That Book By Nabokov

Sun July 3, 2022 - Day +199
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Recently, I was talking to a friend about long COVID symptoms.  He mentioned that an elder family member caused himself a pretty serious injury -- a hernia of some sort -- from intense post COVID coughing.  :(

I'm actually concerned about something like this happening to me.  Every morning I cough (on and off) for maybe 20-30 minutes.  I just can't shake it.  My energy is up enough that I'm swimming super early almost every morning, so at least when I stop to cough while I'm in the pool, I'm outside and not waking anybody up.  But I can definitely feel it in my ribs and my back.  I have to consciously work to try to keep it under control so I don't injure myself.  Crazy.

Sleep has been better and more consistent, but the alcohol still doesn't mix.  On Friday night I had one IPA and my sleep that night was harrrrible.  And now that I'm working again, weeknight drinking, even a single drink just isn't in the cards.  For how long?  Who knows... maybe forever.  That's fine.  I really don't need the calories.

So yeah, work has started!  Where did I land?  A company called Guidewire, led by my longtime Salesforce colleague, friend and mentor, Mike Rosenbaum.  The job is Chief of Staff to the Head of Cloud Operations.  Guidewire is going through a major multi-year transformation from its original on-premise solution to a re-architected Cloud Platform.  In addition to all of the development work, we need to do customer migrations and evolve many aspects of operations (various levels/teams of support, triaging, troubleshooting, incident response, program management, SRE, etc.) and I'm going to help drive that.  Seems like it could be a perfect fit.  And unlike my previous startup, Guidewire is a well-established public company (GWRE) -- I definitely need the stability right now.

The Guidewire logo

The job is mostly remote, but I'll be going into the San Mateo office a few times a month.  Remote is great for myriad reasons.  Let's not forget, I'm only 6.5 months out from my second transplant.  The first time around, I went back to work full time, about 6 months after transplant, and, as documented, I was on a boat load of meds and still needed around 8.5-9 hours of sleep per night.  And I was 11 years younger then!  Also, I wasn't dealing with long COVID. I don't really want to be having coughing fits walking around the office.  Muting Zoom is easy.  And speaking of COVID, we really don't know what's next with this crazy pandemic.  I still need to be careful.  How careful?  Not sure.  Need to ask my team at my next appointment on July 11th.

Along those lines, I'm happy to report that I recently got off all meds except Acyclovir!  No more Tac, no more Posaconisole, no more Septra, no more Amlodipine.  This is pretty incredible and likely wouldn't be possible if we hadn't gone with Martin as my donor again.  Clearly our cells know how to play nice together.  In my 1.0 battle, I was still taking Tac and all that other stuff -- onaccounta GvHD -- 18 months post transplant!  With 2.0, I set the UCSF record for longest AML relapse. I wonder if I'll set the record for getting off all meds the quickest (touch wood.)

Anyway, that's the quick update.  As usual, it's all kids baseball all the time, but I'll save that for a future post.

iwkia...a