Wednesday, September 8th, 2008

Hi everyone,

reaching out to you in the midst of another heat wave. I think it hit 100 degrees again today. It’s nice to know that even though I missed most of summer in the hospital, I can count on good old So Cal to extend it out a few months for me. Evey and I are still walking Floyd every morning and it really is one of the best parts of my day. Being outside, smelling the fresh cut grass, spending quality time with Floyd and Evey, feeling the sun on my face and even in one case the rain on my head. You gotta love So Cal. I know I’m loving every day of it while I’m out of the hospital.

Things are all on track with regards to the transplant. I still have a hospital readmission date of October 17th with a transplant date of the 23rd. I have been assured that what happened with the first donor is highly irregular and should not be expected to happen again. For those of you who don’t know, the first donor had what his doctor called “medical complications” the forced us to move on to another donor. It’s tough not to expect something to go wrong given everything that has happened, but we are optimistic that all will go smoothly.

As far as my health goes, I have been doing relatively well. I say relatively because it was only 10 days ago that I finished the toughest, most brutal regimen of chemo to date. Since I walked out of the hospital on Friday afternoon the 26th, I have experienced some nausea and a little bit of joint pain due to some medication, but nothing has compared to what I am battling now…a side effect called mucositis. This is basically a condition that results in extremely painful mouth sores. I know, glamorous huh? I had dodged these for the first 4 months of my treatment knowing the entire time how lucky I had been. Well, my luck ran out and I got nailed by it last Thursday. Lucky for me, instead of having multiple small sores spread around the mouth, I had one big one located right at the base of the bottom of my tongue…sarcasm of course. I could not have been more unlucky. It is no exaggeration when I tell you that this has been the most painful experience I have ever had to deal with in my entire life. I never could have imagined how speaking, eating and drinking could be so painful. Pretty much any tongue movement put me in agony. To make the experience even better, the doctor had to take a biopsy of it on Monday. This meant scraping the top layer off the top of the sore with a hard plastic brush. I’d like to say my eyes were watering but I’m pretty sure I was crying. Just ask Evey, she was in the room laughing at me, just kidding. The good news is I finally feel like it is getting better. It is still there and very painful, but by the way it feels today, I can say it’s on it’s way out.

I touched on the Light the Night Walk on my last entry. Besides, I think most of you who read this blog either donated or participated in the walk. Again, I want to thank everyone who did either of those two things…and I want to especially thank Van Skoglund for taking the lead and handling pretty much the whole thing. He took care of the shirts, coordinated the food, dealt with the charity on one side and all of you on the other. It really could not have been the event it was without Van’s help and Evey and I owe him a huge debt of gratitude. Thank you so much. I also want to thank Natasha for celebrating her birthday with us on that day. If you were lucky enough to be there, you know how much fun it was and how much of a great time Team Chrome Dome had. I will commit to you that we get some pictures of the event on this site. Look for those one or two days from now. We had a huge pre-party, took pictures with Rod Carew, walked on the field of Angel Stadium while getting our mugs on the big screen and closed out the night with a birthday party for Natasha at the Yardhouse. It was quite a night that left a few soldiers badly wounded. It really turned out to be a day that life should be all about. It was a special time with family and friends, giving back to a great cause while having the time of our lives doing it. We couldn’t have scripted it better.

That should pretty much bring you up to speed with what’s going on. Evey and I again want to thank everyone for your unwavering support. This experience is still a roller coaster with ups, downs and loops all over the place, but we will be pulling up into that station soon enough. The transplant phase begins very soon and it can’t come a day too early. I can’t wait to take this on, succeed and be looking back at it in no time.
Take care and be well everyone…