Marrow

My friend is very likely going to need a bone marrow transplant. I hate it. I hate knowing it. I hate thinking about it. But, I also hate not thinking or talking about it. A bone marrow transplant sounds painful. It sounds dangerous. It sounds like something that an athletic, healthy eating, smart, and careful person should have been able to bet on never having to do.

Whenever I find myself feeling depressed about my ridiculously mundane problems, I am quickly sobered by the realization that there is a much greater problem--I cannot help someone that I love avoid a horrible and scary thing. I wish I could take a scalpel and cut out her cancer and then cut out my own cancer-free tissues and gently place them into her bones and kidneys and chest and, you know what, I keep forgetting all the places that she has cancer it's so many. I want them all to be gone. I want to kill them. This would be full-on pre-meditated murder of those disgusting, evil cancer cells.

Yet, I am completely helpless to help her. There are just so many flowers and cupcakes and "helpful" errands you can run for someone who really just needs new bone marrow. Today I did the far-second best thing that I could do, which is sign up for the national bone marrow registry. It is not as satisfying as I want it to be. It will not help anyone I know AT ALL. About all it does is let me fantasize that some day I'll be the person that a friend of someone who is very sick will be thankful for because I can do for her friend what she is not genetically capable of doing but wants badly to do, which is maybe cure her cancer.

Blast from the Past: Tills and her Auntie Camile this last 4th of July--oh my goodness I miss her fatness (Tillie's, not Camile's of course!)