Day 90, Friday, April 26th, 2013

Friday dawned the way that every day has been dawning for the last month: with backup beepers and the sounds of heavy equipment firing up. You see, just South of the SCCA House, between John Street and Denny Way, there is a large fenced off lot. It used to be the Greyhound Repair Terminal; it was torn down last fall. When we arrived, the lot was empty, except for some cars periodically making use of the parking space that remained. There was a long plywood fence, covered in graffiti, all along the Southern side of the lot, and I wish I'd taken a picture, because it was neat-looking, but it is gone. That lot is being repurposed, and so all of the concrete and pavement have been removed, and a large blue tank was pulled out of the ground, formerly the used-oil receptacle. It was cut up by a fellow with a torch, and then two other fellows in large trackhoes tore it apart in an impressive display of machine operator dexterity. The only thing is that, for some reason, they work from seven am to three pm, which I find slightly off-putting, simply because they happen to be right below my window. Well, it's also off-putting because it means that we mostly have to keep the windows closed. Excavation, and construction in general, is a bad thing for the immuno-compromised/suppressed to be around, because of airborne particulate matter, and the microbiological life that often occupies said particles. The soil is a rich biome, and it teems with bacteria and fungi. In this case, it is the fungal genus Aspergillus that I, and other, patients have to be wary of. To a fully functional human being, soil microbiotics do not typically respresent a problem, but when you voluntarily undergo treatments designed to reduce your immune system to nothing, and then have to follow that up with immune-suppressing drugs, it's something worth watching out for.

This isn't really something that I consider a problem, it's just ongoing, and I realized that I haven't mentioned it at all, despite it being a constant background happening.

The rest of the morning passed without incident. Dad arrived, with his bags, to our large room. He'd been staying in a separate room because he was just on the tail-end of a cold when he arrived, and he didn't want to get me sick (also, I didn't want to be sick). We had breakfast, and then Mom and Dad were off to the Puget Sound Blood Center (Americans, it is properly spelled Centre, get it right). I used the time to go drink espresso and read Cosmos, before heading over to the SCCA for blood draw, another pulmonary function test (different tech this time, not as entertaining), and my first MUGA scan.

MUGA stands for Multi Gated Acquisition Scan, is also commonly known as radionucleotide angiography. It's an imaging test for assessing the health and function of the ventricles of the heart, and it meant having a small volume of my blood drawn, that volume getting tagged with a radioactive tracer, allowed to rest for half an hour, and be returned to me. This was a resting MUGA, so I hung out on a little gurney, and a gamma camera was positioned several times, passively capturing the radiation that I was emitting, courtesy of the radio-tagged blood sloshing around in my cardiac chambers, to create photographs of said cardiac chambers, a.k.a. my heart. Technically, these are not photographs in the traditional sense, but more like several animated .gifs of the cardiac cycle (Have you seen an animated picture of something on the internet? It was probably a .gif file.). Fun fact: the original gamma camera was called the Anger Camera, which I think is funny for reasons of HULK SMASH, but it actually happens to be the last name of the inventor, Hal Anger.

When Mom and Dad got back from Dad's afternoon appointments, there was news: Dad has passed all of the tests and has been confirmed as my donor! This is good stuff. We had fancy crackers with bacon/blue cheese spread to celebrate. Dad had wine. I am not allowed wine (sad face).

That evening, my friend Gabe was in town, and he and I went out for supper, so really, it was a pretty bang-up day no matter the angle one chooses to peer at it.

What do you have if you've only got half of your large intestine? A semi-colon.