Síle taking over

Hello everybody. This will be shortish. Well I will try....

My first " order of business" is to thank you all for your incredible show of love and support. You have no idea how much it helped to open my eyes in the hospital and see all those wonderful cards and to think of you all. You have really helped sustain me and uplift me with your many cards, emails, texts, gifts, comments and on and on. And you continue to do so. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.

And to THE Blogging Team. I know how much you all appreciated them. What you don't know is that they would leave the hospital late totally knackered from the Sile minding. And even though I would say in my admittedly at times rare moments of lucidity that they didn't have to update the blog, you know what the response was.

We have moved into our house and Jim has worked tirelessly to make it feel like home. Many basics were missing. No drinking glasses. No oven. only 1 cooking pot. Etc. You get the idea. But now it is feeling very cosy indeed. 

I get stronger every day but it is slow. My blood counts are beautiful according to Dr Nakamura. For those of you who were so involved in the weekly platelet counts over the last 2 years, my platelets have been hovering around 93k. In other words I am swimming in platlelets. Thank you Frank!

My sister in law, Hazel,( Liam's wife), arrives from Ireland in about an hour. She  will be here for 10 days taking over the Sile minding duties. I will try to make it easy for her!

Finally. Here is Úna in pics taken today.( note ainate's cute nails)

Day +35 and +36 More transitions

(Posted by Jim, despite what it says at the bottom.)

Yesterday was a big day -- several hours at the hospital followed by a quick move from the Marriott Residence Inn to the 5-bedroom house in Monrovia.  It was tiring for all involved, which would be Sile and me.

First the good news... the very best news that we can all get.  Dr. Nakamura said Sile's "numbers" were "beautiful".  He's going to do a bone marrow biopsy on Tuesday to determine how much of the  marrow in Sile is Sile's and how much is Frank's.  He's expecting that something north of 90% will be Frank's.  We met a woman in the hospital yesterday who said her marrow was 100% her donor's, a terrific result.

Sile is still trying to get used to the idea that she has part of Frank inside her.  It's a lot easier to visualize, she said, when you think about a kidney or heart transplant.  There's major surgery; one part comes out; and someone else's part goes in.  With bone marrow, it's not something you think of as an organ (until you need a new one, of course) so it's harder to conceptualize.

This all came up this morning when Sile suddenly remembered that she had not yet received her monthly vitamin B12 injection.  She put it on her list of things to talk to Dr. N about and then said, "Wait a minute.  I wonder if I even need that any more.  Now that I have Frank's marrow I might not have to get that."  This is the second possible unexpected benefit from the transplant.  Even before Sile came to Southern California, her allergist told her that she might not need to take athsma medication after the transplant.  After all, athsma is essentially a reaction of the immune system and Frank's immune system may not be as sensitive as Sile's.

A third benefit of the transplant, totally unmentioned by the medical staff, is that Sile is free to live a life of crime, certain that she cannot be convicted on DNA evidence alone...as long as her DNA sample comes from blood.  The DNA in that sample will be a perfect match for Frank, not Sile.  So Frank...If you see the guys in suits with little white earpiece cords curling into their jackets knocking on your front door, you probably should ask them to wait just a minute while you call your sister and see what she's been up to.

The move to Monrovia was a bit more eventful than it should have been.  I found out later that we arrived pretty much just as the workmen left.  I also found out that Amanda, our landlady for the next 2 months. had been scrambling all week to get the house deep cleaned and get one of the showers fixed.  The previous tenants had been in the house for 5 months and left, according to Amanda, piles of trash in every room.  I had told Amanda why we were renting the house and about our concerns regarding cleanliness, so she was apalled at the mess left by the previous tenants.

She was in such a rush to get the plumbing and cleaning done that she didn't inspect the contents of the kitchen before we arrived.  Amanda greeted us and left and we began to unpack our groceries.  I suddenly realized that I couldn't find any cutlery.  There were plenty of little pottery tchotkes but no knives or forks!  Plenty of leftover staples (oil, flour, salt) but no glasses!  To make a long story short, I went to WalMart (5 minutes away) and partially restocked the kitchen so we had enough dishes and cutlery to make dinner.  I'm going back to WalMart later today to finish.  Amanda was horribly apologetic and, in fact, when I later delved into the dark recesses of the cupboards I found some cutlery, so the situation was not quite as dire as I first thought.

The house is a 1908 Craftsman, with all the charm and all the problems that come with an old house.  The house is big (5 bedrooms) and was used as a board-and-care home for elderly people for 20 years or so.  As a result, the mechanical systems (plumbing and electricity) are pretty up to date.  Nonetheless, there are the usual number of electric outlets that you find in each room of a 1908 house (one most of the time, 2 if the builder was being extravagant) and a 100-year history of "improvements".  The house is comfortable enough, though, and we feel lucky to have found it.

The final bit of big news today is that I'm retiring as a "Sile Transplanted" blogger.  Though I will be here until Tuesday, long enough to pass the baton to Hazel, Sile's sister in law, Sile is well enough at this point to take over her own blog.  Hurray, hurray, hurray!  

Day +34: Adieu from Ralph

Quiet day for Sile and me.  We went to City of Hope this morning for Sile's daily infusion of an infection fighting drug.  There was an uncharacteristic delay in getting the drug due to a computer snafu earlier in the morning. This stretched the hour and a half appointment to almost three hours, but we were still back in time for lunch.  Post lunch I headed for the pool and Sile took a rest.

Sile continues doing well.  Back pain still troubles her, but she is experiencing fatigue more than anything else.  As well as she's doing in general it is easy for me (and I think perhaps for her) to forget how much her body has been and is continuing to go through.  She will need to continue to take it slow and step by step, with plenty of rest at each juncture along the way.

Jim arrives tomorrow and I will head home.  According to the Master Schedule, compiled by Master Scheduler Eoin, I won't be back for a while.   I am not overwhelmed with sadness at this parting, though there are a few things I will miss.  These include:

1.  The LA Times.  What a pleasure to have a really good newspaper on hand every morning (the paper is complimentary here at the Marriott so all I have to do each morning is stroll down to the office to pick it up.)  And speaking of the Marriott...

2.  The friendly, competent, thoroughly nice people here at the Marriott Residence Inn.  All of us have been impressed with how well-run this place is, and how great it is to stay somewhere that is so competently managed.  And all of us have been impressed with how nice all the people working here are.  Which leads me to...

3.  Nice people everywhere.  The folks I have dealt with (cashiers at Trader Joes and Walgreens, nurses, doctors, strangers in the elevator) have, for the most part, been unfailingly polite and pleasant.  Given the poor regard us snobs up North have for LA,  this has been a welcome surprise.

4.  The pool at the Rose Bowl Acquatic Center.  50 meters, lovely setting, good temperature, and never more than one other person in my lane.  A definite A+ swimming facility.

And the things I will definitely not miss:

1.  The smog.  It's better since last week's rains, of course, but the sky is still murky.  And on many days I was here it was positively awful.  There are many places with worse air, I know, and it's not as bad as it used to be, I know, but still - bad air affects everything.

2.  The traffic.  The swish of traffic on the freeway is omnipresent.  

3.  Time spent inside my automobile.  (Note relationship between numbers 1,2, and 3).  We are fortunate here at the Residence Inn to be walking distance of restaurants and shopping, including Trader Joes, and I have strolled down with my shopping bags a number of times.  I am, however, in the minority on this - it's not part of the zeitgiest of the place, let us say.   Life is seriously attached to the automobile - whenever I left the hospital at night the nurses offered their farewells not with "Good night" or "See you tomorrow" but with a cheery "Drive safe!".  Every time.  

I'm sure I could come up with a few more complaints but I think I'll stop now, with the list of things I will miss edging out what I dislike by 1 item!

And so I bid farewell to Duarte and environs and to all you blog readers as well.  I leave you with this photo of Sile as she headed out for her evening stroll around the grounds of the Marriott:

Days +32 and +33: Moving Forward

Sile's wonderful friend Liz Muller has been here taking care of Sile for the past couple of days while Jim completed his jury service (now done - hurrah!).   I returned this afternoon to find Sile in fine fettle.  As I had noticed berfore when I was away for a week, the progress in the six days since I was last here is remarkable.  Sile is walking further and more steadily, is eating well and with good appetite, and is increasingly independent.  She saw Dr. Nakamura today for the first time in two weeks (he's been away at a conference and on vacation).  The good doctor reports her numbers are "as good as they get".  Music to our ears.  

We continue at the very comfortable Marriott Residence Inn until Friday when Sile will move to a rented house in nearby Monrovia until the end of April at least.  None of us has actually cast eyes upon the inside of said house yet, but the location is certainly ideal.  The house is about 10 minutes from City of Hope in a pleasant, leafy neighborhood of comfortable old houses, within walking distance of "Olde Monrovia", full of shops, restaurants, grocery store, and movie theater.  You can find the address in the "Contact Me" section at the top of the blog.  

And for all you Unaphiles out there:

She's learning to roll over!  Apparently Lola is her main teacher!

Day +31

Nora passed the baton to me last night and tried to go home. No dice!  Her 9 pm flight was delayed until 10:30 and then delayed again until 12:30 am. She decided that a night on the sofa bed in Monrovia was preferable to a 2 am arrival in Oakland so we changed her flight and she got home this am with no further difficulty.

Sile continues to get stronger and more "herself" every day. On the way to the hospital today she began telling me the proper route. I (not too gently) reminded her that I had driven that same route many, many times over the last month. She allowed as how that was true and we arrived at the City of Hope without incident.

One of the main challenges at this point is keeping track of all of Sile's meds. There are the morning pills, the mid-day pills, the evening pills, the pills not to be taken on days when certain tests are to be done, the weekend-only pills, the pills to be cut in half, the pills to be taken whenever she feels like it but no more than x times per day, and pills to be taken only when Pisces is in the western sky. Ok, I made that last one up, but all the rest are true. It's daunting. My inner techie wants to write an app to keep track of it all.  Maybe I will, maybe I will.

Sile's appetite is coming back and food is beginning to taste good again. Apparently last week some time she abandoned a banana because it tasted "weird", but this morning at breakfast bananas tasted good again. Blame the chemotherapy. Chemo really does do a number on your body. Sile has referred several times to "chemo brain". Apparently this is a well-known side effect of all the stuff they pumped into her over the last month.   She is distressed that she can't remember what someone wore to a wedding a few years ago (which she definitely would have remembered pre-chemo).  I, on the other hand, can't remember what I had for breakfast this morning.  Even with the chemo I think her memory is better than mine at this point.

The routine here in Monrovia revolves around Sile's daily visits to City of Hope. Other activities include hand washing, pill taking, walking around in circles in the hotel room (her, not me), washing fruit, more hand washing, and chatting. We had a visit today from Jo Wayles, a colleague and friend of Sile's dating back to Athenian School days. She was in town with her husband Alan and it was great to see them and catch up a bit.  It was also great to Sile able to sit up and chat for an hour with an old friend and thoroughly enjoy herself. What a change from two weeks ago!  Today Sile used the term "miraculous" to describe her journey over the last few weeks. I have to agree.