Author: Annie

We heard this evening that Gerry’s blood count is good enough to start the harvest tomorrow – hooray! We’d heard it wasn’t uncommon for the growth hormone shots to go on for a few more days – we’re glad to be moving on to the next level of this adventure. I swear, it’s like a…

The weather is working for us – albeit, not for everyone else in the county – but for us, this has been a good weather weekend. I can tell when the weather’s nice, Gerry itches to get out and DO something. Rain is a respite! It’s raining – overcast, grey, sleep-all-afternoon while watching history documentary…

(an oddly religious post…) We’ve been waiting for the final approval from our insurance company for Gerry’s transplant. The way they do things is they give a pre-approval – a guarantee that they’ll cover us being here for testing and all of the preliminary stuff. After the testing is turned in and reviewed by the…

We have a new case worker with our insurance company, and we discovered something quite wonderful… We get a [small] daily stipend for meals and room! It’s not huge, it doesn’t cover everything, but it’s more than we thought we’d be getting. This is amazing. Apparently when we were looking into the program at the…

At the Mayo there are signs all over the place that if you’re sneezing or coughing, STAY AWAY. I appreciate these signs – it will be only a short time until Gerry’s undergoing his high-dose chemo, and will be susceptible to all kinds of viruses. But I woke up with a pretty strong sneezing, coughing,…

Last evening we noticed a convent looking building on the hill across from our hotel – what a lovely view. Tuscany in Minnesota. We found out today it is a convent. Sisters of St. Francis. I wonder if there are tours – it’s a lovely building, and there seems to be a great deal of…

Some of the music they play around here is pretty amusing. As we walked into our first appointment this morning, we heard the Longine Symphonette version of What Are You Doing The Rest Of Your Life? I’m not sure if anyone else caught it in the waiting room – it was a pretty florid arrangement…

There’s this wonderful feeling when things go well – the small things, the big things, all the in-between things. Like when you make a shopping list and go to the store and get everything on the list (and maybe only one or two extra things,) drive home and make every light – that’s how this…

I miss home. I’ve only been gone a few days, and I miss it. I’m back in Michigan – about as homey as I can get in these 50 states since I was raised in Toledo (just south of the Michigan border) and lived briefly in Temperance, MI (the perfect place for a Methodist) But…

The Twin Cities are like a small town. Obviously they’re the biggest cities in MN, and have all of the benefits of living in a big city, but in the past 6 months of living here I’ve been so struck by how interconnected each person I meet is with so many others. It’s a very…