My apologies for the long delay. I think it won't happen again. I have been dragged kicking and screaming onto Facebook, and Susannah is starting to use Skype, so we should be part of the 21st century before it's over.
In the last month or so, Susannah and I have been blessed to receive an amazing outpouring of support: prayers, food, job security, money, furniture, kitchen goods, cat-sitting, tree-doctoring, landscaping, cleaning, and all manner of other things. Thank you, everyone, so very much. There is no way to even imagine negotiating all this without your love and support, in both the most general and the most specific matters.
I want to express something more than just gratitude, though. We have been deluged in generosity, and it's something we've had to think and talk a lot about. Our culture has an odd, almost paradoxical relationship to helping. “It is better to give than to receive,” as it says in Acts, and somehow this is translated, in American culture, into a notion that helpfulness is a sort of zero-sum-game, in which one person is ennobled and another is humbled. So much political rhetoric revolves around those points: the virtue of helping others, but the possible viciousness of receiving help.
I'm not trying to analyze this politically. Not here. Susannah and I have been lucky enough in our lives to be in the position to help many other people—many of you, perhaps. We have been struck, lately, at how hard it is for us to receive your help graciously when we need it, and to graciously decline it when we don't need it, or when it would be too difficult to accept.
This last point is really important, because we now have something of a timeline for Susannah's treatment and recovery. And it is one that will both require all the support you can give, over the long haul, and it will also place very serious restrictions on how we can accept that support.
OK, so...... Essentially, Susannah will go into Dana Farber in early January (we think), where she'll undergo about a week of very intense chemotherapy, designed to wipe out her current bone marrow (and with it her immune system). Then she'll be given a marrow transplant. This is referred to as “Day Zero,” and then we count up from there. For a long time after Day Zero, her new immune system will be fairly weak, and so she will be at an extraordinary risk of infection from dust and model and other vectors that the rest of us would...ah...just sneeze at. She'll be kept in Dana Farber for several weeks, at least, and probably cannot receive any visitors during this time. Then we will return to South Hadley, making frequent follow-up visits to Dana Farber. In the summer of 2010 we will likely return to Vermont.
However, for about a year after the transplant, we will be in pretty serious seclusion. We will not be able to receive casual visitors, nor will we be able to accept things like food, or clothing, or books, or really any other objects from outside our sterile world. Even things that are presumably sterile, like shrink-wrapped CDs, become one more thing to dust once they're here. We most definitely cannot accept any living things (e.g. no plants, no cut flowers, no marmots). We anticipate that most of these restrictions will taper off over time, but for many months, at least, we are going to be living “in a bubble.”
We're not entirely sure about all the restrictions will be in effect next year, but here are some germ-free things we would definitely be grateful for: electronic correspondence of all kinds, recommendations or links to books, websites, movies, and music. Pictures of you and your family and the world.
We love all of you and you are very important to Susannah's recovery, and to both of our continued(?) sanity. So we are going to have to get creative with things like Skype and Facebook and this blog and who-knows-what-else. Because we really, really, will not be able to give you a hug and break bread together. For quite a while. And even then, we might need to wipe you down in alcohol first, or just boil you for awhile.
In the last month or so, Susannah and I have been blessed to receive an amazing outpouring of support: prayers, food, job security, money, furniture, kitchen goods, cat-sitting, tree-doctoring, landscaping, cleaning, and all manner of other things. Thank you, everyone, so very much. There is no way to even imagine negotiating all this without your love and support, in both the most general and the most specific matters.
I want to express something more than just gratitude, though. We have been deluged in generosity, and it's something we've had to think and talk a lot about. Our culture has an odd, almost paradoxical relationship to helping. “It is better to give than to receive,” as it says in Acts, and somehow this is translated, in American culture, into a notion that helpfulness is a sort of zero-sum-game, in which one person is ennobled and another is humbled. So much political rhetoric revolves around those points: the virtue of helping others, but the possible viciousness of receiving help.
I'm not trying to analyze this politically. Not here. Susannah and I have been lucky enough in our lives to be in the position to help many other people—many of you, perhaps. We have been struck, lately, at how hard it is for us to receive your help graciously when we need it, and to graciously decline it when we don't need it, or when it would be too difficult to accept.
This last point is really important, because we now have something of a timeline for Susannah's treatment and recovery. And it is one that will both require all the support you can give, over the long haul, and it will also place very serious restrictions on how we can accept that support.
OK, so...... Essentially, Susannah will go into Dana Farber in early January (we think), where she'll undergo about a week of very intense chemotherapy, designed to wipe out her current bone marrow (and with it her immune system). Then she'll be given a marrow transplant. This is referred to as “Day Zero,” and then we count up from there. For a long time after Day Zero, her new immune system will be fairly weak, and so she will be at an extraordinary risk of infection from dust and model and other vectors that the rest of us would...ah...just sneeze at. She'll be kept in Dana Farber for several weeks, at least, and probably cannot receive any visitors during this time. Then we will return to South Hadley, making frequent follow-up visits to Dana Farber. In the summer of 2010 we will likely return to Vermont.
However, for about a year after the transplant, we will be in pretty serious seclusion. We will not be able to receive casual visitors, nor will we be able to accept things like food, or clothing, or books, or really any other objects from outside our sterile world. Even things that are presumably sterile, like shrink-wrapped CDs, become one more thing to dust once they're here. We most definitely cannot accept any living things (e.g. no plants, no cut flowers, no marmots). We anticipate that most of these restrictions will taper off over time, but for many months, at least, we are going to be living “in a bubble.”
We're not entirely sure about all the restrictions will be in effect next year, but here are some germ-free things we would definitely be grateful for: electronic correspondence of all kinds, recommendations or links to books, websites, movies, and music. Pictures of you and your family and the world.
We love all of you and you are very important to Susannah's recovery, and to both of our continued(?) sanity. So we are going to have to get creative with things like Skype and Facebook and this blog and who-knows-what-else. Because we really, really, will not be able to give you a hug and break bread together. For quite a while. And even then, we might need to wipe you down in alcohol first, or just boil you for awhile.
Again, and in advance, thank you very very very much.
