It’s a TRUE BLUE Miracle!

The only PERFECT bone marrow match in the entire world came through for us today!
We are so EXCITED and THANKFUL!

I know it was all because of the cherry trees. Van has always planted fruit trees wherever we’ve lived. His favorite fruit of all time is fresh Bing cherries. The counsel has been when you have a health situation like ours where life expectancy is minimal, to go on a cruise or do something together and take advantage of the time you have. We are passed that because we can’t even go to a restaurant. (Because of the germs, etc). Instead, planting fruit trees became that meaningful substantive exercise to celebrate life and hope. I wanted to show Van that I had faith that he would live and be able to eat the fruit.


Like President Kimball said, “Go ahead and plant your cherry trees”. So we exercised faith and bought cherry trees. “Dispute not because ye see not, for ye receive no witness until after the trial of your faith.” (Ether 12:6) Within a day of purchasing the trees and digging the holes, we discovered we had a PERFECT match. The Priests in our ward dug the holes and my Visiting Teacher is planting them.


We are looking at the end of April for the transplant. We go into the hospital next Tuesday for round two of Chemo. We will be there for 1-2 weeks. Then we come home to recover for a week. April 5th (right after General Conference) we will start all the preliminary work-ups for the transplant. All this will be out-patient seeing Doctors about Van’s heart, lungs, taking a ton of blood work, etc. to make sure he is ready for transplant. Then in the middle of April we will check into the hospital to start six days of full-body radiation, 2 full-days of Chemo (the REALLY bad stuff), and then one day of rabbits blood to help him accept the new stem cells. The day of transplant becomes his new birthday and we have a birthday party and it starts with day 0. Every day after his transplant is called day 1 or day 2, etc.


Now let’s pray that there are no hiccups along the way and that this person follows through and his blood is free from problems. This truly was our only hope. Even the cord blood bank didn’t have a perfect match and the siblings weren’t a match either. How would it be to be the only one on the entire planet that could save someone’s life? This is really a TRUE BLUE MIRACLE! Thanks for everyone’s faith and prayers.