OK bloomer

Hello world! It’s been a while. Finals season was upon me. I’m 100% done with one of my final projects, I completed one of my exams this morning, and I’m 80% done with the next final project. Coming up next week is my very last final exam. I’ll have to write a bunch of essays… I hate writing essays! But I’ll do my best anyway. If I do poorly, then I’ll do poorly. My classes are just pass-fail anyway, so it’s not the worst thing in the world. Going to grad school has defeated my perfectionist spirit.

Perhaps you’ve noticed, but I’ve added some Pikmin to my Christmas theme. They wiggle around randomly too, which I hope isn’t too annoying. I sort of wanted to give the impression that they were alive, haha. I’ve also made a big page for every single lifelog asset in Pikmin Bloom. It’s very image-heavy, but I had a lot of fun setting it up. Please check it out! Other than writing lots of code and essays, this has been the main reason that my site has taken a while to update.

I’ve continued to have issues with the Neocities CLI, so I hope that adding hundreds of images to the upload process doesn’t cause any issues. I might use WebDAV to update my site from now on. Haha.

In far-flung future news, I’ve decided that my post-graduation project (which still feels very far away) is to build a very small house as an accessory dwelling unit on my parent’s lot. My parents have experience building ADUs already, so their expertise will be really helpful. I also have some non-certified construction experience (building barns, building docks, renovating my parents’ ADU) from when I was a farmhand during the pandemic. This way when I move I won’t have to lug all my sentimental belongings around and once I pay off the tuition and the cost of lumber I’ll have a debt-free place that I can always live in case something happens! My husband is incredibly enthusiastic about the idea too, and there are some shockingly cheap log cabin kit companies that serve the area where my parents live (the Blue Ridge mountains). As long as nothing too financially crazy happens, I think it could really happen! How exciting!

I guess it would be the wild dream of every cottagecore Pinterest user, but I’ll probably not end up doing very much farming or cottagey interior design, because all my crops die and I’m very very bad at interior decoration. But it’ll be a house! Our own little house! And if my husband and I stay there, we can watch the farm while my parents go on vacation. For the last many years, they’ve had to go on vacation in turns because someone has to take care of all the animals. While I’m very bad with horticulture, I actually am pretty good at taking care of farm animals, so it’ll be nice. In another life, I could be a dog groomer and sheep whisperer. But instead I am a statistician.

Oh, and in great news, the paper I’ve been helping do the analysis for has finally been published in the Lancet Oncology! It’s a really big deal to me, because this has been my life’s work for the last 4 years. Basically, we used the electronic health record’s questionnaire function to perform symptom surveillance in a very large oncology cohort, and when symptoms reached certain levels of severity, we were able to automate different levels of support for those patients. Because of this, patients reported less anxiety and depression than before the intervention, and the amount of unplanned hospitalizations, emergency department visits, and stays in the ICU went down dramatically. And this was with just a couple of extra people hired to provide support at no cost to the patient! This type of intervention both works and is scalable to a population of over 50,000 patients, so I hope that more hospital systems try to implement it and reduce the burden of psychological symptoms and expensive hospital stays on an already-vulnerable population of people with cancer. I’d also like to see if this sort of intervention works on the non-oncology cohort… I’d like more hospitals to show people that help is available and you can get help before your symptoms become too serious to bear. It could do a lot to alleviate symptom burden for a lot of people.

And in other happy news, the colchicine has been working for me so far. It’s not a long term solution because of the toxicity, but I hope that I can do all my finals without suffering severe disease. I wonder when the genetic test results will come back… And I still have to get the biopsy done. But I feel a little more optimistic every day that I’m symptom-free.