March 10, 2009 10:40 PM 78 days to go

As we all know, Wednesday is meat day and the news is this...

According to my doctor, my counts are "great". Boy, that's music to my ears and makes the rest of the frustrating trip worth it. Believe me when I say that the whole process of registering to get your blood drawn and to let the doctor know that you are there is fraught with total mismanagement. They supposedly rescheduled my blood draw to occur before I see the doctor because that is the most integral part of the visit. However, they neglected to to do so and I was scheduled to see the doctor doctor at 7:30 and get my blood drawn at 8:15! Well, the ineptness of the system worked in my favor this time because I got lost in the shuffle to see the doctor and we didn't connect until almost 9:00. With everything going so well, the visit concluded after the doctor's visit and we were able to go home.

There was, however, one other element to the visit. We asked the doctor about the test to determine whether or not the donor transplant was actually doing its job. He did say that the test would be done next week but, unfortunately, the results will not be known for another 2 weeks after that! However, he did intimate that it was unlikely that it did not take hold as they had done everything that they could to make my own bone marrow inoperative.

And then he left me with this zinger(both literally and figuratively). He wants to do another bone marrow biopsy next Wednesday! This will be biopsy V, to use Superbowl terminology, and will certainly not be anything that I am looking forward to. They are literally an unpleasant pain in the butt. Hopefully, this will be the end of those!

So, as you can see, things are going well at this point and next week will serve to give us a deeper look into my status. I guess that I really can't argue with that - especially if the results come out in my favor as I expect them to. It will certainly be an apropos time for prayers to kind of buttress up my optimism.

I think that I've relayed everything that went on today, so I'm going to call it quits for today...

Bob