11/15/10 – 02/02/11: Home For Christmas

 After apheresis, my white blood count and neutrophils recovered quickly and I was feeling pretty well.  My Aqua Team at SCCA decided I could go home because I wouldn’t need to be seen every day and they had to wait 30 days between apheresis and transplant.  What a surprise that was.  We actually got to be home for three weeks which included Christmas.  My heart and breast biopsy setbacks actually made it possible for me to spend Christmas at home. My daughter had decorated the house for Christmas and it was just lovely to be home during that time.  We had a nice, but low key Christmas and it was wonderful. Being at home brought some normalcy back into my life.  When we were living in Seattle, my life was all cancer diagnosis/treatment all the time – the only reason for living there was that I was a cancer patient.  I have lived in my home just about 37 years and almost all of that time I was not a cancer patient, so things were much like my life before cancer.  The downside of this “vacation” from Seattle  was knowing I would be checking into University of Washington Medical Center on December 27 to begin the transplant of my stem cells.  Had I known how difficult it would be, I probably wouldn’t have enjoyed Christmas.