2013 by the FDA. This is truly a remarkable time to be alive, to see new targeted therapies being developed.

Here is the drug information:

http://www.drugbank.ca/drugs/DB05773

This is my former English professor's sermon. Very good and helpful when thinking about the problem of suffering, and when we ask the "Why?" questions.

This looks promising. I haven't listened to it yet, but plan on it.

A teen's science fair project led him to realize that changing fonts could save the U.S. government millions of dollars.

These stories of young entrepreneurs are great to read. Especially getting published in a academic type of journal, too!

I'm standing here next to St. Francis de Sales, the person the hospital is named after. He wrote the following prayer below:

Be at Peace

Do not look forward in fear to the changes of life; rather look to them with full hope as they arise. God, whose very own you are, will deliver you from out of them. He has kept you hitherto, and He will lead you safely through all things; and when you cannot stand it, God will bury you in his arms. Do not fear what may happen tomorrow; the same everlasting Father who cares for you today will take care of you then and everyday. He will either shield you from suffering, or will give you unfailing strength to bear it. Be at peace, and put aside all anxious thoughts and imagination.

Public Service Announcement: Back up your data!

In this age of digital photos, videos, and other content, it is important that your data is backed up. In the past, we used to take pictures with film, use records, tapes, or CDs. Now, most things are files, which can be lost if a disk drive fails.

Most internet providers provide some form of online backup, and your data may fit into the space they give you. There are also other reasonably priced companies that give you large amounts of space for very little money. Try to use one that allows for saving revisions of files, that way if you overwrite a file accidentally, you can retrieve the previous version.

I am of the opinion that while cloud services like Google, Flickr, Instagram, etc., are great, there are no guarantees that they won't lose your data. Having pictures stored on your computer, a photo storage service, and a backup service through your internet provider will at least give you two backups of what is on your computer, in case of a crash.

One other backup scheme is burn DVDs with all your data, and then put them in a fireproof safe. That will give you a local copy that may be faster to restore than over the Internet. These are just some ideas, and any backup is better than having nothing in place at all.

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