Most of the day Saturday Daddy seemed to be doing a lot better than I would have expected. He got up and ate a poached egg and toast in the morning. Two friends came by and visted for an hour or so – Byrl and Kurt. They were just torn up when they left but really glad they had come to see him and visit for a while. Father Chuck came by before leaving town to...

Late yesterday afternoon the Hospice nurse came to take my Dad’s blood. She called back with the results and the doctor wanted him to go to the hospital in an ambulance to get a transfusion as his hemoglobin was only 6 and his platelets were only 3. My brother had just left to go back to the airport and my Dad had promised to try to stay alive until he could...

Yesterday we left the house at 8am to go to the doctor for a blood test to see if my Dad needed blood. After getting the blood work we sat in the doctor’s office for about 2 hours waiting for the results. He did need blood and platelets so we head to the hospital next door arriving there around 11:30. Since his platelets have to be HLA typed now so that he...

It has been a while since I have written. That’s because I got punched in the face in the figurative sense last month. My father has been feeling bad for quite some time. His doctor ran some additional blood work and thought that he had Leukemia so she ordered a bone marrow biopsy. I flew out for that and it was extremely painful for him – it took them...

I read an article over the weekend in Discover Magazine, May 2007 called The Plastic Brain. The article is primarily about a professor at the University of California at San Francisco named Merzenich and his theories about how to “fix” the brain and reverse the toll of aging on memory. He says his program works by reversing the “negative...