It’s 4:00 a.m. and the door opens.

Omg Keanu … Go to sleep!

Since learning how to climb out of his crib and wander around the house like he’s about to buy the place, Keanu — my 3-year-old toddler — has been sleeping in my bed. But I don’t hate it. Just the opposite, really. He tends to interlace his tiny fingers with my (also tiny) fingers and lathers me in kisses. It’s a manipulative effort to stall, mind you, but I don’t care. I much rather him stay with me than creep into the living room in the middle of the night, grab our remote, and whisper into the microphone things like, “Pway Mickey Mouse on Disney Pwus.”

And sure, I did the whole sleep training method when he was a year old, but sleep regression happens. And once he figured out how to ninja his way out of his bed, I didn’t have the energy to start up again. Mainly because, like I said, I love it. Even when his head is digging into my ribs, even when I get the occasional slap to the face or boob, I unequivocally love it. I know it won’t be forever, but I want it to last as long as it can before it gets weird.

Quickly, I gather my bearings and realize it’s not Keanu opening the door. Rather, it’s the night nurse coming in to get my vitals. Something that happens every four hours. Sometimes two if I run a fever. Because, duh, I’m not lying next to the world’s smallest mouth breather. I’m sleeping on a somewhat uncomfortable hospital bed at UF Health Shands in Gainesville, Fla., where on February 23, 2022, I received an autologous stem cell transplant.

After being diagnosed with Relapse Hodgkin’s Lymphoma in October 2021, the plan was always to end up here. To end up in a room where for the past three weeks, I’ve experienced more physical pain and discomfort than I thought imaginable. Of course, everyone’s threshold for pain is different, and I’m not trying to tempt fate with mine. But I didn’t imagine it would be this hard. I didn’t think there would be a time throughout this process that I would have moments of regret. I didn’t know there would be flashes of debilitating stomach spasms that would make me say out loud to no one, “Please, make it stop.” No clue every inch of my body would be writhing in agony.

During one of my last inpatient chemo treatments at the Cleveland Clinic Hospital in Stuart, there was a woman staying across from my room. Her yells of agony filled the halls. She screamed for help, and help came of course, but she would only have minutes of reprieve until sounds of her suffering echoed the floor yet again. I later overheard arrangements being made for her to be transferred to hospice. And I kept thinking, how unbelievably tragic to have your last moments be riddled with anguish. To have your pangs of misery be heard like bolts of lightning by helpless strangers. I didn’t know her. I didn’t know her life. What she had done. What she had accomplished. I only heard her at her most vulnerable.

Because pain does funny things to us. It slowly peels back the layers of who we are and who we want to be, until what’s left is a desperate and rawer version of ourselves. Sometimes what’s revealed is ugly, angry, sad, or broken. Pain is wildly egocentric and perversely one-sided. Because one thing is for sure, when you’re hurting, you can think of nothing else.

But when the pain does cease – albeit temporarily – there are moments of lucidity, context begins to take shape, and perspective becomes clear again.

So, while the plan was to end up here, there was an even bigger goal behind it: A cure. And not everyone gets a shot at a cure.

And hey, let’s not forget Sandra, you checked off a lot of boxes to get here. You underwent three rounds of inpatient chemo. Three, 4-day cycles of drugs that made you question your strength every single time. You reached remission by Thanksgiving, and the news made you collapse with gratitude in the stairwell of Dr. Yeckes’ office. You passed a thorough organ evaluation, where sure, you had a little bit of a meltdown when your occupational therapist asked you to subtract by 7. But you also handled that excruciating bone marrow biopsy like a champ. And OK, it took you 3 days to collect 4 million stem cells, but you did it without having to poop in the bedside commode once! Of course, that’s a statement you can’t make presently, but at that time it was a real feat!

So yes, this is all a means to an end. But I’m not going to lie, that 6-day regiment of chemotherapy and its side effects, have shaken me to my core. There was one bag in particular –the last one: Melphalan. Even looking at its name inspires fears. It only took about 20 minutes to get into my system; 20 minutes to wreak days of havoc on my GI tract. From my throat to my belly, I had ulcers. It felt like someone was scooping out parts of my intestine, like shaving thin layers of Italian ice with a spoon. At times, it felt like I was being separated in two. One day, the pain was so bad that I couldn’t recover and as the nurses were walking me back to my bed, I fainted.  

These past few weeks, I’ve questioned everything, and somehow, I have turned this post into one long stream of consciousness. Fitting, I think, since these days have felt like a Faulkner novel. I can’t tell what the present, past or future is. My morning, noon and nights have been one very long run-on sentence devoid of punctuation.

And the amount of chemo I’ve had to endure is unholy. But I will say there is something divine about the procedure I have received. The five bags of stem cells I had transfused back into my bloodstream, which made the entire room smell like Campbell’s tomato soup (don’t ask me why), rebooted my immune system. I’m now a grown woman with the immune system of an infant. In fact, the staff here called it my new birthday. And with a new birthday comes new beginnings.

There’s this audio book that I’m listening to that says our thoughts are the language of the brain and our feelings are the language of the body. The two must align in order to create one frequency we emit out into the world. That is how we manifest what we want. Consequently, the author also mentions his grandmother, a Catholic woman, who prayed so fervently for an array of things, but whose intentions were always contradicted by her guilt. Boy, do I relate to that. Guilt has always been my default setting.

But I don’t want to live like that anymore. I don’t want to live in guilt or fear for that matter. I don’t want to feel unworthy of good things or be afraid of the unknown. I don’t want to be sucked into the tide of doubt. I want to float buoyantly in a sea of endless possibilities, and I want to feel freaking good about it.

So with my new birthday comes a rebirth of ideologies. And I think my first step is learning to live in a state of gratitude, where it will become OK to want great things for myself. Because dammit, I’m worth it. It’ll be, after all, a birthday present to me.

What’s Next?

So, many have asked me how much longer I’ll be in the hospital. Truth is, I don’t know.

>Transplant day was considered day 0, so I’m technically finishing day 12.

>I’m told that between day 10 and 14, engraftment happens, which is when my stem cells start to function normally – they’ll start to multiply on their own and my blood counts begin to go up.

>The doctors believe that has happened since my white blood count is steadily increasing.

>My platelets and red blood count, however, are not, so I’ve been getting blood transfusions for the last four nights.

>I’ve also spiked fevers, but I’ve been fever-free for three nights now.

>I went from not being able to eat (I had fluids through my central line), to a liquid-only diet, to – as of tonight – a soft food diet.

>My stomach is still very tender to the touch and I’m having a lot of headaches, but there is improvement, and for now that’s good enough.