Day 67, Thursday, April 4th, 2013

I'd like to take a moment to acknowledge a milestone in my life:

From a diagnostic and detection standpoint, I'm cancer-free.

That is... exceedingly peculiar to say out loud; it feels surreal, imagined, conjured, fabricated, and in a word, fake. Too unimaginable to even be celebrated, especially since I'm not out of the proverbial woods yet, medically speaking. In two weeks, this status will be tested again, but I rather expect it to be confirmed, staying completely in line with the level of success achieved thus far.

To be more (less, much less, actually) specific, after this transplant, there are no readily detectable rogue T-cells riding around the fringe towns of my epidermal layer and causing unrest amongst the citizens, prompting the rise of a sheriff with a troubled past to make good. All is quiet on the Western front. There is no Outlaw Josey Wales, no McClintock, no Hondo, no Butch Cassidy and certainly no Sundance. There is nothing but homesteads, ranches, school marms, and the gradual modernization of life through electricity.

I have Will Smith's Wild Wild West theme stuck in my head now. Anyone else?

So, if I'm cancer-free, why am I still getting another transplant? Well, because I am probably not actually cancer-free. What I'm in now is a temporary state of grace, a window of opportunity which has been created by the first transplant of my own stem cells - a time frame in which my immune system has been calmed, and any active cancer cells beaten back into the hills, into hiding. Numbers reduced, they would, over time, quite likely resume their shifty and shady activities, and bring me low once more.

Those rogue T-cells might be gone, or they might just be gathering strength, before menacing to townsfolk once more. In this case, I constitute the village, and the townsfolk are my cells.

This was the point of the first transplant. I am rapidly approaching the point of recovery where the most possible good can be accomplished by the second transplant. When I receive the transplant, even if some cancerous activity has developed, the new stem cells from the transplant should have time to engraft themselves to my bone marrow, get production levels up to snuff, and massively overwhelm any cancer cells present in my body. 

And that will pretty much be that, aside from some GVHD and several years of pills. I'm going to be taking lots of pills, but it's going to be worth it.

What are Super Mario's Pants made from? Denim-denim-denim. Denim-denim-denim.