Day 6 (9th day in hospital)

Jamey came and sat with Jimmy for a long time this afternoon, so I could go to the apartment for a while: do some laundry, take a bath, make Jimmy some blueberry muffins. It's the only thing he'll eat lately, muffins and canned freestone peaches and vanilla milkshakes. Poor baby's running a fever again, and he has some ulcers in his mouth, and he's not too happy right now. But I keep telling him that we just have to get through the next few days, and he'll bounce right back.

Jimmy asked Dr. Langston exactly where we are in the process, and to illustrate, she drew a graph on the message board in our room: we are where the star is, almost to the bottom. With his white cells (and his immune system) almost completely wiped out, he's neutropenic, and will stay that way at the bottom of the curve until his stem cells engraft and start creating millions of new healthy cells, and then we'll be on the upswing of the graph. (Mrs. Massey, my 10th grade biology teacher, would be so proud that I'm beginning to grasp this stuff.)