Scrabble Anyone?

Okay. So this isn't really the way our board looked at the end of our game, but you get the idea. These are the "words" we've been throwing around the past few days.

Yesterday we walked two miles (that's 30 laps around the unit) and Gil participated in a work-related conference call with his physician colleagues as they worked through manuscript edits on a paper that is to be submitted soon. (It felt good to sit here in the room and hear Gil's strong voice contributing to the discussion.)

In fact, during the call his primary oncology doctor (Dr. Uberti, the Director of the Bone Marrow Transplant program) came in to see him, and I had to courteously guide him out of the room and explain that Gil was on an international conference call and could he "please come back at a more convenient time?" (Yes, I know it was gutsy!)

That generated lots of laughter when recounted on rounds this morning. Dr. Uberti said he had never been ushered out of a patient's room "in quite that way before."

We're on Day +9.

Counts are still coming down as expected. They're coming down slower this time around but no one on the medical team is concerned. Genie's stem cells are slowly setting up housekeeping in Gil's bone marrow now and should be manufacturing their own new and healthy (non-cancerous) platelets, red blood cells and neutrophils.

These new cells should reach maturity and enter the bloodstream between Days 10 and 14. We've just been waiting around for that to happen. Immunosuppression therapy continues with Tacrolimus and Cellcept for the foreseeable future.

Marika tells us she is doing a paper on Graft vs. Host Disease (GVHD) for her Honors Section class. We'll ask her to "guest blog" when she's ready to teach us something.

Haiku:

They're not "mall walkers"

They're "hall walkers" together.

A community.