thankful, grateful, and blessed

Thanksgiving has traditionally been a day I would spend indulging in turkey, a great food coma nap, and just the warm feeling of being with my family.

This year was the first year I did not spend Thanksgiving with my family (last year, I at least spent it with my cousin, her husband, and my aunt and uncle). I was really sad that I could not be home with my parents, brother, and grandparents. However, this year's Thanksgiving festivities were a great blessing and also one I won't be forgetting anytime soon.

I spent the day with my Highrock Brookline family, members of whom have been very important to me the past few months. We had a huge feast of all the traditional Thanksgiving dishes, great conversations, and even got in a good game of football. It was a lot of fun to get out on the field for some fresh air and running. I felt incredibly gratified knowing I have so many people here that I can share my time, love, and faith with.

More importantly, I have found that this past year has been one I am immensely thankful for. From becoming acclimated to Boston to finding my love of the law to regaining my spiritual strength to taking on new challenges I had never expected I would take, I have been so blessed. Everyone around me has had a great impact on me, whether they challenged me to become a better person or shared in my many laughs and cries.

I couldn't have asked for a better year to start defining who I am as an independent woman making her own decisions about who she will become as a daughter, sister, friend, lawyer, and most importantly, friend and stronghold.

Even a year ago, I would not have envisioned myself doing so many of the things I have: become a certified SCUBA diver, trained for a marathon through wind, rain, and snow, advocated for impoverished clients at a clinic, and grown up to be the woman I truly want to be, among a myriad of other wonderful growing experiences.

I cannot wait for all the accomplishments I am going to make, all the people I am going to meet, the love I am going to experience, and all the adventures God has for me.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Busy Bee

I have not had the chance to update my blog lately because I have been inundated with work: from clinic to journal to classes to APALSA, things have simply been chaotic. I find that a lot of my free time has become devoted to running. Thankfully, I have some great friends (and my Team from Team in Training!) who I can run with and who keep me going.

Keeping this in mind, I thought I would share some information about bone marrow registry drives.

http://www.helpingjanet.com/

Janet Liang, a recent graduate of UCLA, my alma mater, was recently diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia. She, like all of us, has many dreams and ambitions for her life and needs our help to win the fight against her cancer.

The Asian American and Pacific Islander community is very much under-represented in bone marrow registry. Bone marrow matches often correlates with ethnicity so it is SUPER important that we all, Asian Americans in particular, change this.

Becoming part of the registry only requires a swab of your inner cheek. After this, you will only be contacted if you are a match for someone and then you can decide if you want to donate. Donating bone marrow is similar to giving blood.

Please consider putting yourself in the bone marrow donor registry. You can help save a life.

There will be a bone marrow registry drive at Boston University School of Law on Monday, November 2nd from 12-3 PM.

Please also keep my marathon efforts and fundraiser for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society in your hearts. Any support to this will mean so much to the blood cancer research efforts, to patient care, and to me. http://pages.teamintraining.org/ma/wdw10/sliuie

Thanks so much.

Love,
Shannon

Barely breathing...

Yesterday was my 23rd birthday. That means it has officially been a year since law school stuff started for me. I spent the day helping welcome the new generation of 1Ls and being oriented to the law journal I am a staff member of. I met up with some friends at school and then I had a nice dinner with some great girls.

Everything seemed to be going relatively well until I got home. I was really sore from my run earlier in the day so I took some pain relievers. Next, my lip started swelling up and I took some Benadryl and went to bed. I woke up a couple of hours later only to have some trouble breathing. Upon consulting a nurse's hotline, I realized I needed to go to the Emergency Room. A friend of mine was so great and drove me to the hospital while I was freaked out and just plain scared.

To preface everything, this summer I developed some autoimmune issues. I would randomly, for no apparent reason, get hives and inflammation that would linger for hours frequently. Luckily, I do not have any food allergies. My allergist, however, said that I have slightly lower levels of white blood cells and higher levels of thyroid antibodies and chronic urticaria. What this basically means is that I have antibodies that sometimes attack my body instead of foreign pathogens. Unfortunately, the allergist said that there is no way to know how long the problem will exist, what specifically triggers the symptoms, and when the symptoms even would occur. Thankfully, the symptoms were more of a nuisance than a big safety issue and he prescribed allergy medicine and histamine blockers.

Tonight, at the hospital, I was hooked up to an IV containing Benadryl and steroids to calm down my inflammation and my throat constriction. It took a couple of hours and drowsiness that led me to nap until progress started showing and I could breath pretty normally. The doctor said that my autoimmune issues this time caused my throat tissues to swell up and thus caused my air passageway to shrink, making it hard for me to breathe. So it was a good idea for me to go to the hospital after all. She prescribed me steroids to take for the next week to hopefully keep any symptoms at bay.

My terrible scary night really showed me that I am loved by my friends. From the texts to the phone calls to the Facebook messages, I could tell that my friends were genuinely worried and cared about my well being. One of them even brought me an ice cream cake today to help make up for the fact that my night was so awful. My cousin brought me soup too. It also made me realize that life is not always going to be easy and I will have challenges to face, but I am so thankful that the ones I face are really miniscule compared to the ones people with terminal illnesses face. I will have to consult more specialists to see if they can figure out what the underlying problem is and how I can fix things so I do not have any dangerous symptoms like not being able to breathe in the future.

So I guess I started my 23rd year a lot differently than I had planned to. I am an extremely blessed girl and want to use the blessings I have been given to love others and be the best person I can be for others.

Back to Boston

I have been back in Boston for almost a week now, which signifies that the summer is really coming to a close. Unfortunately, Boston weather is anything but "end of summer weather" because it is incredibly hot and humid. I actually played ultimate frisbee in Boston Common (the oldest park in the United States) and it was almost unbearable; at the same time, it was a pretty cool experience to have.

My summer back in California was great; it was an amazing time for me to get some work experience, think about my goals, and also work A LOT on my faith. All these things showed me that this next year will be a very tough one for me, figuring out what I want to do (which is not big law!) and who I am, but it will be so good as well. This next semester will be busy with civil litigation clinic, working on a journal, job searching for government and public service jobs, getting involved with a church, and of course, training for a FULL (I officially decided to make the bump up to a full marathon) marathon. I am so so excited to be working on myself and pursuing my interests.

23 and battling Leukemia...

Here is another shining example of the need for research for those with Leukemia. It comes close to home because I know many of us have dealt with not having health insurance for periods of time and we often put off taking care of the health concerns we face. Also, having someone close to our age be afflicted with the blood cancer is a scary reality too, especially because we usually associate blood cancers with young children.

http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/07/24/king.sotu.health.care/index.html

Please take the time to read the stories I post or to look at my fundraising page and support me through my own physical challenge and also invest yourself in the important research that still needs to be done.

http://pages.teamintraining.org/ma/wdw10/sliuie

Just one example...

Here is just one example of someone who will be helped by fundraising efforts to the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society.

http://jordanscause.blogspot.com/

I saw his story on the news this weekend and it reminds us how much research is necessary to eliminate this heartbreaking stress on patients and their families.

Please support my race for LLS in any way you can; the cause and I would appreciate it immensely.

http://pages.teamintraining.org/ma/wdw10/sliuie

Embarking on a new journey

I have made the decision to train for and fundraise for the Walt Disney World half marathon on January 10, 2010.

Given that I have asthma and have never been an intense runner, this is a huge deal for me. It is something I have wanted to do for a long time and the fact that I will be helping a great cause (research for blood cancers through the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society) amplifies how important this challenge is to me. I have been lucky not to lose any family members to cancer, but know of so many friends of friends, family friends, and the like who have lost the battle to different kinds of cancers. Making progress in research for cancer is so important and with government funding declining in virtually every area, it is vital that we don't let research become stagnant.

I will be updating this blog from time to time regarding my training and my goals. I hope that you will be along for the ride and will help support me with all of this. Here is the link to my fundraising site: http://pages.teamintraining.org/ma/wdw10/sliuie
Please share what you can with the cause and also share this link with those who would be interested in becoming active for the cause.

On a lighter note, a quote from "How I Met Your Mother":
Barney: Here's how you run a marathon. Step 1: You start running. There's no Step 2.

(If you've seen the episode, you know that Barney fails miserably. He finishes the marathon, but then is pretty much incapacitated because he never trained for the event.)