Worried about virus, happy that my kitchen is coming along

Hey, I have my kitchen back... sort of, that is. 

The barrier separating the dining area from the kitchen came down today. It looks strange with no furniture in it! Also it echos. The walls are primed and ready for paint. Some people volunteered to help me (thanks Jen and Mimi) but when I went into the paint store, I gravitated to the color that I think I want, natural linen. I thought of going back to get some other samples but sometimes the first thing you choose is the one that you end up liking the most, and also, the virus. (As in, not spending too much time shopping, but I went to the Big Y to pick up a prescription today and ended up there for an hour because it was mobbed with people preparing for what they seem to think is the apocalypse. And no hand sanitizer...)

Lower down in my last post you can see what it looked like just a week ago. 

Today I have a story up about the uncertainty facing "older people" who are most at risk. It is featured on Next Avenue, the PBS-affiliated website for people 50 and older. The editor wanted it in two days, and I am pleased to say that I have not forgotten how to write on deadline, thanks to my training in the daily news biz. 

The story started like so: The other night I was so worried about the coronavirus that I took five milligrams of Ativan, but all it did was make me feel hung over. The next day, I ran four miles and walked another two. Neither helped.

“I shall die of eating an unwashed grape,” I said to my dog in my best Blanche DuBois impression.

I survived relapsed leukemia — with an apparent record of four stem cell transplants — and am worried that after all I’ve been through, COVID-19 will be the end of me. None of the available information has allayed my confusion and concern over who exactly is at the highest risk. You hear that the high-risk group is people over 60, then, people 70 and older. Or those with high blood pressure. I concluded that I was going to skip everything but tennis, but, after I went to tennis (where there were many people including the doctor who diagnosed me), I felt that I shouldn't have done it, and I think I'm going to have to look for subs.

You can read the story here. 

On to other topics, because although it seems like there are no other topics besides the virus, there are. 

That redhead in the trippy Celebrity Cruises commercial is sure getting a lot of sun. I thought it might be a commercial for skin cancer. I wrote about some of the weird qualities of the commercial   this post  . Until I had so much trouble with skin cancer, I didn't see so many things through its lens.

For the same website, I also wrote about the ways in which I've been lucky. I didn't write about this, but today, Friday the 13th, is lucky for me, because Ben, my first born, was born on a Friday the 13th. I wrote, "Nobody should say you’re lucky to get cancer, but luck is a matter of degree. For example, an acute myeloid leukemia (AML) patient like myself is lucky compared to one who got the blood cancer before stem cell transplants became common practice. In great part, we owe our survival to the so-called Father of Bone Marrow Transplantation, Harvard-trained researcher E. Donnall Thomas, who I wrote about in a piece on what it’s like to be a chimera, a person with two types of DNA. In 1957, Thomas published a report of a new approach to blood cancer treatment: radiation and chemotherapy followed by the intravenous infusion of bone marrow.