Dear Team Zachary,

Michael and I left Bloomington where it was 100 degrees for days on end with no rainfall making everything look pretty burned up and yucky! Omaha, by contrast, is 80 and as lush as Bloomington is in the spring when everything is new and hope is in the air.

It was a month ago yesterday that Dara and Zachary left for Omaha. They will be here for about two more weeks. This continues to be a journey of epic proportions.

When he got to Omaha they did another PET scan and discovered that he still had active cancer in the lower right area of his abdomen, right under his belt. We are obviously hoping that the high dose chemo he just finished and the radiation he will get to do in Bloomington for thirty days will kill the cancer and not have too many long-term side effects.

Zachary feels rotten and has almost no energy so to answer the question of 'how's it going?' is not easy. It's going GREAT and he feels like someone ran over him with a bus. I keep telling him that any day he's not vomiting or in a semi coma is a good day. He told me that he appreciates my perspective but doesn't quite agree.

• He has undergone his last chemo
• He had his stem cells put back in, which in Omaha is a BIG deal that they celebrate with much fanfare.
• He continues his daily round of hydration, shots or some mixture of those two

One question I get asked quite a bit is if he was in isolation after they killed all his (well everything) white blood cells. Remember "The Boy in the Bubble" movie? No. They don't do that any more. They found that most of what makes a patient sick he carries with him in his own mouth or intestines or ... It's not that they don't believe in the germ theory, it's just that what we can do to ourselves is MUCH worse than what someone else can do to us. (Yes, they still cover their mouths when they sneeze!)

This morning we were out on our veranda of our summer home (the hospital cafeteria, which is partly outside) and the skies were so blue. There is a song, "Blue skies smilin' at me, nothing but blue skies do I see." I've come to the conclusion that hope is a choice. I choose to believe that my boy will live. I choose to believe that one day he will get a job that he is good at and be like other young men his age. When I am an old woman, I will have the pleasure of his company.

The next line of the song is...'never saw the sun shining so bright. Never saw things going so right....'

Love to you and yours,

Ann