Wedding Plans

Our daughter Annie is getting married tomorrow in the Provo City Center Temple in Utah.

            In December 2010, a fire destroyed all but the outer walls of the historic Provo Tabernacle.




The temple was constructed inside those walls and dedicated on March 20, 2016. Annie and Shawn will be married there less than three months later.                            

Jim’s cousin, Mark, and his wife, Lynne, are generously hosting us and helping tremendously with the preparations and reception, which will be at the Springville Art Museum. Cyrus Dallin, who sculpted the Angel Moroni on the main steeple of the Salt Lake City Temple as well as Appeal to the Great Spirit in front of the Boston Museum of Fine Art, was born and raised in Springville, Utah, south of Salt Lake City. Dallin spent his adult life in Arlington, MA, where he had a sculpture studio. We live about 4 miles away, both from his studio and the replica Angel Moroni statue on the Boston Temple.

Two years ago

The first week in June, 2014, our son Sam, a 10-out-of-10 HLA (Human Leukocyte Antigen) match and therefore David’s stem cell donor, takes a few days off work in Utah and spends them at Mass. General as they harvest stem cells. The procedure is much like a platelet donation: Sam sits quietly while a needle in a vein in his arm removes his whole blood. A machine separates out the stem cells (which can mature into any type of blood cell), and then Sam’s blood, sans stem cells, is returned into a vein in his other arm. They freeze the cells, to preserve them before the transplant. After the procedure, we meet for lunch at the food court at Mass. General.

The results of an echocardiogram explain why David walks slowly and bent over: he has the heart of an 80-year-old cardiology patient: the chemo drug, daunirubicin, damaged his heart badly. In addition, he could have died from the C-diff (clostridium difficile) infection he contracted in the hospital. As it was, he had emergency surgery to remove his large intestine. Clearly hospitals are dangerous places for him.

So, when his transplant doctor, Dr. Yi-Bin Chen, asks David if he’d like to go home the day after the transplant, of course David lights up. After my initial elation, I’m more subdued: coming right home feel like the booby prize. They won’t administer radiation or more chemo to eradicate most of the leukemic cells before the transplant, as is the standard procedure. That treatment might just kill him. And since he won’t be badly weakened by any additional chemo and radiation, he can immediately go home, a much safer place than the hospital has been for him. There are no easy decisions.