“In its own way, it was a spectacular summer,” Alex says. “In fact, it was full of laughter. John, Amy’s uncle, her brother Mark, and I all play guitar. In the hospital, we were always playing and singing with Amy. People walking by her room—nurses, visitors, sometimes other patients—would come in to sing with us. But it wasn’t the music. It was Amy. People just wanted to be around her.”
“Amy’s mantra through the summer was gratefulness,” Jon Frohnmayer recalls. “She was constantly listing all the things she was grateful for, and asked all her visitors to do the same. On her way into surgery, she’d be asking the doctors and nurses what they were grateful for.”
On May 29, two days after her diagnosis at OHSU, Amy was flown to the Blood and Marrow Transplant Clinic at the University of Minnesota Medical Center in Minneapolis, where John Wagner, M.D., a prominent pediatric hematologist and oncologist who had also treated Kirsten, performed a cord-blood expansion. For the procedure to prove successful, the leukemia cells would need to be “mopped up” by new white blood cells or be expunged from Amy’s body using chemotherapy and radiation; the results wouldn’t be clear until weeks later. With her immune system depleted, there was a high risk of infection. Amy couldn’t leave the hospital until she had been engrafted with new white blood cells.
On Amy’s bad days she was weak and sick, but on her good days she laughed and joked and made collages for her family and friends. There were so many visitors that Alex had to make a schedule to manage the traffic. She was eventually allowed to leave the room for physical therapy, but a treadmill was brought into her room for regular exercise. As soon as her blood counts improved, Amy would walk the halls of the hospital floor several times a day, 11 laps for one mile. “The exercise was good for her physically, but it was also important to her to maintain a runner’s mentality and discipline,” Alex explains. On her good days she would log her four miles, recording the total on a grease-board chart she kept by her bed.
