Hospital sex and nurses, and this is not what it sounds like

Seems I caused some confusion about what leukemia is with my comment about leaks, so let me clarify, I hope. Docs say I am doing great, no reactions, we'll get the word on the scary-ass Phliadelphia chromosome thing by the end of the week.

The bone marrow has immature cells called blasts, which then differentiate in the marrow into red blood cells (carry oxygen), white blood cells (fight infections) and platelets (clot). Healthy bone marrow has about 5% or less blasts, all other cells having differentiated. In leukemia, the instructions go awry and blasts don’t differentiate enough, so there are not enough mature cells - reds, whites, and platelets. Different %s for different types of leukemia, but that is the basics. I am not really leaking from anywhere except the normal spots. I am just not getting enough red blood cells, white cells or platelets from my bone marrow.

A funny story I left out before but what the heck, we are all adults. On day three here, last Saturday, I was feeling alright and Dana and I were feeling pretty overwhelmed by everything. Maybe it was the prednisone steroid, but I was also feeling pretty frisky. We thought we’d best ask the docs before we engaged in any marital bliss, so when they came in and asked ‘Any questions?‘, I asked ‘Yeah, we want to know if we can be intimate, so to speak.‘ It was two of the young docs, without the bosses, and one of them says ‘What, here in the hospital?’ I said ‘Well, we’d do it in the garden but the Children’s Hospital is 50 feet away and we don’t want to upset the kids.’ They said nobody on chemo had asked that in their experience, they would have to check with the nurses. I said ‘You guys are both single, maybe virgins from all that studying.’ We could just picture this round table conference on the pros and cons of the Fiores being intimate.

Six hours or so later one of the young docs comes back in and says, No, you can’t have sex, boss Doc says it’s too dangerous. Of course we already knew I was toxic, but he said Dana could infect me during such an intimate act. I asked if they had the big cellophane rolls, and we all chuckled, heh heh fer crying out loud.

I still feel fine. Last night I made the mistake of drinking a diet coke at about 9-10. I was watching some stupid movie and must’ve fallen asleep around 11:30. I woke up at midnight with this angel of mercy standing over me, who said her name was Rebekah, and she looked like she was right off Sunnybrook Farm, but she was a traveling nurse from Kansas. Very sweet, chatted with me a while, great smile, very pretty, patients always fall for the nurses (only a little, honey, relax).

All day I’d been thinking about this idea for helping isolated patients connect to the internet and to email using old laptops, and when she finished taking my vitals as they do every 2 hours or so (BP 135/80, temp 97.7, oxygen 97%, pulse 80, same every time), I couldn’t get back to sleep, churning through the pitfalls of this idea. Tossed and turned, first fitful night I had. Around 4:00 am in comes Rebekah, takes my vitals and can see I am not sleeping well, so we start chatting, and I tell her about this idea for a laptop library for patients. She says she has just what I need to help me sleep.

Ten minutes later, at 4:30 in the morning, I hear some machine getting dragged through the hall to my room. Rebekah has dug out some ancient exercise bicycle, with the friction bar on the front wheel, cleaned it up and stuck it in my anteroom. She says ‘Here’s what you need, you have to burn off some energy.’ Crikey. No more diet cokes after 5 pm.

I did get up later and, after breakfast I did a little yoga and bicycle. I did 4 Sun salutes, and that was alright, except my feet had lost all their veins, and my ankles are starting to look like my grandma’s. She lived off cream pastry the last 20 years of her life, and her ankles spilled over her shoes. That always amazed me when I was a kid. She got cream pastry, I got prednisone. After two minutes pedaling the bike I was gassed, and that was with no friction. That is the weird thing about this disease, I feel fine until I try to do anything, and then I am reminded that my blood isn’t right. I thought about Lance Armstrong, pressed on for maybe a total of 20 minutes, not counting breaks, then agreed I am not Lance Armstrong and took a shower. Hooah!

Speaking of nurses, those jobs that George Bush says we are adding are nursing jobs, and they aren’t going to Americans. My guess is that 80% of the nurses are foreign, with 20% here from the Philippines. I have also had nurses from Bosnia, Korea, Denmark, Vietnam, England and Canada, and those are just the ones I figured out. All ranks of nurses, from the bosses to the beginners. And these nurses here are top of the line oncology nurses or will be.

OK, that’s all for now, thanks for all the emails, I am keeping busy thanks to DIAL-UP in the room. Man, back to 1990 and 56K, yippee.