Holiday Exuberance Abounds

I was amazed at how upbeat everyone was at the clinic yesterday. The ladies at the front desk were extra cheerful. The nurses were extra cheerful and reminded me that we had a "Turkey breakfast" as they called it in the family support lounge. And the other patients were pretty cheerful too.

One was a guy with his wife who'd driven from Charlotte at 6 in the morning to make it to the clinic in time for his appt. He has a type of B cell lymphoma and needs a bone marrow transplant of his own cells. But they have had a hard time getting enough cells for the transplant procedure. I don't know all of the details, but he said that he'd had so much chemo that his bone marrow couldn't produce enough stem cells at one time for a transplant. They had already gotten some from his hip bone using the big biopsy needle, but they could only get 85% of what they needed. Now that his bone marrow is producing less, he is always anemic with a hemoglobin around 9.0 and has a decreased number of platelets. He bruises easily too because the platelet number is lower than it should be. But he said, after a year of chemo, his lymphoma is gone, and he is grateful every single day to wake up and be with his wife of 53 yrs. And I could tell he meant it. I hope he gets 100% of the bone marrow cells needed for the transplant so that he gets another 3 yrs or 13 yrs or 23 yrs with his wife.

I also sat close to the twenty something year old from a few weeks back; she was dressed, as usual, in her spiffy jeans and Italian pointy toed shoes. She was really cheerful too because Wed will be her last day in the clinic; she finishes up 43 days here including 6 days of chemo, her transplant, and many days coming to the clinic. Wednesday she gets to go back to Greenville NC where she is from. I did finally ask her about her diagnosis. She gave me the answer with a few "yes Mam's" thrown in. My immediate reaction every time I hear a twenty year old say that is "God I must seem old to them." But then I realize I do seem old to them, much the same way a middle aged woman with grey hair seemed old to me when I was 21 or 22. Anyway, she has aplastic anemia, a rare disorder in which the bone marrow stops producing. It leads to low cell counts and can be very dangerous since you need those cells for fighting infection, making platelets so that you don't bleed to death, and throwing out red blood cells to carry oxygen all around your body. In short, she needed someone else's bone marrow to replace this faulty version of hers that had stopped working. Fortunately her sister was a perfect match and now after 43 days here, she'll get to go home tomorrow. She was really, really happy the way that young people are when they get to go somewhere they really want (a kid at the circus comes to mind). I pointed out to her that now she would have any allergies of her sister. She said that she'd take a few sniffles in exchange for the gluten/wheat allergy she previously had. She said that she was looking forward to eating bread and pizza from now on. And it hadn't been all that bad, as she put it (I think she meant the chemo and the transplant and all the days in the clinic). Clearly, she's mastered the art of gratefulness. It will stand her in good stead.

Of course, I was extra cheerful yesterday too because my counts are coming up, and we get to go to Asheville for the long holiday w-e. And I got a great Thanksgiving card yesterday from my former colleague Suzanne who worked with me at the Health Dept in Asheville. She told me about reading the blog and thinking of me & Holly when she travels. It's so lovely when people take the time to write a note like she did, snail mail and all. Thanks Suzanne, it made my day even happier.

I've been on a cooking spree the last few days. Yesterday I made the sweet potato casserole with pecans for Thanksgiving and a new pasta sauce for dinner that my Dad turned me onto. Today I've made a big batch of granola to give to friends and a large pan of fudge with pecans. My Mom used to let me do her holiday cooking, but she always commented on the fact that I use so many nuts. Well yes, many of the things I like to cook call for nuts. This time of year it seems to be pecans. In fact, I keep stepping on them as I run through town in the mornings. We have a lot of pecan trees here in Hillsborough. This morning on my run, I saw a guy standing in his yard just eating them out of the shell from the tree in his yard. Maybe we need a pecan tree too. I'll have to get on that.

So tomorrow it's off to the clinic in the morning and then we head west and up for the long w-e holiday. What fun. Maybe we'll get some snow in Asheville for Thanksgiving.
Photo: See I do have some hair-short, grey, and curly.