Go Rams!

And "Yay!" for CSU for winning the New Mexico Bowl today!

Day 67--Yachtzee!

We're just hanging out tonight playing Yachtzee and listening to "Excursions" on KRFC (the radio show that Torger normally does with his pal Randy). Torger has really been missing the chance to do their annual Christmas show, but Randy's been doing a great job flying solo. So far he's played some Julie Andrews, Claudine Longet, James Brown, and Flaming Lips!

We're having a restful day after a pretty hectic week. On Wednesday, Torger had to have four separate biopsies so they could check different parts of his body for levels of GVHD: back, arm, inner thigh, and face. He was pretty miserable for the rest of the night after getting four shots and then having four chunks of skin cut out. But the results came back last night and the doctors are happy with his GVHD levels, so that was good news. We did learn another interesting tidbit this week: Since the transplant, Torger's developed a couple of deep, parallel ridges on each of his fingernails. One of our regular nurses, Erin, told us that's because fingernails often fall out after transplant, but apparently Torger's nails resisted it. Yikes! We're kind of glad we didn't know that one at the time.

Day 61 And Still Not Done

This has been a pretty uneventful weekend. Torger just got off the phone with his dad and is waiting for the television event of the season on the SciFi Channel: "Sharks in Venice." He is, of course, disgusted that the sharks that will apparently be the villains of the movie are great whites--and not even a kind of shark that could possibly, under some far-fetched circumstance, ever stand a chance of winding up in the Venice canals. But he plans to watch it anyway because, well, it's a killer shark movie. Set in Venice. Meanwhile, I'm making dinner (like the sharks, we're also having Italian ). I've been trying to get Christmas cards written in between going through bills and trying to keep up on the filing. My friend Jean advised me early on in Torger's treatment to start a file to keep bills and insurance statements coordinated, and keeping up with that file has been both time-consuming and essential. There are so many bills for so many different providers that it becomes really hard to keep them straight, and it would be really easy to pay something twice without this system. There's one unit of the hospital that has twice now neglected to bill our insurance and just sent us a bill for the total amount due, which I might have paid if I weren't making a point of matching all these things up. So while Torger is watching sharks, I think I'm going to enjoy a quiet evening collating.