After transplant, new relationships

Bubbe and baby

My donor is a new grandmother.

What does that make me?

Technically, of course, no relation, but it is interesting to contemplate the bonds generated after a bone marrow transplant.

It surprised me at first to learn that after transplant my blood type would change to Denise's, but then it did make sense. Out with the old, in with the new.

 It is a strange, and in this case, wonderful new world where two people previously unrelated now share something so vital as a common blood type.

We email from time to time and so I knew that she her son, Jordan, and daughter-in-law Kayla were expecting. But I didn't know the due date. On the the day last week that I wrote to ask for an update, baby Aviva Esther had arrived two days earlier.

Maybe we have a psychic connection as well.

Aviva Esther

I am happy for her like I would be for a friend.

But we are at the same time more than friends and less than friends.

It is a brain-twister.

Yet one thing's for sure: My mazel tov was heartfelt, and I loved looking at the pictures of that beautiful new life.