Our Trip to Spokane

Well, as I mentioned in my post before, we went to Spokane at the end of June for Matthew to do a bone marrow transplant. He was feeling pretty crummy, but he still went out an did things with us all week.

Here is Daddy and Parker on our shuttle in the airport parking lot.

Me and Parker on the airplane... This was Little Man's first airplane ride!

 He asked what the bags were for and I told him. After that he started pretending to throw up. Eeeww!

We didn't have a car while we were there, so everything we did had to be within walking distance of our hotel. (Otherwise we would have had to take taxis which would have been fine, but we would have been left with a car seat to lug around town.) This ended up not being a problem because our hotel was right on the river walk. Talk about a great location!

We arrived right in the middle of Hoop Fest... I have never seen anything like it before! Almost all the streets and parking lots in downtown were closed and hundreds and hundreds of basketball hoops were set up for 3 on 3 tournaments. They even had big bridges closed down and hoops set up on them. It was cool to see, but also crazy. They said 250,000+ people go to Spokane for Hoop Fest.

We were a little worried about keeping Parker entertained while we were there, but that was not hard to accomplish at all! He loved walking on the paths by the river either in his stroller on wearing his monkey backpack. He also fell in love with the carousel. We rode it every day, sometimes twice a day! We rode the Sky Tram that takes you over the falls. He got a little nervous a few times, but still had lots of fun. We also fed the ducks almost every day... Parker and I even got chased by them! It was a little scary. Matt went to bed a little early one night and Parker and I went out to do stuff. We were feeding the geese when some really aggressive big white ones came over and started chasing us. They chased us up some stairs and halfway across a bridge before I finally threw some bread to deter them and then booked it away as fast as I could go. They were not going to give up! I have to say that his favorite part of the trip was going to the children's museum. There were so many fun activities to do. We had to trick him to get him to leave. (Evil, I know.) We also took him to see Cars 2. I'll be honest... It was a little bit of a letdown. I thought the best part of the movie was the Toy Story short film at the beginning. Haha!

 Well, here are some pictures from our trip...

Parker feeding the ducks, geese and seagulls.

 Here are a few from the museum.

Parker and Daddy digging

(They were to busy digging to look at the camera.)

 On a wiggle rider in the little city they had set up

 His first time painting. He LOVED it!

 This carousel has a pretty cool history behind it and how it ended in Spokane. All of the animals are hand carved. The horses even have real hair for tails!

 Here we are!

 Yep, he was having a ball!

 This was a really cool slide.

The biggest Radio Flyer I have ever seen!

Parker being cute

Having fun on our last night there.

Well, since there is so much that we DIDN'T do or see, we want to go back for a family vacation... With a car so we can really explore and experience all that beautiful Spokane has to offer.

A Hero

So! I pretty much have an amazing husband who had the opportunity to donate bone marrow... AGAIN! And he was willing to do this for a complete stranger. He is awesome.

He has been on the National Bone Marrow Registry since he was in high school. There was a sick little boy here in town and they held a bone marrow drive and he signed up to be on the registry.

The first time he was called and asked to donate was in 2004. It was such an amazing experience... Especially a year later when we had the chance to meet the man and his family that Matthew so unselfishly helped. 

We have since become great friends with that family and hope and pray for the same outcome for the recipient of this donation.

At the end of June they started the process here in Pocatello by giving him his first two rounds of injections of the growth hormone. After that we flew down to Spokane where they finished the injections and harvested his stem cells and platelets. The injections that they gave him were to make his bones mass produce stem cells that would enter his blood stream. It was the same procedure as his first donation, and the cells were taken via his blood stream. When most people thing of a bone marrow donation they think of it being taken from the hip bones. Depending on the type of illness this process seems to work better. 

They picked up Matthew a little after 4 am and got the party started. This was him around 10:30 when I got there with Parker. 

 His blood was taken from his left arm and this machine would separate the stem cells and platelets (the good stuff) and put the rest back into his right arm. (Which was strapped down to the bed because the first time he donated he didn't want the nurse to see him going potty and bent his arm too much during the procedure and messed up the return blood needle and caused an hour delay while they had to re-do all the lines and clean the machine because he had contaminated it. They didn't want that to happen again because they were on a very tight schedule to finish the procedure and get it to the airport on time.)

 Parker was a little worried about Daddy at first, but quickly got over it. :)

 The return line. The gave him more fluids than they took out (they added saline), but he was left with a critically low level of platelets. It usually takes 2-3 weeks for the counts to build back up.

 Matthew with his team. He sent me a text that morning stating that he had lost his wedding ring and asked me to look for it. (He was guessing it was in the pool because he had taken Parker swimming the day before and had gotten sunscreen on his hands.) But when I got to the center and saw him with all these cougars I decided he had conveniently just forgotten it that morning. LOL! JK! Good thing a little boy at the hotel found it and turned it in to the front desk.

 This is Matthew with the goods! It is hard to believe that this much fluid can be life saving! His counts were twice as high as they were hoping for, so they were able to give half to the recipient immediately and freeze the other half for later. How cool is that?!?

Well there you have it... The reason for our trip to Spokane. Matthew will be taken off the registry now because they don't have the research available for how these hormones affect the donor long term after more than two donations. The only reasons they would allow him to donate again would be for and immediate family member or for a previous recipient. 

I'll be honest... I am so proud of him, but I am really glad that he (FINGERS CROSSED!) won't have to go through this again. He was in a lot of pain from the hormones leading up to the donation, and in a lot of pain for about a week after. It also really affected his lungs this time making it hard for him to breath.

Good job, Honey! I know you don't like it when people call you this, but you really are a hero!

If you are interested in becoming part of the national registry, you can do so by going to www.marrow.org and they will send you a kit for you to do a cheek swab and return to them. Or you can attend a local bone morrow drive.