A Year Ago

Looking Down the Barrel of a Treatment

This week, my internal calendar was telling me that we hit a significant milestone. Sure enough, this morning I was reminded by the ubiquitous Facebook Memories that it was exactly a year ago when I had a difficult and heavy conversation with my son about what I had just learned from one of my oncologists. I knew then that my best chance of surviving this disease would be high-dose chemotherapy followed by a stem cell transplant, but I didn’t know exactly what that entailed. After a thorough conversation with Dr. Nishihori and Nurse Buffy, a plan was outlined.

I remember being overwhelmed by it all. I had just endured the longest hospital stay of my life, eleven days if my memory is correct, to shrink the abdominal tumor