Stem Cell Transplant Then

Two Years Ago

Sam flies back to Utah the day after David’s transplant, after we have watched the anticlimactic delivery of his stem cells via IV to David. Sam has a job for the summer with a small startup company. R’el graduates from her psychiatry residency at the University of Connecticut Medical Center in Farmington, just west of Hartford. We attend a wedding reception for Ryan and Mie at the Old Manse, which Nathaniel Hawthorne and his new bride Sophia Amelia Peabody rented when they were first married in 1842.

Day One, Day Two, Day Three of the hundred day post-transplant quarantine. I become a “Kitchen Nazi”. I decline offers of meals from loving friends. I focus a lot of energy on keeping the kitchen clean and the food safe, measuring the temperature of all meat (even cold cuts) and cooked food (165° or above), soaking the washed dishes in bleach, and spraying down the kitchen counters with a bleach solution frequently. It’s what I can do to combat the helplessness.

2016

The wedding of Annie and Shawn, which I announced in last week’s post, happens in the Provo City Center Temple. My wedding hope for them is expressed by the letter Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote to his sister Louisa, shortly after he and Sophia married:

“We are as happy as people can be, without making themselves ridiculous, and might be even happier; but, as a matter of taste, we choose to stop short at this point.” A year later, Nathaniel writes to his wife, Sophia, “We were never so happy as now—never such wide capacity for happiness, yet overflowing with all that the day and every moment brings to us. Methinks this birth-day of our married life is like a cape, which we have now doubled and find a more infinite ocean of love stretching out before us.”

Two days after Annie’s and Shawn’s wedding Jim drops me off at the Salt Lake City Amtrak train tracks at 10 p.m. I wander around, looking for the promised waiting area, and finally stop in at the Greyhound bus station, where a security guard directs me to the small Amtrak waiting room.

The California Zephyr is two hours late. At 2 a.m. I board and settle into my seat, which is a lot roomier than economy airplane seats. No one sits next to me, so I can spread out a little. I sleep about five hours, waking up several times. When I wake up the sun is well up; my sleep mask is very effective. A group of Mennonites are behind me in the coach car; they speak a language that sounds Scandinavian. At Winnemucca, Nevada, I have time to step out on the platform; a Mennonite woman and man run to the end of the long, concrete platform. The conductor is annoyed, thinking they will delay the train. Nearly half the passengers on the platform smoke. Back on the train many of the passengers sleep through the stop. I spend several hours in the observation car and hear the story of the ill-fated Donner party as we pass Donner Lake in the Sierra Nevada Mountains.

We arrive in Sacramento, California, around 4:30 p.m., about two hours late. I cut across a parking lot to get to Old Sacramento. I trip over a parking berm and cut my chin and scrape my knees—blood everywhere. Dazed, I stumble into a restaurant and a helpful bartender  rescues me with a bunch of paper napkins to staunch the bleeding. I wander the wooden sidewalks, past shops of old-time photographers, ice cream shops and tattoo parlors, and a riverboat dock, all the while firmly pressing the napkins to my chin. The man at the hot dog storefront notices my plight and offers two small bandaids. Then I walk to the California state capitol and enjoy the botanical garden.

At 1 a.m. I board the Seattle-bound Coast Starlight.

Next morning I head to the observation car at 7:00 a.m. I spend the day typing on my laptop and listening to a naturalist and a historian narrate our trip through Oregon and Washington. We stop on a siding in front of a bog and watch yellow-headed blackbirds dart among the rushes as a freight train passes us. Crater Lake is too far away to see, but there is fresh snow on the evergreens as we pass over the Cascade Mountains, which is delightful.

We arrive in Seattle an hour early and I take my first Uber ride, to my college friend’s, Kathleen’s, house. We talk late into the evening, as the room slowly darkens; we bask in our renewed friendship in the dusk, which lingers past 10 p.m.