Six months worth of blood transfusions and chemo injections went without too many hitches, regardless of the fact that those six months were winter months with preschoolers and sickness in the house.

We found ourselves approaching April 2003 with good news and bad. Remission is always good news, but it needed a cherry on top - a bone marrow transplant to make all the poison "stick."

April and May were filled with new doctors from Duke Medical University, extensive tests and plans, and a preparatory large dose of chemo. This blast would completely obliterate every cell in his bone marrow, and was the ultimate demise of Mike's hair. Who would have thought that after fourteen years of marriage there was a place on his body I had not yet seen?

Then, Mike was given something to stimulate growth of a brand spanking new crop of baby stem cells, to be promptly harvested and absconded away to a refrigerator somewhere in the bowels of Duke Med. This was a safe, happy place: far, far away from the just-less-than-lethal doses of chemo that was soon to ravage the rest of Mike's body.

Bone Marrow Transplants are rescue missions. The whole point of BMT is to treat the patient with dangerous doses of chemo that would kill him if it weren't for the infusion of stem cells that rush back into his bone marrow from the bloodstream and help him recover faster than the chemo can kill you.

Yeah. It didn't sound very comforting to us either. But the doctors kept reassuring us that almost killing my husband would insure that he would live. So we placed his life in their hands.

We received a calendar that looked like something from a NASA space shuttle launch, with days numbered beginning with negative numbers counting down to Day 0 (exactly seven years ago today). Day 0 was the day they reinfused Mike's stem cells, God's DNA factories, back into his bloodstream to save his life.

Those negative days were, well, negative. Six days in-patient -- every other day a lethal chemo day, alternating with one recovery day.

The second chemo day was the worst. The infusion time was four hours and this particular poison causes blood pressure to drop. His lowest reading was 80/12. I kept thinking, 12 is not far from none. The nurse was practically straddling Mike in the bed to monitor his blood pressure.

When your blood pressure is that low, you get the chills: violent, bone-shaking chills (the body's way of trying to warm itself). Without much circulation in his body, he was having trouble staying warm, and cold did not begin to describe it. We wrapped him in warmed blankets, but couldn't give him any meds until his BP was respectable again, which meant 45 minutes of exhausting shakes. Demorol finally put him at rest until the vomiting and diarrhea set in. Then the fever of 102.5 kicked in. When I had to leave him that night, he was still burning up and was asking for prayer. When he said, "The spirit is willing; the flesh is weak," it was the understatement of his born life.

Day 0: June 11, 2003: From my email to friends and family:

Four days later, Mike recounted the day for himself with sobering clarity: