past midnight

As I write, Grandma Muslimah should be sitting in her seat on the American Airlines flight out of JFK to LAX, 6am EST departure. I'll go to pick her up at noon. Sam is feeling much better. His temperature has been down for 24 hours. Last check was below 98.6. He is energetic (well, not now, he's sleeping, you get my point). He attended a magic show in the playroom with other pediatric cancer patients, and had a great time. Kafi and Micah came for a few hours. Kafi's amazing, making 10-15 phone calls related to our Harambee annual dinner (btw, you are invited) while sitting on the bed with Sam and keeping an eye on Micah. I thought I was a multi-tasker, but I think I'm just plain old A.D.D. I should be sleeping but I'm up. I slept for three hours from 830pm to 1130pm, when I woke up because a certain someone had a little bed accident. It got on my shirt. I have no other clothes, because when we were in the hospital last I brought a bunch of clothes and barely used them, so this time I packed bare basics, but somehow forgot another shirt. I'm sitting here wearing a hospital gown and jeans; call me a trend-setter. It's all good. It's certainly much better than the boy we are sharing the room with, Daniel. He is six years old. He looks like he has cancer: very pale, white skin; bald head; droopy demeanor; not too much laughter. He was diagnosed with leukemia a week before Sam did. He's been here since Monday with a fever and a persistent, heavy cough. In his sleep he whimpers, then gets up to cough. They keep bringing in cough treatments, respirators, and albuterol treatments for him. His father is right by his side. I was getting very concerned listening to him, but his doctor just came in and told the father that his counts and body temperature are improving, so that makes me feel better. I try to pray for others here in the hospital, and I also pray for you who are helping provide spiritual support for my entire family. With all my nervous energy I've done things like this - it's the new design for the Harambee web site, it's not yet public/live, but should be very soon. You ever seen a nonprofit organization that had a blog on its home page? I haven't either. It's a bit of an experiment. I hope it works.

The other day Kafi and I figured out that the doctors caught Sam's leukemia within seven days of onset, which is extremely early detection, which bodes very well. Let's see if I remember how we discovered it. Kafi found it. She read some papers that the in-home nurse brought (the one who administers Ara-C at home). The papers describe Sam's entire diagnosis and prognosis. Aw, heck, I don't exactly remember. But (not that I let something like ignorance stop me) I think it was that the white counts were at a certain number that was not the highest. Or maybe that the doctors at Huntington Hospital at midnight on July 12th could not exactly tell if it was leukemia, and they referred us to a cancer hospital for testing confirmation. It's something like that. It was so early in the game that they couldn't just identify it right away as leukemia, so had to send him to experts.