I recently started a new job as Head of Engineering at a patient-centric health-focused startup.
From a friend:
Subject: Gratz on the new gig!
I was recently diagnosed with heart failure so I’m eager to see efforts like Clara Health get some traction 🙂 Good job Terry! JP
I sent this photo to Francis already but I thought you may like to take a look. It was taken in Tijuana, Mexico during my freshmen year at Berkeley. Francis wanted to eat authentic Mexican food and bought something from a food cart vendor. He kept enticing us with smacking and yum-yum noises as he ate.
Then that night he was visited by Montezuma’s revenge.
My uncle, my aunt, and my mom.
KEN:
Hi-larious!
My aunt started an e-mail thread in my family. I’ll include excerpts here periodically.
I am cleaning the house of more pictures — so many. In the album Grandma Omma left, I found some pictures your mom. I will send another email of your mom and dad’s wedding that you probably have seen already.
My mom, like her father before her, loved science. She started in physical chemistry like her father but her heart condition caused by rheumatic fever led her to work in biophysics studying the neural network of the heart and heart arrhythmias.
Continue reading about and seeing more photos after the jump
My aunt, when doing cleaning, came across an essay answer to a questionnaire that my cousin Alex wrote in 2001 for a high school entrance application.
Two years ago my aunt died of heart failure. I began to grow closer to her a few months before her death because I became old enough to understand about family ties, and respect. She was a biological chemist who contracted rheumatic fever when young, and she had to fight her weak heart all her life. Her field of work was in heart rhythm. She devoted most of her time to studying ways to automatically revive hearts that go out of rhythm (called arrhythmia) with medicine instead of using machines that shock the heart into beating regularly. She conducted extensive research, wrote many scientific papers, and gave numerous talks at scientific conferences on her work. Her death impacted me in ways that were greater than my grandparents’ deaths. I was old enough to see that life can leave unexpectedly. During my time on earth, I want to achieve notable goals, like my aunt, and when it is finally time for me to move on, I hope I can leave this world as peacefully as she did — while resting from studying — her heart simply stopped beating.
That aunt was my mom. I love you too, Mommy Chay, this mother’s day, and always.
I’m horribly sick right now.
Apple MacBook Pro iSight
I shouldn’t have gotten out of bed yesterday, but I eventually did which was probably not wise.
Being sick means waking up with strange or horrible dreams.
This time, it is years later and my instant best friend has died. I’m thinking how horrible it is that she died so young, so soon after we met, and how I can barely recall her name and face now. But I wake up, everything is fine, nobody’s dead, and its only me who is sick.
I want to call her and make sure she really isn’t dead, but I don’t want to be served with a temporary restraining order. So I think better of it and blog where this private insanity of mine comes from.
[Two dreams of death after the jump.]Continue reading