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“Flu-like symptoms” my ass.

The last couple of days have been a horror story. On Thursday afternoon, out of the blue, I started having intense lower back pain. Then it got worse. By late evening it was bad enough that I took some morphine, which had very little effect. It got worse through my sleepless night. More morphine at 2 am, then more again at 7 am on Friday morning. At that point, the pain was so excruciating that I wanted to head over to our local ER, but unfortunately Friday was the day we were scheduled to go to LA to have my Hickman port installed for the stem cell transplant. Marian, thank God, insisted on us doing the right thing: driving to LA regardless and getting help there. (On the bright side, Good Friday traffic was light.)

I was practically writhing on the floor for the hour after we got there. Eventually I was taken back to prep, and the doctor tried IV morphine. It had only a minor effect. Then he gave me several IV infusions of Dilaudid, and that did the trick. I was still in pain, but it was tolerable.

Unfortunately, our timing was bad. The Dilaudid was wearing off just as the surgery to install the port began, and they could give me only a limited additional amount until it was over. So the surgery was a horror story too, even though the placement of the port is basically pretty painless.

Long story short, all of this might have been the result of my Neupogen injections, which make my bones work overtime. But my doctors all agreed that although back pain is a common effect of Neupogen, pain of my level was very unusual. Alternatively, all of this could have been due to a pathological fracture in my lower back. A CAT scan ruled that out, thank goodness. So we still don’t know for sure what was going on. But after a very bad day and night, apparently the Dilaudid was the right painkiller, and I woke up in the hospital Saturday morning feeling surprisingly good. I would have given long odds against that Friday night.

So….very mysterious. And for me personally, a whole new definition of pain. Hopefully it won’t return.

Need a silver lining? As bad as it all was, it was apparently a sign that the Neupogen is working. Routine bloodwork shows that my white cell count is high and getting higher. Hooray! That’s what we’re hoping for.

On Monday we start putting the Hickman port to use. I will be up at City of Hope for 2-5 days while they extract stem cells and then process them and freeze them. If I’m producing lots of stem cells, they’ll finish up in a couple of days. If I’m producing a weak stream of stem cells, it may take as long as five days. Cross your fingers.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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