Day 81

You know what they say. Time flies when you are having fun. What they usually don't point out to you is the fact that time flies with after burners and retro rockets! It is almost time for my 100 day check up, right around the corner, just a matter of days. It is exciting to look forward to the trip and all it's little surprises. It is also exciting (in a different kind of way -- sort of scary) to look forward to hearing what the doctors have to say about the results of my stem cell transplant which on the one hand seems like it happened last week but on the other hand such a long time ago because so much has happened since then.

My hair is growing out and is beginning to almost look like hair. There is so much gray it is still sort of invisible. I have found that any tiny length of hair no matter the color is welcome compared with a bald head when a stiff, cold breeze is blowing across it!

I'm almost over my first cold (rhinovirus) since I can't remember when. I have a very healthy respect for pneumonia so I can't say this round of sickness didn't scare me a bit. I managed to develop a nasty sinus infection which has responded well so far to levaquin. It has been two weeks and two days since I came down with the virus. About all that remains is slight chest congestion and slight sinus drainage. Of course, I don't like being sick for ten minutes much less ten days.

My oncologist told me last week I was doing very well in his opinion. My white blood cell count is in the normal range or it was last week when they did the test. I am still quite a bit anemic but I am hoping that will get better in a few months.

The city built a real nice walking/biking trail close to the river which has become known as The River Walk. It is about two miles long give or take. I walked it with my wife and one of our friends last Saturday. It was a nice warmish beautiful day for a walk. It was cool enough to need a sweat shirt if you weren't walking, cool enough for the mosquitoes to be out flying around looking for something to eat but not light and bite.

Anyway, we have been tossing the idea of getting bicycles around for a long time. We finally took the plunge so to speak and bought a couple of bicycles, nothing fancy, just something to get us up and down the river walk for fun. Of course, taking up bicycling is one of the last things they want to see a myeloma patient take up. I suppose compared with skateboarding and bungee jumping maybe it is relatively tame. It will give us something we can do together and get some much needed exercise.

Probably some of the best fun I have ever had in my life was on the seat of a bicycle when I was growing up. I must have spent almost every daylight hour (and some night time hours) on my bike during the summer. Of course I had to take some time out to play kick-the-can and army. When I was in the third grade, we would play Flash Gordon on a big oak tree stump which was left over from a big old oak tree which had blown down. It was the perfect make believe device to keep us entertained for hours except we only had about thirty minutes at a time until the recess bell range calling us back to our prison without bars they called a school house. Too bad we couldn't have had the same imaginative fun with school books as we did with old partially submerged oak tree stumps.

So, it's off to the river walk with us.