Then there are parts we remember because they changed us.
And sometimes, strangely enough, the moments that changed us most are the ones we don't remember at all.
That is part of the reason I wrote Day Zero.
When I wrote Skywalk to Survival, I told the story of being diagnosed with multiple myeloma during the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic and everything Lance and I went through trying to get me to a stem cell transplant.
But getting to transplant wasn't the end of that story.
In many ways, it was only the beginning.
What Is Day Zero?
In the stem cell transplant world, Day Zero is the day your stem cells are returned to you.
Before that can happen, you receive high-dose chemotherapy intended to destroy as much remaining myeloma as possible while profoundly suppressing your bone marrow and its ability to produce blood cells.
Then your previously collected stem cells are infused back into your body.
The hope is that they find their way home to the bone marrow, engraft, and begin rebuilding your blood and immune system.
It sounds remarkably straightforward when written like that.
Living through it is something else entirely.
For transplant patients, Day Zero is often called a new birthday or rebirthday.
Mine was August 24, 2020.
I remember the stem cell bags. I remember the strange pink-orange color that reminded me of tomato soup. I remember the nurses celebrating this new birthday with me.
But Day Zero isn't simply a book about August 24.
It's about everything that surrounded it.
The Story I Hadn't Completely Told
There are things about transplant that are easy to explain medically.
Your blood counts fall.
Your immune system becomes severely compromised.
Your platelets can fall dangerously low.
You wait for engraftment.
You watch numbers every day, hoping they will finally turn around.
Those are the clinical facts.
What the clinical explanation doesn't tell you is what it feels like to lie in a hospital room and watch those numbers disappear.
It doesn't tell you what it is like when a whiteboard on the wall says platelets below 10 require transfusion and then your own platelet count reaches 7.
It doesn't explain what happens to the person inside that body.
Or the person sitting beside them.
That is the story I wanted Day Zero to tell.
Then There Are the Days I Don't Remember
This was probably the most difficult part of writing the book.
I remember much of my transplant clearly.
I also have a stretch of time that simply isn't there.
My body was going through some of the most serious complications of the entire transplant process, yet my own memory of those days is incomplete.
There are things I know because Lance remembers them.
There are things I know because they were written in my journal.
There are things I know because the medical record tells me they happened.
And there are fragments that belong only to me.
One of those fragments is my father's voice.
My dad had died the year before my transplant. Yet somewhere inside those missing days, I heard him telling me to keep fighting.
I can't explain it.
I don't try to.
I only know that I heard him.
And I held on.
Writing What You Can't Remember
Memoir usually asks the writer to reach backward into memory.
This book sometimes required me to do the opposite.
I had to accept where my memory stopped.
I didn't want to manufacture details simply because they would make a scene more complete. If I didn't remember something, I had to say that I didn't remember it.
So I went back to what remained.
My journals.
The numbers.
The medical information.
Lance's memories.
And the pieces my own mind managed to keep.
Some of what I found surprised me. Some of it made me laugh. Some of it made me cry. And some of it made me realize just how sick I had actually been.
When you're the patient, you're often too busy surviving to understand the full story while it's happening.
Sometimes you don't understand it until years later.
More Than a Transplant Story
I also didn't want Day Zero to become a medical textbook.
There are plenty of places to learn the mechanics of an autologous stem cell transplant.
I wanted to tell you what those mechanics look like from the bed.
The 3 a.m. labs.
The vital signs.
The routines.
The isolation.
The nausea.
The numbers on the board.
The person you love having to leave.
The uncertainty.
The waiting.
And eventually, the first tiny signs that your body may be finding its way back.
Because recovery doesn't arrive dramatically.
There isn't a moment when someone walks into the room and announces that everything is going to be fine.
For me, it came in numbers.
Numbers falling.
Numbers bottoming out.
And eventually, numbers beginning to rise.
Why Tell This Story Now?
Six years have passed since my Day Zero.
Time changes the way we look at things.
When I was living through transplant, my job was simple: get through the next hour, the next blood draw, the next day.
Years later, I can see the story differently.
I can see Lance's story alongside mine.
I can see how much of survival happened outside my awareness.
I can see how something described as a "rebirthday" can be both hopeful and terrifying.
And I understand now that surviving transplant didn't magically return me to the person I had been before cancer.
It couldn't.
That person had walked into the hospital.
Someone different eventually walked back out.
That is why Day Zero needed to be its own book.
Skywalk to Survival is the story of fighting to reach transplant.
Day Zero is the story of surviving it.
And Still Here will tell the story of what came afterward—because survival wasn't the end of the story either.
It was the beginning of another one.
August 24, 2020
There are birthdays we celebrate because we entered the world.
Then there are days we mark because, somehow, we remained in it.
August 24 will always be both complicated and extraordinary for me.
It was the day my stem cells came home.
It was the beginning of some of the hardest days of my life.
It was the beginning of a recovery I couldn't yet see.
And six years later, I finally sat down and told the story.
That story is Day Zero.
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