New room, New view {day 10}

It's a bit odd to write the blog post from afar, but Uncle Josh is on Sam duty so I agreed to take the various texts and pictures that he sent me today and somehow write an update!

Uncle Josh arrived this morning and tagged out Dad, only to find out that there was a leak in the window in the room next to ours. Because fixing the leak might lead to dust, mold, etc, they decided to move Sam to a new room. (Dust and mold are particularly bad for someone without an immune system, of course.)

(Remember that nice east view that I like so much....oh well. The new room is E572.)

Apparently the nurses have done this before:

I'm pretty sure Sam isn't ON the bed with all that stuff.

This new room looks suspiciously like the old one....

 Only messier!

What is IN that strangely shaped package!? 

And the rest of the day was relatively uneventful...spent setting up the room, opening mail, eating, reading, playing...and so we are now in the period known as "awaiting counts recovery."

Which is a fancy way of saying that we're just waiting around for Sam's cells to grow him an immune system. He's in the hospital because he has none -- and that can be dangerous, obviously. People have asked me how much longer he'll be there, and the answer is....we don't exactly know. I keep saying it can be anywhere from 15-20 more days, or even more. We've never done this before. It feels like last time, like the times before, but it's not really. The relapse thing adds a whole new level of worry and fear. It makes the outcome seem so much more....important. Not that last time wasn't important, but there's a different kind of anxiety involved, waiting for THESE counts to recover. Will it happen quickly enough? Will the remission be "good" and will we head directly to transplant? There are so many questions, so many unknown factors, so many things that we just. don't. know.

And so we wait and hope and pray and believe and continue to do all the things that we do to pass the time both in and out of the hospital....awaiting counts recovery.