Wars and Gardens

It's late Wednesday night. 11:30pm EST. It's 4:30am GMT. My family lives in a different time zone. It's crazy. And Andy straddled a time zone tonight coming here to be with me for the transplant. I feel almost like it's OUR transplant. For me, my family and for anyone and everyone who has been with me, supporting me, fighting with me, tooth and nail, for this day to come.  

I never really liked the expression of "battling" cancer. I don't know why. Maybe because it's such an unusual enemy.  It's more like guerrilla warfare. It's definitely not the "Don't fire until you see the whites of their eyes", type of war. That would be really stupid. Worst war strategy ever.

Dr. Giralt keeps using baseball analogies. "We're going to get as close to the fence and then hit it out of the stadium." (Although when does that happen in baseball?)
Getting close to the fence for him, I presume, is a whopping amount of chemo, so when the cells go in, they have a nice clean place to start off. My bones will then suck them in and the cells will know to go in! They will all know to coalesce. 
Doctors don't understand some of this unusual, unexplained cell behavior, but they trust enough to include them in their protocols. Who knew that the first stem transplant in 1968 would have led to a cure for Leukemia? The doctors took a chance that the cells would build cells. It is amazing how often the metaphor, "It's like planting a garden", comes up among doctors and nurses. And does anyone really know why a garden grows? "It's magic, it's God." I'm quoting doctors here.