Day 70...80

Friday, October 26

Day 70

Well, now...seventy days.  Basically ¾ of the way to the end of this journey.  The end.  The blessed end!  Endings aren’t always welcomed or anticipated, but this one is.  It’s a strange thing to contemplate this particular ending.  The beginning was heaped full of uncertainty, apprehension, and fear.  To be quite honest, I feel those same things when I think about the end of our Guitar City confinement.  Is that silly?  Is that sinful?  I suppose that’s up to you to decide.  I know this...it’s honest.  I had no reference point for any of this.  I had only bypassed or passed through Guitar City.  I had never lived apart from my children.  I had no idea about the stem cell transplant process.  I had no experience being the caregiver for a critically ill patient.

Reference points are funny things.  Once put into place, they are sanity savers.  True story.  Can I get a witness?

Navigating this town isn’t quite as hair-raising as when we first got here.  We’ve been here long enough that I can tell you 31st Avenue becomes Blakemore, once it crosses West End Avenue.  And when it crosses 21st Street, it becomes Wedgewood.  21st Street turns into Hillsboro Pike on one end and Broadway on the other.  West End turns into 70S.  If you need any of the specialties like Cardiology or Endocrinology, they are in Medical Center East.  Park in East Garage and take the elevator to the appropriate floor.  Yes, there is a parking garage built around that part of hospital.  I’ve walked and explored several different inches of this hospital. I guess I no longer look like one of the multitude of displaced visitors.  I have been stopped for directions and given the employee discount for coffee.  (By the way, I did correct the nice cafeteria lady and paid full price for the coffee.)

My children...have not starved or turned into wild raving beasties without their mother in near constant proximity.  My children...are really no longer “children’ in the truest sense of the word.  At 17 and almost 21 (Sweet fancy Moses...he’ll be 21 in December), they are closer to leaving the nest than they have ever been.  My place in their physical lives is changing.  My place in their hearts has not and will not.  If anything, perhaps they have learned what love looks like...what family really means. And that both are tremendously precious gifts.

Day 80
November 5, 2018

It’s taken me ten days to find a conclusion to this piece.  Guess what?  I still don’t have one.  Maybe because we still have ground to cover...but we are closer than we were ten days ago.  Y’all, I have never savoured anything quite as tantalizing as the word “home.”  It makes me pure giddy...even more off center than usual.  Maybe it’s because while I have learned SO much about the stem cell process and caring for a critically ill patient, there is still so much I don’t know...and what I do know is dwarfed by what I don’t.  My experience is heavily influenced by this treatment program and by my patient.  My patient, by the grace and mercy of Christ, has made it to Day 80, post transplant.  Some don’t make it through the six weeks following diagnosis or the treatments leading into transplant.

That right there, friends and neighbors, is a reference point of ginormous proportions.  (And seemingly, a good place to stop.)







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