Two weeks ago marked the sixth month anniversary of my bone marrow transplant. I wrote the following in the weeks after leaving the hospital.
The marrow has arrived downstairs, the nurse says. It needs to go through some final tests before we can start.
My mom hands my dad a sheet with a prayer and encourages him to take a dry run before the real thing and he does.
He stumbles through losing his place once or twice. It’s tough to be MC.
Around 11:15pm the package makes it to my room; four bags, all fat with someone else’s marrow and blood and sacrifice.
My father stands off to the left near the foot of the bed and my mother sits at my side.
He looks for his cue and begins for real this time.
“O Lord upon your son and servant Matthew,” he says. The nurse bows her head.“Touch him with your embrace of compassion, peace and love….”
A minute later the prayer closes. Amen.
The nurse hangs the first bag and fastens the tubing to the Hickman line poking out of my chest.
A week prior the line was put in. “It’s simple,” the surgeon said and patted my shoulder before he looked at the nurse and she said something about giving a sedative, and I felt much better. One nick near the jugular vein and one on the chest; push the line through one side and pull it out the other.
At 11:40p.m. the first of the dark red liquid streams down the tubing. It pours in through the line and my heart pumps and sends it off to find it’s place. How does the marrow know where to go?
Have faith, it just knows.
“Do you feel any different?” my mother says.
“Not really.” The moments that make a difference don’t always feel like it.
Twenty minutes in my heart starts to slow. It drops to 37 beats a minute and the staff decides to hook up electrodes to monitor me on a screen at their station down the hall.
Get some rest, the nurse says and turns out the light.
Eleven hours after the first of it streamed in, the fourth bag finishes. It’s taken down by a nurse; clinically the transplant is over. But it’s more like the end of the first quarter.
We wait for my daily blood test to show the marrow has taken.
A week goes by.
Don’t worry, they say, it takes more like two.
So we wait. The skinny letters that build a word can’t hold all the swelling tension of these minutes and hours, waiting for marrow delivered from a far away place to travel through my body, find and fill the right cavities and start working and making healthy blood cells, all so far from what’s known. Doubt stews and seeps and leaves emptiness behind—nothing left  to cry out; too scared to admit fear, too ashamed to say ‘but what if it doesn’t… ?’
On the ninth day a nurse comes in my room, smiles and says, looks like someone’s new marrow is working.
The anxiety of hours ago falls away like some stone dropped in a river—hard to reach and feel and pull back from the bottom, it’s shape and place distorted through refracted light.
So for now I grin and feel blessed and look back on it as just the grinding of those gears that move us in the direction we’re meant to go; it’s easy when they turn the way we hope.

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