Home Sweet Home

I was discharged on Monday. Here's how I did it.

Beginning last Friday, I started making suggestions to hospital staff that I thought Monday would be an acceptable day to release me. My ulterior motive was that I wanted to be home to see the East Greenwich Cross Country team (and my darling sons) make history by defeating Hendricken High School, a team that hasn't lost a meet since 1978.

By Monday morning, the nursing staff was confident I'd be discharged. The doctors, however, who hadn't been around all weekend, were less convinced that this would actually happen. When they moved into my room en masse, I was projecting utmost confidence and, I hoped, a picture of health. They asked me a few questions, and appeared satisfied I could go, as long as Dr. Antin (my primary doc) approved. He did.

The discharge took forever, and I feared we wouldn't make it to the meet in time. But we did. I'd just had a cord blood transplant, but witnessing the E.G. boys make history seemed the bigger accomplishment.

I'm delighted to be home, sleeping in my own bed, eating tasty food, interacting with my family. My dear friend Dianne is here helping out, doing her best to keep me from doing too much. Sad to say, this sometimes involves tying me to a chair, forcing me to nap at gunpoint, and removing sharp knives from my grasp, an extremely unsafe maneuver.

I hope to post here a few times per week to let you know how the business of growing an immune system from scratch goes. Ain't going to be easy.