I noticed I forgot to give this post a title this morning…

This photo, showing the abscesses Beth has developed, is about as close as I wanted to get, for her privacy’s sake, but they do look like the images at the Wikipedia entry. They gave her an antibiotic called Vancomycin yesterday, a drug of last resort. That will give you some idea of how serious they think these are. You just need that kind of help when your white blood counts are as low as Beth’s are.

Zach stayed with Beth almost all day yesterday – thank you Zach! – and after an abbreviated day at work I took Sissy and Dani down to the hospital. Dani is not supposed to be there, but we snuck her in anyway. And Beth was very grateful.

None of the “medical” stuff got started unit Dr. Rossetti arrived (and I was walking into the room, coincidentally, the same time he got there) at about 5:30. We always learn things when we see Dr. Rossetti, and there were some important takeaways yesterday.

1. He really likes this second donor. This is the one he is hoping we’ll get. She is a young woman from the “international” database, but she has the best characteristics among the three potentials. We may learn more on that as early as today.

2. The Vidaza, while it’s not doing the work of enabling Beth to produce blood cells, is at least doing the work of “clearing out her marrow” – which is the function of the “conditioning” phase that will precede the transplant.

3. The transplant is potentially just 3-6 weeks away. Three weeks is optimistic, six weeks would be more typical. That would put us in the hospital (or making our daily runs to the hospital) for most of December.

We continue to be grateful for and overwhelmed by the love and concern of our family and friends, the outpouring of love and prayers from our church family, and monetary donations which continue to come in, and which are still (and soon to be) be much needed. Thank you for being here with us and for us.