We have been quiet. Not just quiet in this weblog, we find ourselves quiet in our time together. I think we are just plain tired. We have been at this for months on end.
Even when we are talking of grandkids, our minds seem to drift further out to sea; What will come in over the horizon in the coming week or two?
Success or failure?
Success would be new blood being made in Bonnie's besieged bone marrow: red blood, white blood and platletes.
Failure would be more of the same, more of the last 6 months: No new blood, no immune system, and time and options running out. Failure is not an option.
Even success has it's risks.
To go into remission this time around, only means a reprieve.
To get out of this box, Bonnie will have to go into remission. And then go back to the hospital to undergo a bone marrow transplant and 100 days of reverse isolation. Another period of reverse isolation of 100 days or more is required as her new immune system once again will be knocked flat by drugs to allow the new stem cells to engraft and take over her system.
Bonnie will have to become a true chimera, and in the process trust that her body will not reject the graft and that the graft will not attack her -- both are foreign to each other.
So we are quiet.
On Bonnie's furlough of 6 hours today we went to have lunch down by the wharf in Boston in John Hancock's old counting house. We celebrated Bonnie's new count. Bonnie made enough new red blood cells that she did not require a transfusion today. Hurray. Bonnie is making some red blood. We will have to wait to see what happens with her critical white blood counts, which are still 1/10 of a low normal white blood count and 1/4 of a low viable range.
I find that I am losing IQ. I have to check everything I do. I am worn out. I make mistakes. I am slow-witted.
Thirty years ago I was climbing Half Dome in Yosemite with a friend who was one of the top climbers in the Valley, I had to follow his lead. I was climbing at the edge of my ability. On the second to last pitch I got exceedingly tired from the exertion and stress of tip toeing along footholds half the thickness of your baby finger, while stretching to find hidden hand holds that offered the relief of a fifty cent piece on edge.
I became so mentally numb that I nearly made a fatal mistake.
We were climbing a glacial polished prow and the view was stunning: Yosemite Valley below, the Clarke Range in the distance and the clouds from Cloud's Rest billowing by.
I had never felt so alive and full of a sense of beauty.
Beauty and awe aside, my hands and feet and mind got numb from the exertion. As I cleaned up the ropes and carabiners and re-rack the climbing nuts for the next two pitches, I inadvertently unhooked the rope from the caribeener to our last piece of protection. I quickly reversed my mistake. I pray for strength and no mistakes now. I had to steer Bonnie clear of a fat kid in front of the hospital who had the termidity to sneeze. Little things are not little things now.
While Bonnie is beginning to make red blood cells again and we are enjoying our 6 hour breaks from the same room on the same floor in the same hospital, we are often quiet.
I guess I should take solice in the fact that we are following our formula for going into remission again. The last time Bonnie went into remission she was managing the rennovation of our beach house which had to be ripped down to the studs.
So Bonnie and I have our friend, Joe West from California, down in Texas working on a rental house Bonnie has down there. We have a hundred photos of everything that needs to be fixed and where we stand in a Groove workspace that get's synchronized every night, so Bonnie can call the shots on the rennovations. I guess when you have a working recipe you stick to it.
So there we have it. Bonnie is steering a major rennovation of a rental home, and reading a book on Thomas Jefferson, and keeping up with her prayers and St. Ignatious Exercise and dealing with the visitudes of being hooked to a pole with a pump 12 hours a day and looking forward to 6 hour furloughs.
The only other thing that worked last time was your love and prayers.
Please continue to send them Bonnie's way.
/D for BanD.
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