One Year and Counting

Today marks one year since my transplant.



Flashback on March 5, 2007:

• Woke up and worked Telecommuting from my apartment (I did not go to the Palo Alto, or Sunnyvale site on that day).


• At about 3PM was able to knock off work and head over to Stanford to pick-up some Paperwork at the hospital, and have lunch in the cafeteria (a very good lunch from the hospital grill that I was mad they would have to get out of my stomach before the transplant was to take place.) Grilled chicken wrap, Strawberry Milk, fresh fruit salad, bottle of water.


• About 3:30 I finished eating so with my paperwork in hand I went over to the cancer center to use the computers, and print out some puzzles and word searches for the recent heart/lung transplant patients (puzzles help with manual dexterity, and mental focus as your body adjust to all the medicine you are on).


• Still in the cancer center at the library printing when my pager went off, at about 5:00PM PST as I was multi-tasking (blogging, e-mail, printing puzzles http://www.krazydad.com/puzzles/, and researching cancer). I ignored it as I had gotten some false pages when someones fax machine had gotten a hold of my pager number; once I noticed it was a hospital number I called it back and the surgeon said "Jerrold this is Dr. ****** we have some lungs you need to get to the hospital"; I said ok I will see you in four hours even though I was right across the street I had stuff I needed to do before I was to be out of commission for a few weeks. (I needed to clean my apartment, I had no clean clothes it was laundry night, needed to pay bills, I needed to set out maps and parking tokens for my wife to get back and forth to the hospital). In the end I was advised not to leave the hospital so I went and delivered the puzzles and parked my truck at the home hospital apartments across from Stanford hospital, caught a ride to the hospital which was across the street.
• From 5:05 - 6:00PM made calls to (my landlord, wife, folks, brothers, Pastor, manager, cancer friends in California, and transplant buds in California)... I walked into the hospital upright and ready for whatever.
• At 6:00 PM the wait began I was in the put in a room to do blood work, get hooked up to my IV, shower, and get ready for the operation. I was told that the surgeon was tired and was going to take a nap before the surgery so I said sleep was good and the transplant was scheduled for midnight...... waiting
• While waiting Sharon and Justin (cancer buds from California) visited with me, then my Godmother made it down from Sacramento, and my wife would eventually make it in right before the transplant at about 11:30PM. ..... back tracking to kill time I got on the computer at the nurses station and blogged, paid bills, and sent e-mails.