Day 26: The Same But with a Few White Blood Cells

My WBC count got to 0.2 yesterday. It stayed there today! Yippee!

Okay, that's all the energy I have for today, I'm going to bed.

I've had lots of visitors today and yesterday. Mostly I watched them rather than interacted with them because I didn't have enough energy. They all said it was great to see me, anyway. I raised really good kids. (Count your many blessings, count them one by one.)

In an effort to save me from how horribly depressed I look, the doctors suggested I walk around the hospital. We even crossed an outside section to get to the children's hospital, which I was told is much more colorful than the adult hospital. That's true.

There's no good way to put a coat over my tubes, so I wore a shawl and my wife slung a blanket over my back. They also wrapped a scarf around my neck, thus ensuring I wouldn't fact any sun, either. I wore a pair of gloves, and I wore a huge, hang-down hat that didn't allow any sun on my face or cheeks, either. I had ordered that hat just for that purpose.

In order to make my little video so that all of you could see it, I had to load it to youtube rather than blogger. Loading it to blogger doesn't always do the job, for some reason. In the process, I ran across this video from a lady who got a bone marrow transplant in 2008. What I want to know is why she was allowed at the beach four days after she got her central line placed!

I'll tell you, too, I saw the following video before I saw that one, and I cried and cried. I understand these people's feelings, and it was so great to see them returning to their lives.

As for me, my stomach is constantly upset. Nothing I eat tastes good, and everything I eat is forced. I prayed about it, and God gave me a little cartoon picture to look at in my mind when I eat, which I am not going to share with you. It's just a silly cartoon, but it helps with both ignoring the taste and with the fear of throwing up everything I eat.

My attitude is blah, blah, blah.

Otherwise, everything is fine. I have no good reason to have a blah, blah, blah attitude, so I try to ignore it best I can. I sleep a lot, but that's probably from having no real nutrition to work with. (Sorry, Michael, I could only drink a quarter of the last Ensure I tried.)

What's exciting is that Dr. Engelhardt thinks that my stomach problem may be graft vs. host. That would be a really good sign, and eventually they'd give me a steroid pill that would cure the problem. I would love to have a settled stomach, that would be awesome. But for now, we just have to watch and wait.

Sometimes stomach GVH heals on its own. Sigh ...

The sun is shining. Nashville is beautiful today. My son is going to California for computer training, and then he's coming back to get married in April. I have another son being a strong adult working through the difficult decision of how and when to move out to California to be closer to a girl with whom he's developed a serious relationship. My children are giving me every reason to be delighted that they are wise and know how to make godly choices. So underneath the blah are a hundred reasons to rejoice and cry.

Thanks to all of you who are sharing this journey with you. For those of you coming behind, this is the worst part for me. It's the hardest work to choose positive things, and there's the least energy for the work.

Thank God for friends and family who love me and visit me, and for my wife, who never gets tired of me.