Gennie's rebirthday!!!

     March 27th 2012 will be Gennie's Rebirthday!!!

     Everyone is invited to help us celebrate Gennie's rebirth. On Tuesday the 27th of this month courtesy of her brother (our hero), Gennie will be given a second chance at a cancer free life. She will be admitted to the hospital on the 19th and chemo treatments will begin the next day. It will only take a few days to kill off her immune system. On the 26th Spud will have his stem cells harvested and on the 27th they will be transplanted in Gennie. 

     Today we had several meetings with folks at MCV to discuss everything from who is going to pay for this to life after transplant for the next five years. The first meeting was for Gennie to have more blood test done and turn in her pee bucket. For the twenty four hours prior to her visit she had to collect her pee to be studied and tested. The next time you feel like complaining about your job remember you could be a pee tester. Come to think of it it probably pays better and has better benefits than what I did for thirty five years and it sort of looks like beer. Sorry tangent. The second meeting was to determine who is going to pay for this. It seems all is in order on that front. Thankfully. It only cost the two of us $24000.00 a year to have health insurance and for once I don't mind. Sorry again, random thought. The third meeting was with the Doctor who had Gennie sign all the consent forms. He explained all sorts of things. To many to mention or remember. All are facinating and awesome. One is that they will keep a sample of Gennie's blood and DNA frozen for maybe twenty five years. This is in case sometime in the future they discover something and it relates back to her case they can ask for that sample and with future technology they can determine what was unique about her DNA or blood. Pretty cool. However it has it's drawbacks. If she desides to murder me she is going to be caught. She is on file now. I feel so much safer now. The doctor told Gennie she will be under the care of a team of 85 doctors, nurses, caregivers and support people all with the sole goal of helping Gennie through this. We have met many of them already and they are great. His pride in his team is apparent and that gives us a good feeling also. Next was on to the post transplant coordinator. She shared with us what life would be like for the reborn Gennie. Without boring you with the details let's just say it will be a little different for a while. In the near future it will mean a move to Richmond for atleast six months. Once released from the hospital in about thirty days it will be daily visits to the hospital for about six hours a day. They will be checking everything every day. Rather than try to explain what they will be looking for I will keep you informed as it happens. When they say we can move home to Poquoson it will mean frequent trips back to Richmond for more test. Right now we are not sure how frequent, she probably told us but I forget. She did say we will be going to MCV for years in the future. I really should buy a Prius. We spent almost two hours with her. To much to remember but she said there would not be a test. Then on to our pretransplant coordinator. She is the one who gave us the schedule. Her name is Judy and she is great. She did not keep us to long as we were saturated with new knowledge. As my mother use to say Gennie is "wound up like an eight day clock". Judy saw this and got the doctor to prescribe meds to help. She will start on them tomorrow.  It was a long and insightfull day, but we are ready.

     We did not learn anything today that caught us offguard except, we are not going to be able to take our little Jazzy to Richmond with us. This is going to be difficult but we will work it out. We have had a few friends offer to help us if this occured. We are hesitant to ask anyone to take this on but we are going to have to impose. Another difficult part of this is the seperation from our family and friends. During the hospital stay Gennie is technically allowed to have visitors as long as they are completely healthy and have only been around healthy people. OK, I am going to make this easy on everyone. She is only going to be in the hospital for thirty days. Many of those days she is not going to be feeling her best. I am asking that if you would like to visit please wait until we move in to our apartment. Then if you would call me we would be happy to have you visit when she is feeling better. Remember for the first thirty days we will be at the hospital for six hours each day. Visits would be best in the late afternoon or evening. You still need to be healthy and wash your hands when you get there. Once the daily visits to MCV stop we will have days off when visitors would be great. The best way to keep intouch with Gennie is e-mail. deadogdottie@yahoo.com She may not get right back to you but believe me she will as soon as she is up to it. She is going to need someone other than just me to bitch at, sorry I mean talk to.

     Thanks for reading and I know many of you are only here to see how my diet is going. No progress from last time. Oh well 200 is nice for now. Still going to 190 but taking a little longer than I thought. My golf game seems to be stuck too. I just hope I live long enough for my golf score to catch up with my age.

     Thanks as always for your thoughts and prayers. That's all for now folks!!!

Bob