Saturday, August 2, 2008

The call


It was a friday afternoon, I am on my way home from work, thinking about the last minute packing and details that need to be done before we leave for vacation early the next morning.  My cell phone rings.  I think "No way".  Way.  Its the transplant coordinator, and they have a pancreas for me.  If you knew my luck with vacations, you might not be surprised, but is still  its a shock.  But, it is  still a good shock, and we basically repeated the procedure from 3 weeks ago.  My packing was mostly done this time.  I  just took out my bathing suit!

This time we are a bit more  skittish about getting the rejection call, so we made plans to get about 3 hrs from  Minneapolis and stop, thus creating less distance between us and the South Carolina vacation destination.  We stopped and slept for awhile and waited for the phone to ring.  It was a very long wait, with a  few updates.  We kept creeping closer and closer  to Minneapolis, and eventually waited there for about the last hour.  I am not sure exactly what took so long.  I guess the islet processor is quite a perfectionist, and at that time, it made for  a long wait, but I am now grateful that he did such  a great job.

Finally, at about 3:00pm, the call came that  the processing of the islets was complete,  and that their were enough cells harvested for a transplant.  By this time, we were right outside the door, so  I went in and my husband, Gary, parked the car.

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