of caretakers, timing, gratitude, and life.

It is already 4:30 I cant believe how much it seems like I do in one day. Of course I am moving at the speed of an 80 year old. There is so much that I have to do in a day. Most of it is daily living stuff that is not worth writing about except to say how long it takes me to get things done. My body is slow and swollen from weeks of lying in a bed. My mind is often numb from a feeling of hypoxia. For about a week I have been back on the BMT unit. During that week one of the goals has been to get my body functioning on its own. A big challenge right now is to get my heart rate, blood oxygen content, and blood pressure in sync so that I do not feel short of breath as I move around the room or even just sit in the bed.

I have been waking up at 3 AM and having trouble getting back to sleep. Why? Because I am overwhelmed with positive feelings; I am coming home, eventually. Don’t get all excited there is no date set. I just can feel it coming. I can hardly wait to be at home with my girls, I miss them very much. The thought of coming home, and recovering, actually recovering is so wonderful that I can hardly stand it. For the last year it seems like I have had nothing but bad news. Every time I talk to a doc I brace myself for bad news. But lately I am allowing my guard down. They have been giving me good news: kidney function is looking good, the bone marrow transplant is working. More importantly, my body is feeling better. We won’t know how much cancer was killed through the process until I am about 100 days into it. So no real numbers yet. But the bottom line is that I feel great.
Today is Monday and I have just finished two great days in a row. A great day is when I feel like I am making progress towards recovery. The progress is always that frustrating two steps forward one step backward. The big challenge that I face is to keep my attitude positive when I hit the backward step moments.
That is where my caretakers are such a big help. Through all of this I have had someone by my side. Katie, Brother Billy, Adam, The Chickenhawk, and currently David have been here, by my side helping me to keep head straight like the bars that surround the bumper cars .

There have been various phases in the last month of hospital stay earlier when I was really sick and hallucinating the C/H was there for that. The next phase is when I was just really really sick and getting worse, Dr. Katie was here for that. Then there was the phase where I went to the ICU and started to s l o w l y get better, brother Billy was here for that. Then Adam came for the end of the ICU stay where I woke up from a couple of weeks of fighting for my survival to find a world that dared to go on without me. Now David is with me. Soon I will be moving out of the hospital and into local outpatient apartments where I will be out of the warm, cozy hospital bubble. Each of the care takers seemed, in retrospect to have the perfect timing for dates that they commited to compared to what actually happened. I am so, so grateful to them for the love care that they have shown me that I don’t know what to do other than accept the love, turn it around and pay it forward.