GRATITUDES:
1. My bone marrow biopsy is over
2. I’m once again hungry
3. Warmer weather at last
4. Rory has just run to get me coffee❤️

It’s been nearly 100 days since the transplant and I’m being put through a series of tests to see how my new blood supply is doing. One of the doctors at the clinic last week scared the living sh*t out of me by casually saying that, because of my slightly fluctuating cell counts, he was glad that a biopsy had already been scheduled. Umm… sorry, but you simply can’t drop remarks like that around someone like me because my brain will take that comment and run straight into the gates of hell with it. In no time at all I was nearly hyperventilating over the possibility of another relapse. I really wish I could just tell my brain to shut the f*ck up. Honestly, it does far more harm than good to worry about stuff I have absolutely no control over. Oy.

So, this time I opted for sedation, rather than doing the hardcore local for the biopsy. Other than being relaxed and sleepy, it still hurt like hell and there was little difference in pain level between the sedation and the local anesthetic (in fact, I think it may have been worse WITH the sedation!). Yeah, not gonna do that again. The recovery time wasn’t too bad, maybe only a half hour longer than if I’d opted out of the drugs, and now we’re sitting on a picnic table outside the bone marrow clinic, noshing on sliced apples and cheese that Rory got from the Starbucks across the street. I have another appointment at 3pm with one of the doctors, just another run-of-the-mill follow-up, but I’m anxious to see what my blood cell counts are up to. If I see Dr. Peterson in the hallway, I may have to slap him for being such a dork and causing me so much worry. I won’t, of course, but I have a vivid imagination.😈

Want. To. SLEEEEEP. Someone just stuff me in a sunny windowsill, give me a soft blanket, and let me snooze. Sort of like a giant lazy house cat. That fentanyl/versed cocktail is a sure-fire way to make a person want to snooze for the rest of the day. My biopsy site aches as well but I’m not surprised. That part of my body has been drilled, siphoned and abused far more times than I care to think about. Ugh, and now my doctor wants to send me off for a bone density test. Bloody hell. Oh, AND he’s kvetching over the results of a CT scan that I had when I was still hospitalized. I thought the results of that test came back negative but apparently there were some anomalies that weren’t explained to me at the time of the scan. (Or maybe they were but I was too out of it to recall much of anything. Dunno.)

After several days of overnight hard freezes, we’re once again back to reasonably temperate nighttime lows. Rory and I were scurrying around a week ago, bundling up our more fragile outdoor leaf babies and wrapping exposed pipes with rags and bubble wrap, and our efforts seem to have paid off. I don’t think we’ll lose any of our plants and my three very special ones, my two rockroses and my Cleveland sage – which is a California native – have emerged from their swaddling relatively unscathed. I did go a bit overboard tucking them in but they look fairly happy, just a bit frost-nipped at the outermost leaf tips.