Bob's voice: Mewlings from Savoy

One month post stem cell transplantation!

 

The “Wizard of Oz” used an interesting cinematographic technique by commencing and ending with the mundane scenes from Kansas in black-and-white, whereas the fantastic middle portion utilized brilliant and sharply contrasting colored scenes. My amazing adventure into and through the valley of the shadow of death was colored in just the opposite manner. Those portions of my treatment prior and subsequent to the transplantation were vividly colorized, whereas the hospitalization was as bleak as the setting of Babette’s Feast or southern Sweden as filmed in the Wallander series. The anticipation of the transplant was as classical an example of an approach-avoidance conflict as marriage. Once the hemlock was administered, there could be no turning back. But my engraftment was swift and dramatic, allowing me to be discharged about 5 days earlier than most other patients. I rested for several days in the hotel in St. Louis before our daughters flew in from Burlington and Las Vegas. We were rewarded with spectacular weather which we enjoyed during afternoons in the botanical gardens and the world famous zoo and at sidewalk cafes on “The Hill,” the Italian section of St. Louis, and throughout the Central West End District adjacent to the hospital and our hotel. I forgot to buy a baseball cap and so my newly bald head was sunburned. Ceiling lights reflected on my reddened scalp giving my short gray hairs an eerie pink cast, making me think of myself as an Easter chickee peep. My grandson, Noah, who is a freshman at Washington University in St Louis, gave me a Wash U cap which I both needed and wanted.

 

The wonderful world of bright colors resumed upon discharge from the hospital to the hotel. I had feared that the chemotherapy had killed my taste buds until I had my first wonderful meal with pasta and butterflied shrimp on the Hill, al fresco, toasting in the afternoon sun. The bland hospital food had nearly bored my taste buds to death, but they had not died. Meals thereafter became the highlight of my days and evenings. The drive back to Savoy included the plethora of colors from the autumn leaves and the ripening crops. I had safely navigated the most treacherous part of my cancer journey, with the assistance of many prayers and kind thoughts from so many caring friends.

 

But now the colors are different, not as vibrant as before. I realize that I have been changed by this experience. I look at life a little more seriously now and am less free with my rapier wit and invaluable opinions about everything.