I spent 45 minutes on the phone with Kristina tonight, and she sounds pretty darn good. She is excited to have passed Day 180 since the transplant -- amazing, isn't it? -- and she tells me she has an inch and a half of hair now! It's dark brown, and she's having sort of an identity crisis, but as she says, at least she's buying clothes now!
I was sitting on the porch when she called, not taking notes or typing, just watching the bats fly around and enjoying the breeze ... so I forgot a lot of stuff I'm supposed to be saying. And she forgot some stuff she had wanted to tell me. So there are your disclaimers.
One thing she did recently was help a group called The Madhouse Project raise $134,000 for the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance. The Madhouse Project is a group of successful 30something guys in Seattle (they named it for their old college crash pad) who get together once a year to raise money to fight cancer. They have a silent auction and a regular auction, and this year Kristina was asked to speak. She told me she screwed it up royally, but she also said there were a lot of tears, and hey, they raised $134,000! Something must have gone right.
She's been doing some physical therapy with other cancer survivors: walking, yoga, this sort of thing. The main thing is to try to rebuild muscle mass after all the lying around and taking drugs. She still has some GI hassles (bad abdominal pain and needing to stay close to a bathroom) on occasion, and there are still hassles with the insurance company, and of course there's always money concerns ...
But let's not forget that she is alive and cancer-free, 180 days after a transplant. That's amazing and more than wonderful. She's really grateful folks are staying in touch -- and if you aren't, well, you ought to be. Give her a call, for heaven's sake!
