Happy MLK Day!

I just got my daily blood results, and my white blood cell count is zero! Yesterday it was 0.2. Normal range is 4.0 to 11.0. So the bad news is I'm at rock bottom as far as my personal infection prevention system goes. The good news, as my nurse says, is that I can only go up from here! Tomorrow they start giving me injections intended to boost my wbcs. Can't wait.

I was too tired last week to tell this story, but I want to tell it now. Wednesday morning was a lot of fun. We turned the TV on around 9 and found the movie The Water Horse. It's a Scottish movie about a little boy who finds a Nessie egg and raises the creature until it gets too big and has to be released into the loch. Fairly cute. We watched it as much as we could with nurses and doctors coming and going. When it was over, we channel surfed until we found a movie on TCM called Gentleman Jim. It's a 1942 movie about the Irish-American boxer Jim Corbett (Errol Flynn), who's credited with modernizing boxing in the 1880s-1890s. He knocked out the great Irish boxer John L. Sullivan (Ward Bond). It was fun, very Irish with lots of fighting and drinking, and it continued the developing Gaelic theme of the morning. (For those who don't know, the whole Celtic thing is a major interest of mine, as well as a big part of my ancestry.) The Gentleman Jim movie had only been over for a few minutes when there came a knocking on the door. One of the nurses looked in and asked if we would like to have a music therapist come in and play some harp music for us. My wife and I were thinking "you've got to be kidding." We of course said yes, and in came a young woman named Ingrid (yet another coincidence that many of you will be aware of) with her Celtic harp and proceeded to play a set of mostly Irish tunes! Then it was time for lunch and my nurse came in and set me up with a Guinness drip on my IV tree. Okay, I made that last bit up. But, really, it was kind of spooky. It was like my room had been zoned Gaelic for the morning as a little morale boost. Very cool.

Speaking of morale boosts, thanks to our friends P and J for the visit this weekend! They're from Austin and came into town for the day, took my wife out for lunch and stopped by the room for a nice long visit. Thanks again, guys!

And Happy Birthday Nola!