Good morning. And it is a good morning - Bill is sitting in his big chair reading the newspaper - at home! They finished all of the testing they can do for now so last evening they sent him home to sleep in his own bed. He is still on oxygen - a bit less when resting and a bit more as he is up and moving around - which is slow but more frequent. He's still taking steroids to help his lungs clear. But, no more monitors, IVs and people waking him up at all hours to poke and prod. Despite it all, Bill was an amazingly "patient" patient so now he's set a standard for good behavior that he'll need to live up to with Nurse Ratchet here at home.

We talked with the oncologist/hemotologist yesterday. He ordered some additional tests. The folks in Olympia and up in Seattle are a bit stumped. They can narrow down the abnormalities in his bone marrow to a "family" of disorders but haven't yet been able to do a positive ID as to the specific culprit. So, yesterday they sent all of his records to the researcher at the Mayo Clinic who has done the most research/writing about this family of bugs. Of course this means we will have to wait a bit longer but once they have a positive ID they will know how to treat it. They are reasonably certain that this is not a fast growing bug but rather something "indolent". (Who would ever have thought that Bill would have anything "indolent" attached to him?) Without knowing what the bug is they are still not certain what its relationship is to the pulmonary edema episode that was so difficult last week.

Bill is on a high protein, low salt diet so if you have any good recipes/menu ideas please send them our way. Maybe we'll buy stock in Mrs. Dash! Also, neither of us are getting out to do early spring yardwork and so we are looking for a good company to come in and treat the moss in the lawn, cut back the grasses, etc. Since we are new to our house and Olympia garden maintenance folks we'd really appreciate any suggestions of reliable companies you may have worked with.

We received a couple of emails yesterday about not knowing how to post a comment on this page. Just go to the bottom of the page and click on the item that says, " (a number) comments". That will take you to a page where you can post anything you'd like to say. We'd look forward to hearing from you now that we can look outward to what's going on in the rest of the world!