We Are Home -- Free At Last, Free At Last!

 After a full day of all the things we anticipated (last visit to IPOP, exit conversation with Dr. Imus, no CT scan because Kaiser said no, on to extricating ourselves from Baltimore), we made it home.

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We took the shuttle for the last time -- the roads are plowed minimally and the cars parked on the edges are piled up with snow -- and had our 26th visit with the nurses. It will be weird not to see them anymore. We have graduated. If we went back tomorrow, we would not belong.

It was nice to see Dr. Imus for the first time since about November. He was glad it went so well and wants us to be careful about managing the rest of the RSV recovery. There are so many more appointments in the next weeks and months, but mostly at Kaiser. He said that a preliminary look at the myeloma indicators shows that the treatment has already had some effect. Before the CAR-T, the M-spike was around 0.6 and two weeks after the treatment, it was 0.3. That is significant.

Kaiser declined the request to have a CT scan before we left. We were fine with that because we know they will do it themselves (tomorrow, in fact).  Julie pushed back pretty hard but they stood firm. The oncology nurse said, "that's why Daddy Kaiser has been in business for so long." But we feel really good about Kaiser after all they have done for us, and we know that they gambled and lost with our family, in terms of making money. They have kept Jon alive for a long time and they have always supported us when we go to Hopkins for high level care.

Jon had chosen a car rental company based on price, not proximity, so we took a 25 minute Lyft ride to the way northern parts of Baltimore. There are a lot of abandoned houses up there. That is not the part of town that is having lots of new construction. The parking lot of the car rental place was not plowed. What a giant mess. They had shoveled enough to get one car in and out at a time. While we were sitting there waiting our turn, I looked around the room and it felt like this was a sort of a theater version of a rental place. There were four pictures on the wall, black and white except for one item in yellow, like a child's boots or a sweater. There was one sign that said Hertz. The whole thing just looked sort of last-minute, like in The Sting. I expected that when we left, they would quickly turn it into a different business. They did have a car for us and they took a thousand pictures of it before we left. Maybe they only have two cars.

Next stop, loading up at the hotel. It took three hotel trolley rides down the elevator, and I filled up the whole trunk and back seat. A lot of it was the oxygen equipment, but a keyboard does take up some space. And knitting, and food, and winter coats. We rolled out of town at 3:30.

Traffic was not bad at all and we were home before 5:00. Jesse helped me unload everything into the house while Jon got himself situated in his big recliner. The house was all cleaned up, Jesse and Shalini had moved out completely, and Thalia is smiling real smiles. It will be an adjustment for Thalia, not having her personal baby bouncer at the ready whenever she starts to fuss.

Now Jon just has to get better from this pneumonia, stop coughing, get off the oxygen, start eating like a regular person and go to about three appointments a week. Julie said all of that will go better at home. It is certainly better for all of us. In terms of the farm season, there was no better time to be exiled. And if this really worked, we have so much to look forward to. 

Many thanks to all of you for all of your caring attention. I will post something about the second week of March after his PET scan and another check-in with Dr. Imus. We welcome texts and emails and I will answer anything. You never know, Jon might answer too.