T+153 Patience

BOX SCORE	10/4/24
Element	Current	Std. Range	Trend
Hemoglobin	12.3	13-17	v
Platelets	175	140-375	-
ANC	2520	1800-8300	v

Sometimes I am amazed at how soft and spoiled I have become. Today is house cleaning day. The house cleaning company had an employee quit without notice, so of course, the rest of the staff has to take up the slack. Consequently, our house cleaner arrived a little over an hour later than expected. To her credit she did leave Jill a voice mail to let her know that she would be late. 

When it's house cleaning day, we need to skedaddle so we are not in the way. When we are not quarantined, we sometimes go out to breakfast to while away the time. We have found some pretty neat restaurants doing that. Today, however, that didn't work for us. For one thing we are still quarantined. For another, the scheduled time for the house cleaner was 10:15 AM, which is a bit late for breakfast, given that we are usually up around 5:00. So, as we have done on other occasions, we have holed up in the brewery, which is a fun place to be, except that the seating is not very comfortable.

To my chagrin, I found myself getting pretty annoyed with the late arrival. It's not that I had something else I had to do, with which the shift in timing was interfering. In fact, I had planned to do a little painting in the garage, which was a nice diversion from sitting in front of my computer screen. 

So, I am now saying my mea culpas, and I have cooled off. The painting came out just fine. I am slowly working up to painting the interior walls of the garage. I started by painting the brewery door a dark red. Today I was painting the door frame for that door which leads from the garage into the brewery. Jill said yesterday that she is getting excited about the garage painting, now that she has seen the door color. I told her that my devious plan was working; now that she is excited about spiffing up the garage, she can help with the painting. She, of course, is more than willing to help.

Today we also went to Grocery Outlet for some fun snacks for entertaining friends on the patio this evening. That trip was followed by a visit to DMV to pick up another trip permit, since we still don't have the registration and title to our new to us car, after five weeks. Another annoyance, or perhaps, I should say another opportunity to practice being patient. 

As you will notice in the title of today's post, this is day 153 since my bone marrow transplant. That means we are less than four weeks from the six month mark, which is an important milepost. At that point, I will have another bone marrow biopsy and finish taking the last of the anti-rejection meds. I came across a note today that I had made during one or our pre-transplant conversations with Dr. Meyers. It said that full immunity will occur somewhere between six months and a year. We are hopeful that our quarantine will be eased some at that time. We also look forward to seeing the results of the biopsy, which should show that I am free of leukemia and that John Dillinger's bone marrow (see Day 0 The Big Show ) has completely replaced my cancerous marrow.  

In the meantime, I have been feeling wonderful, walking a couple of miles everyday with my sweetie, doing projects, brewing beer and occasionally getting into mischief. Oh, yes, and working on my patience. 

 But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, ²³ gentleness, self-control...(Galatians 5:22-23)