Happy Birthday to my bone marrow!

That's right, it has been a year since we laid in the bone marrow donation from Lisa, day zero was 9/30/08.  That seems like a lifetime ago!  I just finished reading almost the entire blog, mostly because I was looking for some pictures I know are there but lost in massive hard drives/multiple user hell.  I need those pics for the speech I am going to give on Nov. 6th, at the big pre-race pasta party, and the process of writing that and rereading all that has happened makes me reflect on what has changed and what has not.


It brings tears to my dry and scarred up eyes reading all the comments of love and support from all of you, people from my past and from my present.  When this began in '05 I expected a lonely monk-like journey back to health, but that is not what happened.  Instead, all these people stepped forward to help me, to cover my back, to prop me up, to do what they could to help me get here.  I cannot thank all of you enough.  I don't know if I ever would have made it without all the support and encouragement and love.  One stumble and a lonely monk might topple off the path, but I had a whole team around me, so when I stumbled they held me up and urged me to keep-a-goin'.


Everything has changed and nothing is the same.  In spite of a reconfigured brain I do some of the same old stupid things I always did, which sounds contradictory to what I said in the last sentence.  What I mean is, when I do the same old stupid things, now they are far stupider.  I am like an older car now, so when I take a curve too fast I sway, and my wipers aren't wiping very well, my struts are shot, and my transmission doesn't mesh as well as before.  So I have to learn to drive differently, or pay the mechanic. 


My mom ended up in the hospital a few days ago, so she really wasn't feeling any better when I left.  She has pneumonia and they are working to control it with antibiotics.  I called the hospital and tried to get her into a single room, and they will do that when they have one.  How stupid is a system that puts people with complete strangers when they are at their most needy and vulnerable?  We need to rethink this.


So I regret not staying in RI an extra week, not just for Mom but also for the people I need to see, Mo and Paul M. and Bill McNiff and Roger and others.  Unfortunately I may have a return trip sooner than later, to help mom's recovery, and I will leave that open-ended.  I am doing as my wife suggested and signing up for some volunteer work, Hospice (uh-oh, here we go again) and the Literacy Council, so that will complicate things.  The Literacy Council may not want me since I pointed out 4 mistakes on their website, or maybe they will want me because of that.  That is one of my OCD manifestations, noticing misspelled words.  It is funny because I found a number of typos while going through my blog.


I started reworking this blog into a book, but it is going to be a massive job of editing.  And I have questions, like what if it made money, what cut do I have to give Mo and Pat and Mac and Manitoubou and others?  I think the comments make the blog what it is, funny and irreverent and hopeful.  I was imagining how it might be without that support and I wrote this, in part in response to the weekly prompt from the writing workshop I attended and still visit online.


My friends are tired, tired of me
being sick, it is
taking too long.
They wouldn’t say ‘Die or heal already’
but they might think it.
Like a coconut I have shed my hairy husk,
down to a hard kernel, a nut filled
with the milk of life.
I worry that I have become the cancer,
it is all that is left of me,
it taints my milk, and my friends
smell what they think is death.
I must rise up and crack this hull,
spill out this life and
show them I am here, I am fine,
they are dying too.


My son Mike said that was 'woeful', and I had to remind him that I have a poetic license with no expiration date.  And furthermore, he is the one that dressed up as Nancy of Sex Pistols/Sid Vicious fame.  Dang, I used to think he might look too pretty!