Well, not quite: but tomorrow is our last day here, and Saturday we have an obscenely early flight back to the US.

Karen has maintained her tendency of being always on the bell curve, only more so: her numbers crashed to the lowest imaginable when they were supposed to dip, and soared in recovery after. When she needed a leucocyte count of 4K, she had 38K. So that was okay, and she was discharged from the treatment two days ago. Since when she's largely been sleeping, because she's still incredibly weak, but hey. We'll take that.

We are turning our minds to departure-type things, running laundry loads and packing medications for the next six months. She's going to be vulnerable that long at least, and there's a list of things she's not allowed: sushi and crowds and suchlike. Also wine and restaurant foods, both of which are rather more a problem. We'll deal. Well, she'll deal, largely. I'll cook.

I've finished two more chapters of the Crater School vol 2, but I haven't done much else while we were here. I was hoping for more, but this whole caregiver scenario is kind of mind-sapping. I've read a lot of books, and even more internets. That's about it, really.

So every forty-eight hours, Karen gets blood tests and a consult with the haemologist. (I kinda want to say haemiatrician, but I know that's wrong.) Two days ago, her white bloodcell count was 800, and she was officially in neutropenia; today it was 400, so we are double or half or whatever. Twice as sunk. This is all to the good, because what's dying off is the bad immune system that was eating her alive; hopefully at some point we turn this around, and she starts growing a new one that won't be doing that. The stem cells that were transplanted into her are supposed to help that process. I still don't quite understand why they put those stem cells back into her while the chemo was still actively killing things, but I guess they know what they're doing. I guess we'll find out, at any rate.

Statistically, this process helps 80% of patients. I think that's why they divide us into groups of four; if there were five, we'd all be eyeing each other and wondering who was going to be the one who failed. Four goes into eighty so conveniently, we can all be confident of coming through.

Except that unhappily one of our four never got this far. She just wasn't generating enough stem cells to harvest, despite all the drugs they have to encourage it; apparently that's the first time this has happened, in the nearly-500 patients they've treated here. She goes home tomorrow (and the worst of it is, she had the worst reaction to the first round of chemo when we first arrived; all the nausea and diarrhoea and everything, plus her hair's all gone. Which hasn't yet happened to anybody else, although Karen says she sees more in the shower every morning).

Meanwhile, this morning Karen told the doctor that she still felt nausea, and he said that shouldn't be happening because medication, and we pointed out that the anti-nausea meds were stopped a couple of days ago, and he said that shouldn't have happened, and now we have them again, so that's good. We're very much in control of our own meds here, an array of pills to be taken at prescribed intervals. Luckily Karen's long used to this, and so I guess is every patient in the programme.

What more? I dunno. I feel stiff and sore, and a little bit sullen and stupid. Still not trying to work. Reading Kipling and drinking wine. I'm surprised we're not watching more Netflix, but Karen doesn't have much brainspace still. She spends most of the day either napping or trying to nap (there is major construction work going on immediately adjacent, where they're throwing up another apartment block, and that is not a quiet process), and she's in bed by eight every night. With me let's be honest not that far behind her. We do have to be up early (a doctor comes by with a stem-cell-stimulating injection between 7 and 9 every morning), but there is something extraordinarily exhausting about this whole process, for all that I basically sit around all day and barely do a thing.

Ten days to go. I really, really want to go home right now.

All things are weird, but some are more weird than others.

It's been a long time since I was this monomoniacal, so focused on a single activity or outcome. I have been like this about books, in the long-ago; I wrote a fat fantasy in twelve weeks, a shorter book in eight. One of the attributes of this new life I lead is that I thought that degree of focus was gone for good; marriage is all about multitasking, I find.

And now here we are, and the state of the Karen is all that there is, minute by minute and day by day. She's pretty much come through the nausea now; she's starting to eat again, tentatively; and as was foretold us, she is deep in fatigue. We both went to bed stupid early last night, she slept well, and now mid-morning she is back on her bed and asleep again.

She'll have to move when the cleaner comes, because all the bedding has to be washed daily while she's in neutropenia. Could be a week, could be longer; there's no telling. We are cheerleaders for the little leucocytes. She gets a morningly injection to hurry them along, but other than that there is nothing to be done but wait and hope.

Which reminds me: I have read The Count of Monte Cristo, and A Different Light, and am halfway through Kim. I thought I'd do more writing than reading, but that's the monomanic thing: I can't think about anything else. I can't think, period.

So what should I (re)read next?

Day Plus One, and we are largely hanging around the apartment trying to do nothing and not quite succeeding.

Last night I had a magnificent pharmaceutical accident: for we have a few old tablets of Lorazepam with us, and after the night before I felt that I was due a proper night's sleep. Experience has proved that I can cut one of these tablets into four and feel the benefit with a mere quarter: so there I was with one of those and our magnificent little pill-splitter device, and I rather cackhandedly dropped the pill into the sink. Which was damp.

By the time I'd fished the pill out again, it was already starting to dissolve around the edges, so I performed my famous "what the hell" shrug and swallowed the whole damn thing. Last time I took a whole one, I famously slept not only through Karen's rising and showering and dressing and going off to Grand Jury, but also through the boys' breakfast time - I'm sorry, that should be I SLEPT THROUGH THE BOYS' BREAKFAST TIME! - and woke at ten with two anxious furry faces wondering if I was edible yet, or if they had to wait a little longer.

This time I slept like a delicious contented log till seven-thirty, when Karen needed me. Lord knows how long I'd have slept else. Sleep is good, y'all.

Karen's not feeling too good today. I have made one emergency dash to the pharmacy, and am poised for another as and when. Otherwise I read and poke about obscure corners of the internet and occasionally think I ought to be seizing this chance to work but. I got nuthin'.

So, I shall elect to call that Night Minus One, as against Early Morning Day Zero: for, as anticipated, Karen had a horrid time of it. She's sick as a dog, and staying in bed until the last possible moment. I didn't sleep much either, despite having taken a lorazepam in hope; as you know, I have my own issues, and was out of bed frequently beside to fetch her things she couldn't achieve herself.

Still'n'all, we can hope that was the worst of it. Eleven o'clock this morning, she'll be transfused with a billion stem cells of her own making, and they will leap into action to restore her murdered immune system. This will be a process of months - boosted along the way by a repeat of all her childhood vaccinations, which weirdly delights me - but little by little, we can rebuild her. We have the technology. Etc.

Meanwhile, the tradition of Thursday dinners continues at our house in our absence, which delights me. Also I suspect the boys of being pampered rotten, which kinda delights me also. We have already seen photos of their new fluffy snuggly beds.

So everyone came out of the apheresis room, and was hungry, so we went across the road to a local restaurant for lunch. And were summoned back precipitately, because they had counted everyone's stem cells and the results were ready. Hearts in each other's mouths, back we came - and Oystein had 500 million, which was plenty, and Rafa had 750 million, which was awesome. And Karen had over 1000 million, and is best. Which of course we all knew already, right?

So now we're back in the chemotherapy room, being chemotherapised to kill off the immune system all but entirely. That's the rest of today and then tomorrow too. Saturday, she gets all her thousand million stem cells back, under firm instructions to get stemming, or celling, or whatever it is that they do.

As I write this, Karen’s in surgery. By the time I can post it - for I have no wifi at this hospital - we’ll be back at the apartment, and she’ll be fine. Drowsy, maybe. It’s a minor procedure, to connect a port to her bloodstream so that she can be a cyborg for a few days; local anaesthetic and a sedative, no more, but they say she’ll go to sleep.

We have a room that is ours for the duration, and all I have to do is sit in it and wait. Half my task here is waiting. (I have never liked waiting, and do it poorly.)

Outside our room in one of those windowcleaners’ cradles that hang on cables from the roof. Two men are in it with all the tools, and they are doing all the things to the wall at my back: hammering, sawing, drilling. It’s like being in the apartment, transposed to a minor key: for there they are building another tower block just next to ours, and that affords us all the noises of major construction.

I am in a weird mood, I find. I feel ... pent. Potentially eruptive. Popacatepetl in miniature. It’s just the waiting. Karen will be fine, and so will I.

I’m rereading an old favourite novel, Elizabeth Lynn’s “A Different Light”. I still hope to meet her one day, for I know she’s local and we have friends in common. (I’m also rereading “The Count of Monte Cristo”, though I have no hope of meeting Dumas. That’s on the other Kindle, back at the apartment. Reading different books on different Kindles may seem perverse, or contraindicated, but really it’s just about power management. This one, the original, a full charge lasts for weeks; t’other is a tablet-in-embryo and I only get a few hours out of it, less than my phone even.)

I thought I’d be doing more work than I am, but apparently a man can just read and shop and cook and watch TV. Maybe after this week is over, when the procedures are behind us and Karen’s just apartment-bound in neutropenia, I’ll find the mindspace again. These next few days are going to be rough: apharesis and chemo and then at last the transplant. At the moment she’s in a lot of pain - or would be, but for the shots - which they tell us is a good thing, a sign that the process is working as it should. Her bone-marrow is sending lots of stem cells out into her bloodstream, ready to be harvested, yay: but this is a painful process, and her bones ache. Tonight’s going to be the worst of that, and she’ll have the discomfort of today’s operation to deal with also. Plus a lot of stress about tomorrow, when we’ll be all day at the clinic.

Now there are weird noises happening just outside the door. Power-tool of some kind, I think. I’m not going to look. They said I can go down to the cafeteria and get some coffee, but I think I’m just going to sit here and wait till Karen gets back.

Good morning, from Day Minus Six! (I actually nearly typed Seven there, which would have been wrong. Happily I had the wit to check. These negative hours pass inconsistently, I find, and I lose my place in the calendar.)

This morning I learned in Mexico what had eluded me for five years in California: that not only does the Bay Area have an active cricket league, but that Sunnyvale has a cricket club which is a bright star in that league, and has a dedicated permanent cricket pitch a short cycle-ride from our house. I may have renewed sports fandom in my future. Ah, the crack of willow upon leather: how I have missed thee, my Hornby and my Barlow long ago!

Karen had a couple of utterly miserable days post-chemo, constantly sick and not at all interested in food. Ginger ale and water saw her through, with the aid of ginger candies; yesterday she had oatmeal for breakfast (how right was I, to bring steel-cut oats from California? *preens self*), a little soup for lunch and a little chicken and brussels sprouts for dinner. This morning I am making French onion soup and croutons, and we will see how the day plays out.

They're odd, these days. We're very detached from the world in here, and with Karen having been so sick we're a little detached from our own group as well. Everybody else had a roof-party yesterday, with real Mexican food and music; we lingered below in the backwash. We see doctors morning and evening, with Karen's shots; I go to the store as often as I can make excuse for it; otherwise we hang out in here, reading and dozing. We haven't even been watching much TV, though Netflix is a saviour and "Breaking Bad" turns out to be really rather good. I've been working on the Crater School - oh, and cooking, obviously - and I have The Count of Monte Cristo on my Kindle. An old friend, and always reliable. (Actually I think it a work of genius; our lawyer and I bonded over that, last month.)

With that first round of chemo having been so hard on Karen, we're anticipating a difficult second week, because the next round will be worse. But we're a quarter of the way through this whole process now, so that's a thing. And Karen will still be weak and immunocompromised, and it may be a year before she's fully recovered, but nevertheless. Our friends are awesome, and I'm there to do all the things, and with any luck it will all prove worthwhile. *nods affirmatively*

We count the days differently, here in the Clinica Ruiz. Monday was Day Minus Twelve; if today is Wednesday, as I earnestly believe, then it is now Day Minus Ten. Day Zero will be the start of the rest of Karen's life, when she receives her stem cell transplant. The countdown from now to then is all about preparing for that day.

Monday was a day of driving back and forth all over Puebla, for measurements and tests and consultations in numerous clinics and hospitals. I have been in three cities - Taipei, Seoul and Mexico City - each of which I was assured had the worst traffic in the world. Puebla's is certainly not a competitor, and yet... I'm not actually actively scared out there, because our driver is awesome and native to this place, but it ain't good for me. I get hypervigilant and stressy, when cars are flying at us from all angles and seemingly with no regard for their own likely survival let alone ours.

My prime task here as Karen's caregiver is to keep her fed. Given that I've been doing that for the last five years or more, I was weirdly stressed about having to do it here - strange city, strange language, strange kitchen, strange foods, yadda yadda, not to mention how the treatments may affect Karen's appetite or internal economy - but I have found my happy place. The kitchen is no better than I had expected and in some ways rather worse - I have never before encountered a corkscrew that is actually not capable of opening a bottle of wine - but the shopping situation is much, much better. Just around the corner from our apartment is a store called Mega, which appears to sell everything. Certainly it sells enough to keep me happy and active for a month. I have no idea how much money I'm actually spending, but I've decided not to care. So far I've been to Mega three times in two days (including one emergency dash for a corkscrew, which I did of course not know the Spanish word for, but my mime of a man opening a bottle of wine was apparently outstanding: the nice guy I performed it for smiled broadly, practically took me by the hand and led me all the way across store, from the wine section to the kitchenwares. Me, I think they're missing a marketing opportunity: a few fancy corkscrews distributed among the wines, cigars and fancy charcuterie would find a ready sale, I suspect), and I expect to go back on a pretty much daily basis. I love it there. They have whole aisles of gourmet food, imported from all over.

Yesterday (Day Minus 11) we got to meet the great Dr Ruiz himself. He was professionally charming, swift and efficient: everything was fine, so treatment could commence immediately. Happily the same was true for the others in our group (we are Group One, so obviously best, and there are four pair of us: a couple from Aruba, a couple from Florida, an aunt-and-nephew pair from Norway, and ourselves) so we all trooped up to the chemo room for the infusions thereof.

Nobody's hair fell out, nobody threw up, nothing nasty appeared to happen at all. Two hours of actual chemo was followed by three hours of something designed to protect various internal parts from damage. I finished a Crater School chapter, Karen read, everybody except me talked quite a bit. It's a bonding experience, this whole thing, a community effort. Which I guess is partly the point of dividing us up into small groups. Us and our driver just exactly fit into our van, and we're all in the same accommodation block. Once we're settled into the rhythm of the thing, I anticipate wild parties up on the roof terrace.

Today we're back in the chemo room for a second treatment, the same drugs over the same five-hour stretch; but after that we're free for the day. And the really good news of last night was that our luggage finally reached us, after three days without. We get to wear our own actual clothes again, rather than whatever-we-could-find-in-Mega; and in my case, for I am an idiot, I get to take my own actual medications again, hey-ho. Hereinafter Softly shall take charge of those, in my carry-on bag. When in doubt, rely on the teddy bear, that's what I say.

My first intent, on returning to the apartment this afternoon, is to sharpen the bloody kitchen knives, I am just sayin'.

This time tomorrow, we'll be flying into Mexico, where Karen will be harvested of her stem-cells prior to having her immune system killed off with chemotherapy. Then her stem-cells will be reinserted, her immune system rebooted, and maybe she won't have multiple sclerosis any more.

It's a month of radical treatment, during which time we'll be pretty much isolated within an apartment building and together twenty-four/seven.

I have no idea how this is actually going to play out, but one scenario says that we are going to find time hanging heavy on our hands. I do have a tradition of blogging about foreign trips; clearly this one may lack external input, but nevertheless, it is possible that I might revive this journal for the occasion. (For clarity, I never chose to abandon it; it just turns out that I can only maintain one social-media presence at a time, and Facebook is better for staying in touch with the communities I left behind me in the UK. Hence this has kind of gone by the board - but it's so much better for long-form blogging, maybe I shall revert. Maybe. Watch this space.)