In Which We Have A Few Hours Apart

Jon seemed quite normal today, all things considered. We had our usual sumptuous hotel breakfast and then came back up for some vacation relaxing. Then I said we had to go outside and take a walk because it was just too beautiful. The sun was shining, the sky was blue, and it was warm. The expression on his face made me laugh out loud -- that is the exact same face that his dad would make when he didn't want to do something. My most recent memory of that is Leon sitting in the sunny room at Brookhaven, in a circle, with all the other old people doing a social form of PT, tossing a beach ball around the room. Leon made such a face of distaste and dismay whenever the ball came to him. That's Jon when he thinks he has to go take a walk on a rest day.  

So out we went. We were headed for the Northeast Market, about two blocks east of here. We thought we knew what it was (Anna had described it from her time at grad school here) but when we walked in, we felt like we were in one of those European markets -- piles of delicious looking food behind glass, slanting floors because no one bothered to level the building site before putting up the building, crowds of people. The last market we went to like this was in Florence where we got something for lunch by mistake because it was all in Italian. Something like tripe stew. I couldn't really eat it after a few bites, the texture was so inedible. Anyway, we wore our masks and we looked at all the nice food and the grocery displays that looked like they were from 50  years ago (Sunmaid raisins in those square red boxes that you don't see anymore) and we thought that if we lived near something like this in real life, we would definitely come and eat. We can't imagine how they sell all those piles of cut up chicken in one day. 

Then I went out for a long-anticipated date with Nell who drove all the way up from Reston to take me to the Baltimore Museum of Art. Luckily Jon was in fine condition and had work calls this afternoon to keep him busy.  Nell and I had a lovely lunch at the museum (jampacked, ate at the bar) and then went to see the Amy Sherald exhibit. She is the artist who rose to national fame when Michelle Obama selected her to paint the official portrait. We learned a lot about Sherald's philosophy as an artist, how she sees that painting Black people is a political act (SO many things are political acts now) and she decided to paint in grayscape rather than making the skin tone become a point of discussion. She is more interested in the interior person as that relates to what they show the world. She uses models, takes photographs until she gets the "sketch" she wants, and then paints from that photo. Very accessible and each painting tells a story, just by the way the person stands, looks at you. Not relying on context, just what they are wearing and how they look. We recommend a visit to see the exhibit. It was just about as much museum time as I can manage. Then I feel like I need a nap, always.

For the first and perhaps only time this trip, I had to flush Jon's line because we didn't go in to the IPOP. They make it so easy now, they don't even use the caps (the nurse said that studies showed that there were more line infections when they had amateurs cleaning the caps), so you just have to rub the ends of the lumens very thoroughly, squirt out the first saline from a pre-loaded syringe, push it into the line. One is purple, one is red so you don't make a mistake and flush the same line twice. Jon clicks the little valve open and closed for me because I don't have the dexterity of a nurse. That was all the medical excitement of the whole day.

Tomorrow is Day Zero. They expect to be ready to infuse his re-engineered cells at about 11:00. Then our friend Monica (who has done this exact thing herself) says that the side effects don't really appear until about Day 5. You never know what will happen, but we are ready for whatever comes next.