Update re: Barry’s health

Posted by Barry Willdorf in Bonnie's Email Journal on March 27, 2010

Dear Family & Friends (all 193 of you),

Barry just completed his 8 week course of Campath and we have a bit of a reprieve.  He will have a bone marrow biopsy (his 12th) on April 12 with results (the verdict) on April 19.  If he is in complete remission, he will get a transplant, but we do not have any further information on when that would be.  Our best guess is sometime in May.  If he is in partial remission, he will have further treatment with another drug, Nelarabine, and we do not know how long that course of treatment would last.  We, of course, are hoping for complete remission.  All indications are good, but they can’t really tell from his regular (peripheral) blood draws — they have to look at the marrow to have a definitive answer.

He’s feeling pretty good now, but has been battling infections.  We had another ER visit last week that was really no fun at all.  He had a fever and we spent 21 hours at the Emergency Department and got 3 hours of sleep.  He had been diagnosed with yet another viral infection, MPV (metapneumovirus), which they were not treating because they did not feel like it was dangerous unless he got a fever or shortness of breath.  Since he got the fever, he just finished a course of Ribavirin, and he’s doing much better. His cough from this virus was downright scary.

We are both completely burned out. Read the rest of this entry »

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COAL

Posted by Barry Willdorf in Essays on March 5, 2010

I saw an ad for “clean coal” while watching the Winter Olympics. The actress was clean, in her neatly pressed pantsuit, her shimmering, freshly-washed hair falling to her shoulders. The background scenes were clean. You felt like you could drink the water without boiling it. There was no picture of coal in the ad and I said to myself, “I bet she never held a chunk of anthracite in her hands, ever.” It made me think back to my experiences with coal.

In the late forties and early fifties, when I was a little kid, we heated our house with coal. There were five apartments, all hooked up to the same furnace, with large pipes running out of the top, making it look like a giant squid. Every night, my uncle, grandfather, and on occasions when he couldn’t escape the duty, my father, shoveled coal into the maw of this monster, filling the firebox bottom to top. In the morning the shovel-man had to empty the box of the caustic, coral sediment that remained. And it was a foul brew. No sane person would want to touch, much less inhale the acidic residue. Read the rest of this entry »

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