Day Zero Has Arrived!

   It is 7:30 am of Day 0 - Transplant Day.  Please just pray that all goes well.  Thank you.

   As we now approach 4:30 pm, the family reunion inside of me has started!  Thank you everyone for the warm wishes, the prayers, the cards, the thoughts.  The transplant was both uneventful and monumental -- uneventful because everything went well but monumental because this day is a turning point of sorts.  Now real recovery can begin.  But it will still happen slowly.  I have at least two weeks left here in the hospital or until my stem cells can prove they are doing what they are supposed to be doing. Also I have had a lot of chemo put into me in the last week and so that will have to slowly matriculate its way through my system too, leaving me feeling generally--whats the clinical word?---yucky.  (More later -- I have three special visitors right now...Connie and Tem and Tess).
   Now that my family has eaten room service (which Tessa thinks is really cool -- "just call them up and they deliver!") and Tem has wiped me out in cribbage, the family is heading back home.  I have just a couple of thoughts.  I didn't want it today but my devotional book wanted me to focus on Job.  No God...not today.  But the point made is that without the suffering in Job's life, who would Job have been?  His hardship formed him.  I want this hardship to form me into being a better man.  I am not sure what that looks like yet, but I am now open to it.
   Also, Curt went home yesterday.  He was a BMT patient that was released from his hospital stay just three hours before his daughter's high school graduation.  They had him gowned up in a private room, but he was there to watch his daughter walk across the stage.  Those things too will now take on new significance for me as well.