Day 11,,, Not a happy time but Not an Unhealthy time.

She has no white blood cells.  She has had lots of very heavy duty chemo and total body radiation.  Her body is breaking down and there are no white blood cells to make things better.

She is in pain most of the time but they are working really hard to take care of that.  She has a Happy Juice pump and has almost unlimited access to "Happy Juice".  There is still some jiggering going on  but mostly the Happy Juice is working.  She is so much better when there is no mouth pain, or stomach pain or other pain.

Day 11, too early for any real news that the girls have done their job.  The docs have been talking about how she will begin to feel better and there will be some start to healing of the mouth sores.  When I asked if we would see some sort of counts to let us know she would be feeling better it was explained as follows:

We are hoping and anticipating the cord cells are working now to grow and multiply to an extent that they can leave their cozy home and enter the blood stream and be useful.  We had observed that the mouth began to heal first so a doctor did a study and found that when he scrapped the mouth of the patients they found dead Nuratiphils in the swabs.  Evidently as soon as those puppies are produced, they leave the cozy bones and go do their jobs.  Brave Little Engines That Could.

We should not discount how sick she is.  Yes she is eating Cheese Cake (thank you Uncle Alex).  Yes she ate a Chicken Almond Salad (thank you YaYa Pattie), yes she was able to look at the Tiffany web site to find a charm suitable to live on the same chain as the thoughtful Star Fish the Reinfeldts brought her from Nashville, yes needs more lint rollers to remove her chemo hair.  But we are hopeful that all of these things are leading to a great result.  

She is getting mad and frustrated about what is happening and being done to her. She is rallying the strength to do this hard job of replacing her immune system one cell and one day at a time.  I so see glimpses of the strong young woman we all know and love.

Every day I remind Mother Mary that any help she could send our way would be appreciated.  I swear a little, cry a little, laugh a little, whine a little, walk a little, drink a little and wait alot.  Sometimes I just sit very close to the dear sick child and "pet" her while she goes to sleep.

We will come through this and will do it with great alacrity.  The view from our soul will be changed forever.  Nothing will be as it was, yet vastly familiar.  Mary-E feels like she is being left behind by life and her friends and her world.  I know the feeling as we crawl deeper and deeper into this place of change and heeling.  I think the real result will be sort of like the Star Trek form of transport.  We don't have the high tech version but rather the slow painful kind.  When we are returned  in the beam, we will look the same but have been altered slightly.  

Change is good.