A New Day!!

Just as the first purple crocuses are peeking up, and the occasional drift of daffodils lifts the spirit, we celebrate Jim's new stem cells' Hundred Day anniversary.  Yesterday, on the actual day, we visited the doctor who had only good news.  The cancer has retreated to only  6% of the cells in his marrow.  Although this is short of full remission (which is rare), this rates a B+/A- for grading partial remisions.  He has also put on 5 pounds, mostly from eating bags of junkfood, celiac style.  I suspect his sodium load is astronomical, but I can't argue with the fact that he is retaining some weight (sodium+ water retention?  Who knows!  Sometimes I over-think stuff)  He is getting/eating good meals too, and his absorbtion of nutrients is also good, by one of those measures or another.  

Our next step is getting the vaccine they developed in January 09, using his own stem cells then.  This is unrelated to the transplant, and is part of his participation in a clinical trial.  He will receive three injections in the coming months, which could help him, or which could be the control group which gets a neutral substance.

What's the outlook?  Well, he is still perfectly exhausted 24-7.  The trip to the hospital wipes him out, although I must add that he has abandoned the walker, and forgot his cane, and still did well on the long trek from the car yesterday.  His recovery is so slow because he has been incapacitated for so long.  Your body needs to fight gravity to keep in shape, and being horizontal saps your muscles rapidly.  And for Jim it has been about 3 years since he was active (even when active means sitting at the computer!!)  So his return to anything resembling a normal life is going to take quite a while longer.  The pain meds he is on slow his brain, in general.    He still has no interest in reading, writing, TV nor music.  He genuinely sleeps that much.  Once the warm weather is here, I plan to get a chair and lounge in place, then boot him outside so he can breathe fresh air and restore his Vitamin D, so the calcium his bones need can be restored.  His bones are so soft the doctor said when he inserted the needle into his vertebrae to retrieve the bone marrow biopsy it felt no different than penetrating his flesh.  Eeuuuu!!

He also officially parted company with the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, retiring officially this month... a little anticlimactic having been away for the past 15 months.     He was there over 17 years, in an undergrown bunker.  Explains a lot.  

The house will be going on multiple listing service shortly, which will be a drag, what with Rip Van Winkle in his beddy and our resident 5 year old always willing to requisition the cover of my Wok for a shield, and a huge wooden spoon for his sword.  Some hateful psychopath at the Lego company created a 1000 piece set of legos that fit in the palm of your hand, and we own part of a set.  Three of them can lodge in the same crack in your foot with great ease.  (for them, not for you) My Electrolux, driven somewhat maniacally, by yours truly, gobbles them up like peanuts on a Margarita bar.

And frankly, there has been a certain, shall we say, relaxation of the finer details of spring and fall cleaning since Jim's MM  fell out of the sky, four cleaning seasons ago.  Translation: you can write in the flat planes of the wood moldings in any room in the house.  So it will be an exercize in humility (God's idea of "sleeping in on Saturday" is implementing ways of keeping me humble) that I will try (in vain) to bring the house up to realtors standards, yet again honing my soul for beatification.  Be advised, though: I draw the line at hair shirts. Too many of them make me look fat. 

My imagination is cruising the Aegean this Spring.  Vicarious travel surpasses actual travel because you 1) don't need a passport, 2) don't need to take your shoes off to get through security and 3) the currency there is even more unstable than the currency here.  I do put some clothes in a suitcase for my cyber travel, since I can put in things that no longer fit... string bikinis and little halter sundresses... because I am not going to wear them anyway.  Go ahead, call me "tapped".   Sure beats Spring Cleaning!

C'mon Springtime!

Really sorry to have left you staring at the cold french fries for so long, but things have been uncustomarily  busy.  With the house kind of on the market, I am frantically trying to sort through all the accumulation I have virtually ignored for the past  mmgphfn years.  From start to finish this is a mind-numbing nightmare.  I  am someone who does not see the forest at all... when I start on the forest, I begin manicuring individual leaves, cutting off the dead ones, going sprig by sprig.  This is also how I tackle 11 rooms of abject chaos.  It takes time.

Main importance is that Jim continues to improve, by the numbers gleaned from his blood work, and by the fact that the weight loss has been reversed, albeit at a snail's pace.  Too often, I feel like a drug pusher, suggesting things I believe to be tempting, only to be rebuffed in favor or pea soup, or oatmeal.  Ah well, as long as he keeps putting calories into himself, what matter?  We visit the hospital today for our weekly appointment, and in several weeks, we may have the results of tests to see if the stem cell transplant beat back the multiple myeloma entirely, partially, or not at all.  

Overall, Jim is showing more signs of life.  Some day he sleeps insatiably, but he sometimes has a run of two or three days when he emerges and connects.  Still not much reading or computer (!) but he does show interest in going through papers and journals with an eye to discarding a lot.  It will be nice when Spring is permanently here, and I can attempt to cajole him out of the house (he's a dedicated home-body.)

When we moved into the house, we had not been connected to the sewer, so of course we immediately--did nothing, in the time-honored tradition set in the Muckerheide family motto: "ain't broke, don't fix!"  Only on the horns of complete desperation did anything actually get action.  So when the grotto of wood chips and pine needles Jim's  ever thrifty dad crafted in the corner of the cellar to use as "kindling" turned out to be directly under the line to the septic tank, we had quite a moist dilemma.  At that time, the honey-wagon had to send for back-up (as it were).  With chagrin, I watched two honey wagons, front fender to front fender, canoodle at our busy intersections,  at school let-out time, no less.  Um....  

Now we have the amazing recurring dumpster.   This is the fourth one we have had in the past five years, a frequent flier program no one wants to be part of.  Apparently other people throw out their stuff as it accumulates.  What a thought!

I am Linda and I have an addiction to magazines.  Gourmet, Bon Appetit, Southern Living (never lived south of DC) Martha, Fine Gardening... and miscellany that is no longer in print.  They are like former students...or teachers really.  Have a terrible time consigning them to that dumpster.  "Recycle," my brain suggests.  "Not on your life,"  my spirit counters.  And so I go, cleaning the attic by tearing out the article I might want in the future,  from one of literally several hundred publications.  Visualize a pile of unsorted magazine clippings, right where the wood chip pile of glop used to live.  Can you spell SLOW LEARNER?

Yup,  it's going slow.  Not fair that you get cold fries, though.   I'll do better... I promise.