Pauline here.   T+ 9 and counting.

I think the hardest thing I've ever had to do is see Boone like this.  Honestly, if I walked past him out in public, I'd not think twice that it could be him.  There is no hair left on his head or face other than a bit of stubble here and there.  I haven't  seen him without face hair since he was 18; then his hair was beautiful long straight silky black hair.  It was several inches below his shoulders.

He is still receiving chemo to suppress his immune system so he doesn't try to murder the donor cells. Right now he is asleep but talking out loud, reaching for things in the air; I think he's petting Leukka.

For his coworkers, he is constantly talking about work in his sleep.  "Yes you need to draw this", "no the engineer was supposed to do that", "Mike! Come here!!!.. With fingers doing the come hither moves.  Then he will break out laughing, then suddenly stop.   Now he's getting on a plane back to Nashville.  I wonder what hospital he is working on....

There's nothing much for me to do right now other than show up at the hospital.  Yesterday I didn't even do that.  I absolutely had to have a break. When I talked to Boone about it on the phone, I felt so guilty for "leaving" him here alone.  I still feel guilty about it.  I feel like I abandoned him in his time of need.

Mostly he sleeps and talks.  In reading other CMML patients blogs or the Cancer.org stuff, people talk about being too weak to talk on the phone.  That's where Boone is now.  I've had him fall asleep in mid sentence.  He's getting platelets today, he got 2 units of whole blood Friday.  He is at his lowest point blood count wise, but is as best I can tell, right on schedule.  It's bad, but its good.  No infections so far.
As for me, I've moved the critters to the farm for the duration of the hospital stay.  Lyla (AKA "Crazy Dog"), gets out and runs at full tilt boogy, rather than hiding in a dark corner shaking all day.  Tweak, our eldest, loves to lay out in the sun.  Leukka is learning to catch moles.   All good girls.  Boone misses them a lot.  They seem to understand that something is wrong too.
I've had to find busy work to do, just to divert my brain from all of this.  I'm not one to want to talk to counselors, because I think girlfriends are better.  They let me talk about what I want to talk about, not about some crap that happened when I was 5.
In the last month or so, I've managed to clear out the dead trees with honeysuckle all over them that lined our front yard.  Now you can see clear through the woods to the top of the hill.  I still have to finish clearing out what has been cut, and hopefully I can get that done before the ticks come out.
But my number one distraction is the moss garden I started last year when I was bottle feeding Leukka.   I'm putting in roads, complete with streetlights, a volcano, waterfalls, a river with an island, a lake, and will Bonsai a seedling Japanese Maple that sprouted last spring.
Hummmm....now he's speaking Spanish.
I'm spending way too much time on my moss garden, but it gives me a miniature world I can control. I've always been one to need to know what's going on, why its happening, and plotting what I have to do to get a job done or divert catastrophe.  With this disease, we are just passengers on a bus that is taking us to some unknown destination, and no ETA.

I'm so very tired.