Thank You!

Day 28: I've felt a lot of things for the first time as a result of Annie's illness but these past few days there have been some new feelings.  Where we used to have to constantly warn Annie to stop spinning around or flopping onto the hard floor or tell her to use nose spray every hour (all to prevent the black and blues and bleeding her low platelets couldn't control) now I catch myself and stop.  Her platelet count today was 131,000; almost normal.  For us this is like a blind person getting their sight back.  It's like waking up from a nightmare long after you'd given up ever waking up from it.

Her white and red cells were also in normal ranges.  The reds, however, could be due to her transfusion last Friday from a "designated donor."  This leads me to our thanks.

Annie's and my schools share the motto "Actions not Words" and that spirit was in top form yesterday when her school held a blood and bone marrow registry drive which ended up exceeding their goals.  I have often wished the other people at City of Hope could have the same support as us and yesterday they did.  Those gifts of blood will extend and save lives of individuals as well as bring another day together for loved ones.  When Annie gets a transfusion I look long and hard at the "designated donor" sign and think about the time it took that person to drive out, sit through the questions, get poked, lay there while the blood is removed or sit even longer while the platelets are, then they have to take it slow, forgo that workout or glass of wine all usually in complete anonymity.  It's an overwhelming expression of the motto we hold so dear.

Thursday Annie has her bone marrow biopsy, her eighth and hopefully her last.  It will be used to see if the engraftment was successful.  The doctors are hoping to find that 95% or more of her bone marrow is that of her donor.  Eventually they want that to be 100%.  We won't know the results until the start of next week so we'll update then.