Plans--the transplant begins

Ladies and Gentlemen:
Here's the plan to make Dwight better.

On Tuesday, November 2 (election day here in the States--If you can, vote!) sometime during the day someone will call us from the Hospital at the University of Pennsylvania to tell us that my room is ready and to come to University City right away to be admitted. As for when, well, we don't know when; we just have to make sure we're ready (hmmmm, is this a metaphor?).

And we will be ready. Armed with photos and music and movies and books, we will drive to the city, get to the floor I'll be on (dunno yet), sign in and show them my blue UPenn Health System card and my little white Blue Cross/Blue Shield insurance care, and then and only then will they put me in the room.

Once there I'll be instructed to put on my PJs, and kick back as a few nurses come in to introduce themselves. One or two of them will "access" my "dual port"--that contact holder-shaped thing under my skin just below my collar bone through which all of my IV fluids, drugs, and even the stem cells will be introduced to my body. Once I'm settled, one of the nurses will come in with a bag that nearly oozes evil, and she'll hang it on my IV pump so that my infusion of Malphalan, one of the more nasty chemotherapy drugs, can begin.

The following three days, morning and evening, I will have Total Body Irradiation (TBI), a medical procedure somewhat like being a suburban Hiroshima dweller, or one of the soldiers assigned to Bikini Atol in the South Seas. The radiation will, we hope, kill the Myeloma in my bone marrow.

Funny, we met with the oncology radiologist on Thursday, and the entire visit was about all the ways this treatment can kill me. OK, not so funny. But in this case, the gravity of the situation demands some kind of wit. Or, lacking anything substantive and funny to say, I resort to the scatological. While it's not exactly a laugh riot, we endure.

The radiation will make room for the autologous stem cell transplant (the procedure is more like a blood transfusion than what most of us imagine when we hear "transplant"), which will take place the final night of the TBI.

After this, we wait.

We wait for me to become, as my oncologist radiologist suggested, "hit by a truck and then dragged by a bear" tired. (Oh, the singing and dancing that conjures up!)

Then we stay in the hospital and wait for me to stop puking endlessly.

We wait for me to have an immune system again, so I can fight infections and disease.

About three weeks of this waiting will be in the hospital. (I will send out the snail-mail address when I know it.)

After that, the waiting will be at home.

The burden on Sheri is huge, so please pray for her.

I'm sorry to be this bold, but in the coming weeks we'd appreciate it that unless we've already made arrangements, you wouldn't spend a lot of time calling or emailing us. We're going to be weary, and won't have the energy to even press "reply."

But we already know you'll be considerate, and we appreciate a great deal.

But please, please pray.

More to come on Tuesday.

love,

Dwight (& Sheri)

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