February 12, 2009 10:10 PM

Happy 200th to Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin!

It may just be coincidence, but late last night, here on this floor – a few doors down from me, a 61 year old man got a bone marrow transplant from a woman who was known to live quite far from here. Could it be Skoja’s stem cells? One can only guess at this point in time, but quite a few pieces of the puzzle seem to fit together.

This information we got from the social worker who stopped by during the day. She did not know any more than what I related above.

As for me, day 2 of the chemo is now complete and there have been no side effects up now. In fact one of the nurses was surprised that I had not made use of the bed during the day – what for!!! So the chemo does not get to me, but they insist on filling you up with saline solution on a 24/7 basis “to clean out your kidneys”. I’ll say! You spend half the night answering bathroom calls and then they ask you in the morning if you slept well!

As I said yesterday, the pills just keep on coming. I must have had a dozen or so today and the nurse tonight said that I would start on some new ones tomorrow in preparation for the transplant. By the way, when the doctors came in this morning, they said that the transplant date had been moved to the 17th without providing any reason. They are still looking for me to go home on the 18th. This means that there will be 2 days of rest – Sunday and Monday instead of only 1. If, with the doctors’ visits and the chemo, each day is currently very boring – Sunday and Monday are going to seem like eternities. However, as was said before, uneventful is what everyone is striving for.

Now back to my favorite subject – the wonderful cafeteria downstairs. It is always a gamble when you order anything – will you or won’t you get what you ordered and, if you do, will it be edible? I’ve kinda licked the edible part by ordering the Stouffers frozen dinners as I said yesterday.

However, I ordered scrambled eggs with bacon for breakfast and got scrambled eggs and sausages. I had intentionally avoided ordering sausages because when I did so before, they were so overcooked that you could have used them for dowels. However, I must admit that this time the proved to be edible. For lunch I had asked for 2 bags of potato chips. I received a bag of cheese flavored nacho chips and a bag of corn chips instead. This, of course, comes after I repeat the order because I have been burnt so many times in the past. Businesses routinely record phone calls - maybe they ought to record our food orders here at the hospital!

Tomorrow we have an afternoon meeting with the nutritionist to go over my “100 day diet”.

I’m sure that will be interesting….

Bob