Day 88, April 24th, 2013

Today I rolled over to the allo team (their phrasing, not mine). I am, as put forth in my last update, indeed on the Red team, and Dad is equally indeed on the Blue team. Indeed. Yes. Quite. Rather.

After breakfast, Dad and I went over to Vivace for coffee (espresso, technically). It was ridiculously nice out today, so we sat at an outside table and basked in the sun with our respective brown stimulant juices and enjoyed the sunshine for an hour. When I say ridiculously nice, I mean plus twenty, birds singing, women in summer dresses, men breaking out the golf shirts, bikers (pedal) in spandex, and motorcycles multiplying like bacteria on a growth plate with no competition for nutrition or space (rapidly). Once caffeinated, we retrieved Mother from the SCCA House and headed over to the SCCA to register, get a lot of blood drawn, and meet with our respective teams.

Yeah, that was about half a cup.

The blood draw was on the first floor, the rest on the sixth. I took the stairs; I always take the stairs. Six stories worth of stairs, taken two at a time, is a fantastic way to raise your heart rate a little. Done daily, sometimes multiple times, along with living on the fifth floor at the SCCA House (and taking the stairs instead of the elevator), it is helping me keep my girlish figure.

While Dad and I were, per instructions, required to arrive at the SCCA at the same time, none of our actual appointments were together, and none of them were scheduled simultaneously. We saw different people at different times, and some of the tests he underwent were scheduled, for me, on Thursday. We ought to have news regarding Dad's final eligibility as my donor by Friday, but we might have to wait until early next week to find out. I don't expect any complications at this point: Dad passed all of the preliminary testing, and he's in pretty good health. 

As part of our meet'n'greets with our team nurses and Physician's Assistants, both Dad and I had physicals. My PA was a very nice lady named Kristen, who appeared to be about my age. I'm not sure if the experience of a physical, including the hefty-proddy sections, was substantially improved by that, as opposed to the more usual having it performed by an overweight sixty-ish fellow with a stethoscope around his neck and large fingers on his hands. 

All told, we were at the SCCA for about four hours. Much of the in-between time was spent talking to other patients that we've befriended (or who have befriended us, it can go either way). For our evening repast, we went over to the Irish pub I've mentioned several times, and I relearned, again (this is ongoing), that in America, if you order an iced tea, you literally get a tall glass of unsweetened tea with ice. If you wish to imbibe what Canadians consider to be iced tea, you must instead order sweet tea. I enjoy both, but the flavour of the one is shocking when you are expecting the other, and functionally, they have the same outward appearance. 

Your eyes lie to you in 'Murrca. They lie about tea. Well, tea and any time you watch Fox News, but that goes almost without saying.

What is it about public restrooms that makes people want to discover empirically how much surface area the volume of urine in their bladder can cover?