Party at the Bechtel's Saturday (D+104)

"We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures." - Thornton Wilder

We're hosting a "Welcome Back Elise" party at our house in Ridgecrest so you can see Elise and also to say Thank You to everyone that has been so supportive over the past many months.

What: Welcome Back Elise (very low key) Party

Where: The Bechtel's in RC (call or send me a message if you need the address) 

When: Saturday, 4 Oct 2014, 4pm to 6pm

All of Elise's friends, family and wide circle of supporters and well wishers are welcome. We'll have soda, beer and white wine on ice along with some light hors d'oeuvres. The pool will be open (weatherman says "Sunny and Hot") but the AC will be running indoors too. If you'd like something in particular feel free to bring it, but please no gifts as we ran out of Thank You notes a long time ago (you guys are great!) Oh, and our fridge broke while we were gone so don't bring anything that needs refrigeration (the new one arrives next Tuesday).

Now on to my blog update:

After driving 3080 miles of driving through 11 states in 7 days, we finally made it home to Ridgecrest on Tuesday (9/30/14). We saw a lot of the beauty of this great country and some really cool things along the way, but we're enormously thankful to be home.

Elise is feeling great. The minute we got into town she ran across the street to visit her friend Gina and then they went to a volleyball game! She's been very anxious to get back to school ("I feel like I'm ditching") so she started today instead of our plan to have her go back next Monday. The picture above is her "First Day of School" photo this year. She's kinda brought new meaning to "skinny jeans", but the weight should gradually come back along with the hair and eyebrows.

We are visiting Children's Hospital LA for the first of many weekly follow-up visits this Friday. Elise isn't completely out of the woods yet. Because of the type of transplant protocol she underwent, she's still open to "acute" graft vs host disease and will be for a few more months. This means that she's taking an immunosupressant to prevent GVHD, and this med means she's still more likely get opportunistic infections than the general population. So they need to watch her closely for a few more months. Hopefully by Christmas time (when the effects of the Campath wear off) she'll get to taper back on the weekly visits and the meds.

So we're trying to work our way back into the routine here at home. Elise is back to school, I'll start work again on Monday, and Becky goes back in a couple weeks. I'll try to provide some periodic updates but they will be few an far between unless something comes up wrt Elise's transplant.

Thank you all for your support, whether it was a smile, kind word, one of a seemingly endless stream of cheerful cards, mowing the lawn, or the truly nasty task of cleaning the rotting food out of our freezer when it died while we were gone. All these were heart felt gifts that made this an easier process for us to go through and we are truly grateful!