It's On

It's official. I signed off the consent forms and the doctor signed off my treatment plan, so the transplant officially starts Monday morning. I won't get the actual transplant until Tuesday, because Monday we'll be destroying my bone marrow.

It's kind of ominous. The risk of complications and mortality are pretty low, but this isn't a flu vaccination. This is Serious Stuff and it kind of scares me. It doesn't scare me enough to back out, but it still has to be taken seriously. For one thing, it'll reset my immune system to Day Zero. I'll lose all my acquired immunity to everything, so I'll need to be vaccinated against even childhood diseases, and a lifetime spend accumulating antibodies against colds will be lost. Plus there's the simple observation that any chemo powerful enough to kill my bone marrow is likely to make me feel like crap for a while.

The next sixty days are liable to be fairly unpleasant, but the sooner I start, the sooner I can finish. That's the idea I'm trying to hang on to, not the idea of sixty days of feeling bad.

Scary. I'm at a loss for words. But won't it be nice to not have cancer any more?