Day 32

Off to a celebratory dinner with Terry! More details to follow.

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Today we paid Dr Manno a visit and got a set of labs drawn. Hopefully, everything went correctly at the lab because the values were excellent. No blasts (phew!), WBC 6.2 (normal), hgb 9.8 (still a little low, but higher than I was discharged with), MCV 94.2 (normal sized red blood cells), platelets 745 (a little exuberant--hopefully, they'll settle down soon), 1% metamyelocytes, 2% myelocytes, 14% monocytes, and the absolute counts of everything were normal. My ANC is now 3, 170 which means I can go to the dentist. o, boy! (actually, I want to go to the dentist to get anything even slightly off taken care of so it does not become a source of problems with the next round of chemo (which, just as surely as early August is coming, is on its way). My liver and kidney labs were all normal, including an albumin of 3.5 (now normal, was 3.2 in the hospital which I had a mini-meltdown about).

I will be seeing Dr Hill a week from Friday so, as Terry puts it, we have about nine care free days before the next doctor visit.

Otherwise, today was lovely. I walked 1.7 miles around town, ran a bunch of errands, including getting the dog de-stunk at the groomer's, lost at Sorry to my favorite Sorry shark and I don't think I even made a single triumphal return visit to my bed today.

Terry and I went to what I'm pretty sure is my favorite restaurant, BlueMoon, which is two blocks from my house. When I was in the hospital, I sometimes asked myself how will I know for sure I've gotten out of here? The answer was often because I would be having dinner at BlueMoon with Terry, eating their bread and drinking a housemade sangria. Well, tonight, I did it. I was careful to avoid the cream sauces and had a delicious turbot stuffed with mushrooms with some fabulous grilled potatoes. It had pesto, but hopefully, that was not too rich. We go there often enough that all the old waitstaff know us (there were two new ones, however) and it was so nice to see them and chat for a couple of minutes. Terry had already stopped by while I was in the hospital to give them the scoop so they didn't feel like we had spurned them and I didn't have to explain the whole leukemia story which was a huge relief. In all, a very successful and cozy celebratory dinner.

Now, on to nine days of relatively carefree life. Dr Manno says my job is to keep up my nutrition, exercise and keep my mood good. What a lot of hard work I have ahead of me! It's a pretty nice job for the next nine days.

If you would like it, I wish you some carefree days. If you have had enough carefree and feel you might need to buckle down now, I wish you luck with that. Either way, sleep well.