“I got cored.” That’s what I told my mom and dad when I called them tonight after my bone marrow biopsy. (For those of you that get easily squeamish at medical procedures, skip ahead to the next paragraph). Back to the bone marrow biopsy. If you want to know what that means, it’s like coring an apple, hence my comment to my parents. Despite the fact that they numbed my back and nerves around my bone, I felt the pressure of them basically cork-screwing into my bone to extract a piece of that bone from my hip on the left side in the back. I felt like saying, “Hey, I wanted to KEEP all of my bones, thank you very much,” but I didn’t think that would be appropriate or appreciated. When extracted, it looked like a toothpick. It was maybe the most disturbing procedure I’ve ever had done, and I’m SO grateful to my teammate Kelly who went with me and helped distract me from thinking about what they were doing to me while I was laying there fully awake. Praise the LORD that they ended up only doing it to my left side; initially they planned to do it on the right side too (which might have made me want to pass out or hurt something), but then she said that the one was good enough since it didn’t really look like the lymphoma has spread to my bone marrow (PTL!). While it didn’t hurt too badly (but it is sore right now), it made me more than uncomfortable as I thought about what was actually happening. Other than Kelly blessing me, the other bright spot was that the nurse in there was an Aggie, so of course, I had an immediate bond with my fellow Texan (sidenote–she moved up here because she WANTED a change in seasons. That made me a little concerned that she was half-crazy as she did the procedure…it was 14 degrees this morning, and it gets worse. If you know me, you know how I feel about people volunteering to live in this freezer).

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