Reflections on a Rainy Afternoon

Today is Saturday (March 8th), and it is raining.  I'm inside wandering around feeling trapped.  For the first time since the diagnosis I'm feeling normal, and all I can do is lay around.  Lucky for me however, the past week has been anything but normal.

 

Last Sunday the family (minus Izzy) and I went to Boston, not for medical reasons, but in order to see Kevin Garnett and the rest of Celtics play the Atlanta Hawks.  It was a great game, and the view was amazing from row 7 seat 3.  (this must have taken a lot of ice cream sundaes...thank you, CCLCS, for eating them all for me!) 

Less than 12 hours later, I was on a Cape Air flight back over to Boston.  Once in Logan Airport I met up with the Dana Farber Jimmy Fund group and I started my next adventure: a trip down to Fort Myers (where it is 80 degrees and sunny every day.) Monday was just a travel day, the real fun started Tuesday morning.  After breakfast we 32 teens from the Jimmy Fund and the 15 chaperones (a combination of doctors, nurses, and social workers) headed by bus to the field.  Before the game started we all got to meet some of the players.  Manny and Ortiz didn't come by, but I did get to meet: Alex Cora, Tim Wakefield, Kevin Youkilis, Clay Buchholz, Doug Mirabelli, Jon Lester, Mike Lowell, Hideki Okajima, and Dustin Pedroia.  After meeting the players, getting autographs and photos, we headed for our seats.  Well actually we headed for the air conditioned owner's box.  John Henry wasn't there, but there was all the free food a person could want: even an omelet bar complete with a chef waiting to make a custom omelet. The box itself was almost right behind home-plate. The only better seats were the announcer's box right next to us.  It was an exciting game with Dice-K pitching, and the Sox pulled out a win 5-3.  On the way back to the bus (which was waiting for us in the player's parking lot) one of the most memorable and unexpected things happened on all the trip.  Red Sox legend Johnny Pesky (as in  the "Pesky pole") came out to meet with our group .  He is a great guy and was more than happy to sign baseballs and take pictures.  Wednesday was mainly a travel day, but it did end with pad thai with our friends in Cambridge, so I would call it a good day.

 

Thursday I was expecting to go into my next round of chemo, but I was neutropienic (not enough white blood cells.) Being neutropienic, I couldn't get my chemo.  However my mom and I were not going to waste a day in Boston.  We ended up going to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, followed by hot chocolate.  The next day I finally got home, thus ending a great week. 

Now it's Saturday and it's raining.  Now that my spring training trip is over, and I'm back home I find myself missing all of my friends.  One of the worst things about everything that's going on is that most of the time people don't know where I am because of all the unexpected schedule changes, and I don't know where they are.  When a situation has both of those two things going on, the end result is me sitting around the house on a Saturday with nothing to do, but feeling ready to do anything.  The re-scheduled chemo is Monday-Wednesday (if my white blood cell count is up) and the next big step after that is surgery (April 7) to get rid of the tricky tumor. 

 Thanks again for all the support, hearing from all of you can make all the difference between a good day and a great day.

-Logan