October 15

Discharge Day. My own bed tonight. Alicia’s cooking instead of hospital cooking. Walking along the river instead of in the hallways. I meet with my hematologist on Monday; he will attempt to evaluate the success (or lack of) of the transplant. Which will be difficult because I am part of the 1% of myeloma patients who do not secrete the “M proteins” which are used to assess stage of the disease. Enough stem cells were extracted to allow for a second transplant; in a small minority of cases the first transplant doesn’t take and a second one is done soon thereafter. What a drag that would be!! Expectations for the next few months: will be tired and occasionally queasy for the next few weeks (?); appetite will gradually return; blood counts will gradually rise over the next couple months but my immune system will not be back to completely normal for over a year. I will be avoiding crowds for a while. I expect to resume teaching in January.

My last thoughts upon leaving the hospital:
1.The Tom Baker Centre is a well-organized place with great doctors and nurses and physiotherapists and nutritionists and technicians and housekeepers.

2.The thing I’m going to miss about this room is the glow-in-the-dark stars and planets and comets that adorn part of the ceiling. Their installation must have been directed by a kid, because no adult would have that much imagination.

3.I have wonderful friends.

4.I’m not particularly anxious about anything in particular. There’s a cliché about cancer patients, whether they’re completely cured or have only a month to live, having epiphanies and seeing each new day in a different light, treasuring all the things that they and everyone else always took for granted. But I am lucky enough to have treasured those things all my life. I have been flashing back to some episodes of my life….

My Dad teaching my brother and I how to catapult stick-arrows into the sky along the Kern River in California;
Patty and I singing a love song to each other in harmony in our wedding ceremony and me choking up (it didn’t work out in the end, but at least we had half the audience crying!);
The nurse handing me Will, age 10 minutes, and leaving us alone, and me singing “Hush Little Baby Don’t You Cry” to him while he looked me straight in the eye and tears rolled down my cheeks;
Lou and I sleeping in the mountains of sand in the Erg Occidental in the Sahara Desert;
Lou and I traversing the Desert of Death in Afghanistan;
Sleeping on the beach in the Grand Canyon numerous times and looking up at the narrow strip of brilliant stars bordered by the black canyon walls, while a canyon wren trilled in the background;
My first run of the upper Red Deer River, in a toy raft; running all the grade III’s without scouting and not flipping until attempting the Grade IV without scouting;
Our guide leading Will and Thom and I across untracked slopes of Mt. Kilimanjaro, where tourists never go, in search of obscure outcrops of glacial deposits;
Clay and I rock-climbing to the top of Salaginella Wall in Yosemite Valley, needing every ounce of strength we had, each of us falling on the way and held by the other, each of us holding the other’s life in his hands;
J.T. and Cathy and I making a then-illegal July backpack in the western Grand Canyon, featuring heat exhaustion and extreme dehydration and incredible thirst, and the epiphany I had when I stumbled into the green strip along Thunder River and stuck my cup into the waterfall and drank, realizing for the first time the meaning of water;
Will and I photographing the landscape with great exhilaration in the Sossusvlei dunes of Namibia;
Re-meeting Wendy at the Brentwood Starbucks after 25 or 30 years, all because Alicia wanted a fancy coffee;
Watching Alicia grow into one of the most compassionate young women on Planet Earth…

…..and I think that in the part of my life still to come, I don’t plan to do anything or see anything differently.

5.Did I mention that I have wonderful friends?


I’m going to make one more post to this blog after my meeting with the hematologist on Monday.