Well, today’s the day. I woke up when the night nurse took my vitals and haven’t been able to go back to sleep (for obvious reasons). So much excitement, so much anticipation for such a simple procedure.

To quickly break it down for you, yesterday my donor donated his marrow — most likely a removal of marrow from his iliac crest (lower back) — in volumes of 50-200mL (a pretty significant and painful amount). From there his marrow was probably immediately stored on ice and/or treated with sometime like EDTA or heparin to reduce the amount of clotting that naturally occurs with blood products. It was then shipped to UCSF and probably arrived late last night and is being processed in the blood bank. They’ll irradiate if needed (though I doubt they want to get rid of anything from his marrow since my blood type is compatible with mine), check for cell population distributions, health of the marrow, and then give the okay to transplant.

All of this information is still up in the air and unknown to me. I don’t know how much marrow I’ll be getting, thus I don’t know when we start or how long it’ll take. My projection is that we’ll start sometime in the late morning and run into the mid-afternon. I’ll keep you posted.

As I look out my window on the dawning sun, it’s amazingly humbling how beautiful life is. With Adam whirring quietly in the background, I can’t help but think of all the individual lives that slowly starting to get their days started with other lives have been running full speed and are now winding down. The synchronicity of what we call human life is something so precious and powerful. I’ve come to appreciate it more and more as I grow older, aside from the uniqueness of each person that makes up the milieu that surrounds us.

More to come later today.