My family is all safe. My husband Ken, who works directly across
the street from the World Trade Center, was in the dentist's office near
home yesterday morning, and thus I never even had to worry about his safety.
Sarah is home and has just started tenth grade in a new high school, the
Public School Repertory Company, and Margie is in Ann Arbor in the Green
Corps, a
"field school" for environmental organizers (she graduated from Yale
in May).
I pray that you and yours are all safe as well. We are mourning
for the victims of yesterday's tragedy and their loved ones, and praying
for a New Year of peace and healing (it is the Jewish New Year this coming
week).
I drafted the following update on my health on 5/30/2001, but never sent it out - I kept meaning to write more. But here is what I wrote:
We're going to Ghana!
Margie, our 22-year old daughter, is going to Ghana for a month on behalf
of
a Jewish group called Kulanu, which encourages volunteers to reach
out to
lost Jewish communities throughout the world. Ken and I decided
to join her
for a week - I will bring a laptop computer and offer to teach them
how to
use it. Other volunteers who have visited the small Jewish community
in
Sefwi Wiaso in Ghana have loved it.
Anyway, I was worried about whether there were too many health risks,
but
both my internist and my oncologist gave me the go-ahead. I hadn't
had a
blood test in months, and I finally had one, and was delighted with
the
results:
white blood counts: 3.3
hematocrit 34.8
hemoglobin 11.8
platelets 98
The platelets are especially good news. We had been worried, in
1998, that
they might never go beyond 20 or so. Now they have been slowly
steadily
increasing - at the previous test, I think they were 83.
The red counts are good news, too, since I haven't had a Procrit injection
since about last December (the Procrit injections somehow keep the
hematocrit
and hemoglobin up). When I had tried stopping Procrit a year
earlier, my
counts had seemed to be dropping rapidly. This time they seem
quite stable,
though a little lower than when I was on Procrit.
P.S. (9/12/2001) - I returned from Ghana with no health complications. I have taken a few doses of procrit over the past few months (when I felt sluggish and suspected that my blood counts might be low), especially right before traveling away from home, but I am mainly still not taking it and am feeling fine (except for the tragedy around us in New York).
You are welcome to view my online photo journal of our trip, with commentary, on dotphoto.com.
Love,
Harriet [hbograd@compuserve.com]
.