Day (-1) Almost Time

The first two pictures are pictures from our trip to Enchanted Forest before we went in for transplant. The painting is a painting that Avarie did while at Emanuel. She did it in Art Therapy and I love it. It took us a while to see the painting for what it was, I just saw colors swirled at first and then one time the painting was turned this way and I was standing back and it just hit me. The Dark creature luring behind the beautiful colors reaching out to get it and a little bit of the black has mixed in with the beautiful colors, It is amazing that she created this. We just gave her finger paints and a giant canvas and she did this.
The last picture is her riding a tricycle at Doernbecher a couple of nights ago. They let the transplant kids go out of their rooms in the evening when there are not so many people as long as they wear a mask and scrub their hands after.
Tomorrow is transplant. We were unsure what time it would be happening, we didn't know what time the plane arrives with her stem cells. We found out this morning that it will be arriving at 11:30 pm tomorrow night. So by the time the plane arrives and they get the cells to the hospital and do everything it will probably happen really early Friday morning. She will most likely sleep through the whole thing, but I will be taking pictures. Even though it is just a little bag of blood basically, I want to document it. We have been waiting for this for so long and done so much to get here, I will not let it pass with out marking it.
Craig and I will be trading out tomorrow because I want to be there for the transplant. We were both planning to be there, but finding out that its going to be so early in the morning and Craig is starting to go stir crazy,I think he has decided to come home instead of us both trying to sleep there.
Its really going to be pretty uneventful, and anti climatic, but I still want to be there. Just in case anyone missed previous posts, I'll quickly re-explain how the transplant works. The donor: a healthy, 23 year old man from some where in this world is donating stem cells to Avarie. We had the option to take actual marrow, but the stem cells work just as well and they only take actual marrow now in certain circumstances. The donor has been taking medication over this last week to boost his stem cell production and then he donates his blood and they have a way to filter out his stem cells from the other parts of his blood and they transport it to us. We then hook up the small bag of blood to Avarie's Buddy and it goes in and the transplant is done. Then we have to wait for 2 weeks for the stem cells to find their way into her bones where your bone marrow lives and for it to start to regrow. The greatest chance of complications comes during this time and the weeks following. So far even though we got off to a rocky start Avarie is doing really well, she has tolerated the chemo's great and we are hopeful that the rest of this transplant can be as anti climatic as the actual transplant is.