Dear Family and Friends,

As some of you know, Barry had a bone marrow biopsy on Monday to see whether the treatment he went through this summer (Campath, a monoclonal antibody) had cleared his marrow enough to make him a viable candidate for a bone marrow/stem cell transplant. We got a call today from the doctor’s office at Stanford with great news — there is no sign of leukemia in his marrow.

Things have been moving fast on the transplant front. A well-matched donor has been identified through the National Marrow Donor Program and we have a full calendar of appointments, tests, trainings, procedures, etc. ending with a pre-transplant one-week hospitalization on October 22 and the transplant scheduled for November 3. We will be moving to an apartment across the street from the hospital the week of October 22 and will stay there up to four months.

We are very optimistic that Barry will be cured of his CLL (Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia) and by next year some time our life will resume a more normal pattern. For those of you interested, check out http://bmt.stanford.edu/ where Barry is being treated. He will be having a non-myeloablative allogeneic BMT, and for those of you interested in getting in the donor bank, check out http://www.marrow.org/.

For those of you wishing to email Barry, his email address is bsw@igc.org. Please forgive me if I don’t return emails and phone calls. We’ve been trying to live a quiet life, and also watch a lot of comedy.

We want to wish all of you, and the world, a peaceful, healthy and sweet New Year.

Much love,

Bonnie