A Journey With Friends

Holly picked me up after my clinic appt yesterday and we headed home for a short walk around the neighborhood. I spent a good while at the Outpt Clinic since my appt was at 10am but didn't get seen by the Practitioner until almost 2pm. Mondays are very busy evidently. I didn't mind though because I had my book and snacks and slept a bit after the benadryl they gave me for my platelet infusion. My platelets had dropped to 6,000 (ouch! less than 10,000 can be associated with spontaneous bleeding) so they gave me a platelet pack-donor matched bag with my same blood type (O+). Afterwards, they checked the level and it had bumped to 32,000. Hey I fill all juicy now. Still I need to be careful to avoid cuts or scrapes or bumps. As Holly put it, I won't bleed out immediately but I shouldn't take any chances.

I saw a woman at the clinic who was a resident at Duke when I was a med student. She is now an Attending doc on the bone marrow service. I introduced myself to her after she came in to tell me that she was the head doc for the week. Her name is Cristina Gasperetta (from Italy) - tall & stylish with gorgeous long brown hair. She asked me what I was doing there, so I explained that I had just had 7 and 3 chemo for induction and that I was the one who'd had breast cancer 2 yrs ago with chemo-induced leukemia. She said in her beautiful Italian accent, "Teresa, you are the one with secondary AML? We must fix you with a bone marrow transplant." Well yeah that was my plan too. Somehow when you hear her say it, it seems a lot more glamorous than it has been so far.

I got to see Gail after my appt as we visited a bit. Her office is in a different part of the building where my clinic is. She made us a big batch of spinach lasagne. Yum, yum, thanks Gail. Now I won't die of scurvy, at least.

As I said above, Holly and I did a walk with Quig when we got home. Waiting for us on our porch was a slim cardboard package from Blurb. What is it? We opened the package to find a slim book that Marty put together with photos of friends. It is beautiful. Photos of Jason's wedding, hiking Max Patch, Quig, Hiking Roan mtn, etc. It is gorgeous. You guys would all love to have your own copy; it's so well done. Thanks Marty. It is a cool idea and one I'd like to use in the future to make a photo memory book after our travels. I took a photo of it to put here. It won't do it justice but you'll get the idea at least.

Well my mom is one her way back up. We'll be safe now and Holly won't have to miss so much work. Thanks to everyone for offering rides and all manner of help. More later...tree