Stubborn Blood

When Randy was young, he remembers his grandmother – a woman slightly taller than a kitchen broom – rearranging the stars and holding back the ocean. Some people bravely called her stubborn (she would have laughed this off and said, no, she was just always right), but she was the sort of person who created a different gravity around herself. That force pulled the family together for almost a hundred years.

That, ahem, stubbornness passed down to other family members, transmitted through the blood, and Randy’s mom (who was also a shrimp) would spend weeks tracking down a missing toy for her grandchildren, harassing stockers from Bangor to Boston. In the short 57 years we had her, we all knew when she had reached a point when she would not relent, even if the planet itself was on fire, whether it was planning a wedding, wallpapering a house or conjuring cash to help someone out.

This also passed down in some measure to her kids, too, and when a call has come in the middle of the night or during a snowstorm, Sister Sue has always had her coat on and been heading for the door before a conversation has ended.

Love drove all of them, but stubbornness kept them going. Cross these ladies and you were doomed. Endanger their loved ones, and you were not safe.

So blood can be stubborn, and the expression this takes depends entirely on the situation and personalities involved. In our case, the blood that has ran through Julie during this long, desperate year – polluted as it was – comes from a similar stubborn line. Do or don’t do, there is no trying (said Yoda, who was probably taller than Randy’s gram, although certainly no match for gram when it came to Scrabble).

For almost a year, this blood has pumped for hope and love, and it has not gone gentle into this good night.

In other words, Jules’ blood has refused to convert from O+ to A-, her donor’s blood type, and our doctor believes that this is holding her back from complete recovery (necessitating near weekly transfusions; until she switches completely to A-, she will need continued transfusions, but in all other areas she is improving incrementally every day).  On October 29^th, she received an all-day transfusion of Daratumumab, a chemotherapy that not only continues to attack mutated cells, but also has been found to speed up this blood type conversion.

There’s no reasoning with blood (or with powerful women, Randy asides quickly, vanishing wisely from the stage), and that first infusion didn’t convert her blood (although all her other test results have come back spectacularly). With Randy’s gram and mother, the trick to returning to grace was always a matter of time, of waiting out the storm, and we suspect this is the case now, too.

Our ladies need to meet in the bloodline and come to an agreement. Or, better still, let disagreement dissipate through the passing of days.

As we wait, Jules has been doing a lot of art, jewelry making and boogying to music and will be teaching a class at Granite State College when the New Year begins. She’s regained a lot of her strength and even her hair has come back in. (Randy coos her scalp saying, “you’re so furry!”)

Randy has eased back into a “normal” nine-to-five (is life really normal for any of us?), and trying to get back into something like a groove with meditation and working out, and bracing for winter. To anyone looking in from the outside, it would seem like life had reasserted its normal tide, but everything has changed.

Alvin barks at everything and drenched a friend who stopped by a few weeks ago with… um… unbridled enthusiasm. The weirdest things remain stable, thankfully.

Jules has also created a website where she’ll be posting art, jewelry, blog posts, and an occasional video (like the one on this page). There’s always been some question about authorship on this blog – although as Randy tells everyone, he doesn’t really exist or is a cloud collage containing the collective thoughts of everyone he’s encountered (especially you) without a clear center to the tootsie roll, so philosophically why both with origins? – and you, dear reader, can be assured that only Julie is writing for the blog on Chill Creative.  

Love you all!