Roaring back at the universe-- HA HA!! Good Counts! (in many senses of the phrase...)
I went in for my one-week-post-big-chemo labs and my weekly vincristine and procrit. Good news abounds.
My platelet count went from 21 on Monday, to 24 today. Looks like it's not going to crash, just bounce back. HgB is 12, and WBC is
12. I'm in good shape for a week after chemo. My bone marrow seems to be working, albeit with a lot of support.
HA! I say to the universe. So there! Pppfffffftttt! Try to get me down with almost two years of nonexistent blood counts and constant transfusions, will you? I haven't had a platelet transfusion in 25 DAYS!!! HA! I am strong, I am invincible, I am woman....
(knock on wood...)
Tuesday, September 10, 2002
Sleep-deprived Night + End of Prednisone + 5 hours of Blood Transfusions = Long, Spacy Day
Not to mention the headachy, rundown feeling both from the prednisone crash and the low hemoglobin (7.5), and the stomach blahs (could be from that bag of sour cream and onion potato chips at 1 a.m., but it's not my fault! The prednisone munchies made me do it!) I sincerely hope I feel better tomorrow than today.
I seem to have less tolerance for these long transfusion and treatment days as time goes on. I thought going to the Cancer Care Center less (as I have been recently) would help my morale and patience on the days I do have to be there, but it seems to be having the opposite effect. Having gotten a taste of freedom, the confinement feels more intolerable. I guess I didn't have that much to compare it to before, but now I do. I've been teased by the possibility of a more normal life and now it's hard to stuff my impatience back into the box when I have to be "sick" again. Of course, in the long run, maybe this is a good thing -- pushing me out of the sick mode and into life again. I'm just not quite there yet, and the transition is nerve-wracking.
Not to mention the headachy, rundown feeling both from the prednisone crash and the low hemoglobin (7.5), and the stomach blahs (could be from that bag of sour cream and onion potato chips at 1 a.m., but it's not my fault! The prednisone munchies made me do it!) I sincerely hope I feel better tomorrow than today.
I seem to have less tolerance for these long transfusion and treatment days as time goes on. I thought going to the Cancer Care Center less (as I have been recently) would help my morale and patience on the days I do have to be there, but it seems to be having the opposite effect. Having gotten a taste of freedom, the confinement feels more intolerable. I guess I didn't have that much to compare it to before, but now I do. I've been teased by the possibility of a more normal life and now it's hard to stuff my impatience back into the box when I have to be "sick" again. Of course, in the long run, maybe this is a good thing -- pushing me out of the sick mode and into life again. I'm just not quite there yet, and the transition is nerve-wracking.
Monday, September 09, 2002
The Monday after chemo blues
Here I am on my last day of prednisone for this round, and I have really wacky blood counts. My WBC went up to 32.5, thanks to the overachieving effects of the Neulasta. I hope it saves some of itself for two weeks from now... My platelets were still good (for me) for the week after chemo at 21. Hope they bounce back up around 70 again where they were last week. However, the problem child of the blood counts today was my HgB which has bottomed out at 7.5, after a couple of weeks of bouncing up and down between 8 and 10. Boo! That means missing my support group again tomorrow at the Cancer Wellness Center and going to the Cancer Care Center instead for a blood transfusion for about 5 hours. Fun and games...
Probably this is all due to the talk last Friday about only going into the CCC once a week, instead of twice. HA!!! I must have forgotten to knock on wood... Now I get to go in 3 times this week. Better not be more than that! That'll teach us to speculate without proper voodoo techniques to ward off the evil eye. :-(
Here I am on my last day of prednisone for this round, and I have really wacky blood counts. My WBC went up to 32.5, thanks to the overachieving effects of the Neulasta. I hope it saves some of itself for two weeks from now... My platelets were still good (for me) for the week after chemo at 21. Hope they bounce back up around 70 again where they were last week. However, the problem child of the blood counts today was my HgB which has bottomed out at 7.5, after a couple of weeks of bouncing up and down between 8 and 10. Boo! That means missing my support group again tomorrow at the Cancer Wellness Center and going to the Cancer Care Center instead for a blood transfusion for about 5 hours. Fun and games...
Probably this is all due to the talk last Friday about only going into the CCC once a week, instead of twice. HA!!! I must have forgotten to knock on wood... Now I get to go in 3 times this week. Better not be more than that! That'll teach us to speculate without proper voodoo techniques to ward off the evil eye. :-(
Sunday, September 08, 2002
Dear friends and family,
Contrary to seemingly popular sentiment, I did not make this weblog to be difficult or to leave anyone feeling left out of the news. On the contrary, I wanted to make the news more available to everyone with less hassle to me. If you come here to this blog, you can find out how I'm feeling almost anytime.
I just can't take all the repetitious emails I was sending out to my beloved and very well-meaning friends and family anymore. I want to talk about OTHER things sometimes, so I try to cover my health stuff on the website. The short version is that I'm doing very well. My blood counts are WAY up. I have had very little problem with the treatment and prednisone these last few days. I finish it tomorrow. We'll see what this week brings, but things are looking up.
I go in for blood counts tomorrow, as a follow up to my treatment last Thursday. I'll have to go twice this week, but we are actually contemplating having me only go in once a week most of the time, if my blood counts stay on the upswing, especially the platelets. Wow. I might actually have to get more of a life! Just a few weeks ago, I was having to be there EVERY DAY. Now only once a week? Astounding!
I've been pretty busy too, between the visit to my family after my dad's surgery, the Jewish holidays, Erin living here, and my apartment being occasionally used as a refuge once again for the over-stressed. I forgot what all that is like when I had a few months of peace and solitude and semi-independent living... Of course all that peace and quiet was a little boring too.
At least I don't have a cast on my leg any longer. Instead I entertain a cast of thousands...or at least it seems that way sometimes. This afternoon peace and quiet has once again temporarily descended. I even took a walk over to Lucky Platter for a delicious and quiet early dinner. That's the longest walk I've taken since my cast was removed, I think.
I'm having a blast with my new online class. I have a couple of wacky student stories, but luckily the wackiest one dropped the class. She didn't even know how to turn on the computer... In fact, she didn't even HAVE a computer! How can you sign up for an online class if you don't know how to use a computer????
I'm giving a presentation on Friday afternoon to the Advisory Board at the college about my online class. That's going to be fun. I'm attaching below (for those of you who are interested) the handout I made for it so you can see what I'm doing. I love this stuff, and am probably going to be telling the advisory board way more than they wanted to know, but hey, what the heck... I'm in charge. It's my 15 minutes of fame.
-----------------------
Explanation which might be boring to some, but tells you what it is I do for a living these days
ECE 180 The Exceptional Child (Online Version)
Preview of ECE 180 Online: The first contact most students have with my online course is the Preview website, where they can find out what the course is like and if it’s a good match for their skills and learning styles. This is especially important because of the heavy emphasis on reading, writing and self-motivation that an online class requires.
Preview website:
http://servercc.oakton.edu/~teach/sampleofECE180fall.html
WebCT: The usual format for this class is on WebCT, which is limited access. You need a login ID and a password. On our WebCT site, we have the course syllabus, “Your Instructor,” course calendar with due dates, Program Observations description, chat room for the instructor’s office hours (fun!), weekly online discussion topics, weekly assignment choices, and the private online journals for each student’s responses to the weekly assignments s/he chooses.
This private journal can only be accessed by the individual student and the instructor. This is a dialog journal, where a student posts a response to an assignment, and then I give feedback and a grade, and often other ideas for the student to consider. Sometimes there is a longer “conversation” that takes place about a particular assignment, depending on the student’s interest and enthusiasm.
WebCT login address:
http://online.oakton.edu:8900/webct/public/home.pl?action=print_home
Very Necessary Backup Website: All course information is also available on the backup website on Oakton’s servercc, which is freely available. (No excuses, like “I couldn’t get on WebCT…”) Samples of the discussion questions are posted on the alternate discussion board (Discus) and available by link from the backup website, although most of the time the discussions really take place on the WebCT discussion board only. Any emergency (or misguided) discussion postings on Discus can later be moved or copied to WebCT.
The private journals for assignment responses are only on WebCT. In an emergency, entries can be posted on Discus from the backup website, but that is not private, so I wouldn’t post a grade or feedback on there. In such a case, I would only give feedback by email directly to the student. Later I would copy the entry and my email feedback to the student’s private journal when WebCT was working properly again. A student could also email a journal response to me, but at times there has been a problem of emails getting lost in the ether. A discussion board format is better, because if the student can see his/her work there, so can I. And only I can erase it.
Backup website:
http://servercc.oakton.edu/~teach
Instructions by email and blog: Frequently in the beginning of the semester, and less frequently as time goes on, I email instructions and/or my views on topics under discussion to the students.
I also store a copy of all my emailed edicts and instructions and, hopefully in the future, content-oriented spoutings on a weblog, aptly titled “The Instructor’s Ramblings on the Exceptional Child.” This info is always available to students, regardless of whether they have forgotten or deleted the instructions from their email. They can go to the weblog when they have a problem and aren’t sure they remember what I told them to do. The most recent instructions appear first, but all of them are stored in an archive on the “blog”. The blog is available by link from both WebCT and the backup website.
Instructor’s blog:
http://www.judithw.blogspot.com
Online quizzes are done through the publisher’s “Companion Website” for our text, Exceptional Lives, by Turnbull, et al. Students go online whenever they are ready (but by the end of the week for that chapter) and take an open book quiz consisting of 20 multiple choice questions. The website immediately grades the quiz and the results are emailed to me and to the student. The companion website also offers chapter summaries, student-made study guides, links to other sites, and lots more. The companion website is available by link from both WebCT and the backup website.
Publisher’s Companion Website:
http://cwx.prenhall.com/bookbind/pubbooks/turnbull5/
Contrary to what you might expect, most students don’t get perfect scores. Open book tests can be hard and time-consuming. They just think it’s going to be a piece of cake.
My feeling about the open book quizzes is this: I don’t lecture to give the students the information they can get from reading the text. I want to make sure the students at least skim, if not seriously read, the textbook. The online quizzes help me to assure that this happens. I don’t care so much if they remember a particular fact or resource, as much as I want them to know where to find the information for themselves when they need it.
I keep this from artificially inflating their final grades, because the vast majority of the students’ points come from their writings, in the form of two 5-page program observation reports, their weekly discussion postings, their private journal entries, and their interaction/participation with the other students and with the instructor.
Weekly Assignment Choices and Weekly Discussions:
Because I don’t use my time and effort “lecturing” to the students, I have set up a variety of active learning assignments to put them into real life scenarios, mini-research projects, and thought (and emotion) -provoking video versions of reality, to counterbalance the theory they learn from the text. I offer at least two assignment choices each week, and I offer bonus points for some choices that I feel are more valuable, but less convenient to the students, such as some very excellent videos we have in IMS, and an on-campus physical disabilities simulation workshop I run every semester.
I approach the weekly discussions the same way. I post scenarios gleaned from my own or my colleagues experiences, or from the current news reports. Most of these scenarios are true events, although some of them are composites of several similar happenings. This semester I am only offering one discussion topic per week, but that will change as I develop more topics. I’d like to have at least two discussion topic choices per week.
In order to get credit for the discussions, the student is required first to answer my scenario in detail. What would that student do in that situation? The student should then read what other students have written, and choose at least one other student’s post to reply to. Some students confine themselves to that minimum, but others will freely respond to more than one entry. We have had some great discussions. The quality seems to improve as the semester goes on, with the more involved students modeling good, specific interaction to the less out-going and/or more generalizing students. Online discussions are great for students who are shy in class. In an online discussion you hear ideas from all the students, not just the confident “talkers.” Students have the time to think over and revise what they want to say before it becomes part of the record, unlike having to think on their feet, so to speak, in an in-class discussion.
This Semester’s Weekly Assignment Choices:
http://servercc.oakton.edu/~teach/assignonlinefall02.html
Sample of Weekly Discussion Topics and Private Journal Instructions:
http://lego.oakton.edu/discus/messages/26/26.html
Contrary to seemingly popular sentiment, I did not make this weblog to be difficult or to leave anyone feeling left out of the news. On the contrary, I wanted to make the news more available to everyone with less hassle to me. If you come here to this blog, you can find out how I'm feeling almost anytime.
I just can't take all the repetitious emails I was sending out to my beloved and very well-meaning friends and family anymore. I want to talk about OTHER things sometimes, so I try to cover my health stuff on the website. The short version is that I'm doing very well. My blood counts are WAY up. I have had very little problem with the treatment and prednisone these last few days. I finish it tomorrow. We'll see what this week brings, but things are looking up.
I go in for blood counts tomorrow, as a follow up to my treatment last Thursday. I'll have to go twice this week, but we are actually contemplating having me only go in once a week most of the time, if my blood counts stay on the upswing, especially the platelets. Wow. I might actually have to get more of a life! Just a few weeks ago, I was having to be there EVERY DAY. Now only once a week? Astounding!
I've been pretty busy too, between the visit to my family after my dad's surgery, the Jewish holidays, Erin living here, and my apartment being occasionally used as a refuge once again for the over-stressed. I forgot what all that is like when I had a few months of peace and solitude and semi-independent living... Of course all that peace and quiet was a little boring too.
At least I don't have a cast on my leg any longer. Instead I entertain a cast of thousands...or at least it seems that way sometimes. This afternoon peace and quiet has once again temporarily descended. I even took a walk over to Lucky Platter for a delicious and quiet early dinner. That's the longest walk I've taken since my cast was removed, I think.
I'm having a blast with my new online class. I have a couple of wacky student stories, but luckily the wackiest one dropped the class. She didn't even know how to turn on the computer... In fact, she didn't even HAVE a computer! How can you sign up for an online class if you don't know how to use a computer????
I'm giving a presentation on Friday afternoon to the Advisory Board at the college about my online class. That's going to be fun. I'm attaching below (for those of you who are interested) the handout I made for it so you can see what I'm doing. I love this stuff, and am probably going to be telling the advisory board way more than they wanted to know, but hey, what the heck... I'm in charge. It's my 15 minutes of fame.
-----------------------
Explanation which might be boring to some, but tells you what it is I do for a living these days
ECE 180 The Exceptional Child (Online Version)
Preview of ECE 180 Online: The first contact most students have with my online course is the Preview website, where they can find out what the course is like and if it’s a good match for their skills and learning styles. This is especially important because of the heavy emphasis on reading, writing and self-motivation that an online class requires.
Preview website:
http://servercc.oakton.edu/~teach/sampleofECE180fall.html
WebCT: The usual format for this class is on WebCT, which is limited access. You need a login ID and a password. On our WebCT site, we have the course syllabus, “Your Instructor,” course calendar with due dates, Program Observations description, chat room for the instructor’s office hours (fun!), weekly online discussion topics, weekly assignment choices, and the private online journals for each student’s responses to the weekly assignments s/he chooses.
This private journal can only be accessed by the individual student and the instructor. This is a dialog journal, where a student posts a response to an assignment, and then I give feedback and a grade, and often other ideas for the student to consider. Sometimes there is a longer “conversation” that takes place about a particular assignment, depending on the student’s interest and enthusiasm.
WebCT login address:
http://online.oakton.edu:8900/webct/public/home.pl?action=print_home
Very Necessary Backup Website: All course information is also available on the backup website on Oakton’s servercc, which is freely available. (No excuses, like “I couldn’t get on WebCT…”) Samples of the discussion questions are posted on the alternate discussion board (Discus) and available by link from the backup website, although most of the time the discussions really take place on the WebCT discussion board only. Any emergency (or misguided) discussion postings on Discus can later be moved or copied to WebCT.
The private journals for assignment responses are only on WebCT. In an emergency, entries can be posted on Discus from the backup website, but that is not private, so I wouldn’t post a grade or feedback on there. In such a case, I would only give feedback by email directly to the student. Later I would copy the entry and my email feedback to the student’s private journal when WebCT was working properly again. A student could also email a journal response to me, but at times there has been a problem of emails getting lost in the ether. A discussion board format is better, because if the student can see his/her work there, so can I. And only I can erase it.
Backup website:
http://servercc.oakton.edu/~teach
Instructions by email and blog: Frequently in the beginning of the semester, and less frequently as time goes on, I email instructions and/or my views on topics under discussion to the students.
I also store a copy of all my emailed edicts and instructions and, hopefully in the future, content-oriented spoutings on a weblog, aptly titled “The Instructor’s Ramblings on the Exceptional Child.” This info is always available to students, regardless of whether they have forgotten or deleted the instructions from their email. They can go to the weblog when they have a problem and aren’t sure they remember what I told them to do. The most recent instructions appear first, but all of them are stored in an archive on the “blog”. The blog is available by link from both WebCT and the backup website.
Instructor’s blog:
http://www.judithw.blogspot.com
Online quizzes are done through the publisher’s “Companion Website” for our text, Exceptional Lives, by Turnbull, et al. Students go online whenever they are ready (but by the end of the week for that chapter) and take an open book quiz consisting of 20 multiple choice questions. The website immediately grades the quiz and the results are emailed to me and to the student. The companion website also offers chapter summaries, student-made study guides, links to other sites, and lots more. The companion website is available by link from both WebCT and the backup website.
Publisher’s Companion Website:
http://cwx.prenhall.com/bookbind/pubbooks/turnbull5/
Contrary to what you might expect, most students don’t get perfect scores. Open book tests can be hard and time-consuming. They just think it’s going to be a piece of cake.
My feeling about the open book quizzes is this: I don’t lecture to give the students the information they can get from reading the text. I want to make sure the students at least skim, if not seriously read, the textbook. The online quizzes help me to assure that this happens. I don’t care so much if they remember a particular fact or resource, as much as I want them to know where to find the information for themselves when they need it.
I keep this from artificially inflating their final grades, because the vast majority of the students’ points come from their writings, in the form of two 5-page program observation reports, their weekly discussion postings, their private journal entries, and their interaction/participation with the other students and with the instructor.
Weekly Assignment Choices and Weekly Discussions:
Because I don’t use my time and effort “lecturing” to the students, I have set up a variety of active learning assignments to put them into real life scenarios, mini-research projects, and thought (and emotion) -provoking video versions of reality, to counterbalance the theory they learn from the text. I offer at least two assignment choices each week, and I offer bonus points for some choices that I feel are more valuable, but less convenient to the students, such as some very excellent videos we have in IMS, and an on-campus physical disabilities simulation workshop I run every semester.
I approach the weekly discussions the same way. I post scenarios gleaned from my own or my colleagues experiences, or from the current news reports. Most of these scenarios are true events, although some of them are composites of several similar happenings. This semester I am only offering one discussion topic per week, but that will change as I develop more topics. I’d like to have at least two discussion topic choices per week.
In order to get credit for the discussions, the student is required first to answer my scenario in detail. What would that student do in that situation? The student should then read what other students have written, and choose at least one other student’s post to reply to. Some students confine themselves to that minimum, but others will freely respond to more than one entry. We have had some great discussions. The quality seems to improve as the semester goes on, with the more involved students modeling good, specific interaction to the less out-going and/or more generalizing students. Online discussions are great for students who are shy in class. In an online discussion you hear ideas from all the students, not just the confident “talkers.” Students have the time to think over and revise what they want to say before it becomes part of the record, unlike having to think on their feet, so to speak, in an in-class discussion.
This Semester’s Weekly Assignment Choices:
http://servercc.oakton.edu/~teach/assignonlinefall02.html
Sample of Weekly Discussion Topics and Private Journal Instructions:
http://lego.oakton.edu/discus/messages/26/26.html
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