It was a good check-in visit yesterday in Houston with my MD Anderson oncologist. I'm still doing great, no sign of graft-versus-host disease (GVHD), and they'll see me again in two months. They started my re-vaccination series, a two-year process that's familiar to anyone with young children!

After three shots in each arm, for everything from Hepatitis A & B and "Hib" to polio and pneumonia (I think), and diptheria-tetanus-pertussis, plus a high-dose flu shot, my upper arms are SORE and I feel a little blah and tired. As the injection nurse advised, I iced both arms off and on most of the drive home yesterday to help with the soreness, and did "chicken dance" arm movements too, to hopefully prevent any deep hematoma tendencies due to lower-than-normal-people platelet count. Even so, it was pretty uncomfortable to lift my arms when changing clothes to go to bed.

We got home about 11:05 pm last night, and I was in bed by 11:15! I'm glad we decided to fix our family-favorite Thanksgiving foods and Zoom with our sons last weekend and planned to have a very low-key holiday weekend.

I'm even more glad to be starting this process of rebuilding standard immunities to community-spread diseases. For the entire two years to come, I still need to be super careful around people, and basically stay away from children who have recently had the live vaccines I'll get last -- for measles-mumps-rubella and chicken pox. Since I don't know who has / has not had those vaccines, I steer very far away from all children in all circumstances, sigh.

With the sky-high community spread of COVID-19 and resistance to precautions, Mark and I have stocked up via grocery delivery service and have stopped seeing even our sons inside our home. My necessary outings for blood draws for lab work are now biweekly, and I do those at 7 am. We made the two-day Houston trip with extreme care. Now we've pulled up the drawbridge for the time being.

Side note:  It's been fascinating to hear news and analysis about COVID-19 vaccines at the same time I'm starting the standard childhood vaccination series.