Today marks day number five at glamorous Hotel de Chicago (sponsored by the eponymous University). The accommodations are pretty top notch: around the clock room service (they even wake you up multiple times a night!), fresh linens, an unbelievable drug cabinet, a 3.5 star chef (who gives you stuff like milk, and soup and crackers minus the soup, even if you didn’t order it) and a five star view right out your window:

Despite the frequent interruptions from well-intentioned hospital staff, there has been quite a lot of down time, which has been filled in various ways: visitors, infinite scrolling, Netflix binging, and game playing. I can confirm that Cathy’s as sharp as ever given her performance in double solitaire, and Sequence, but she needs to put in some work at Backgammon.

Lindsay, Cathy, and Glenn take a break from a competitive game of “Chaos”

At this point, we’re awaiting signs that the drug she has been ramping up on is effective at lowering her cancer burden so that we can move on to the CAR-T cell therapy. Typically the back-and-forth with insurance for various approvals for the CAR-T portion of the treatment takes weeks. In our case, it was completed in 24 hours, the fastest they’ve ever seen. We’ll count that as a win! That is very advantageous, as previously she was going to have her T-Cells harvested on July 11th after being released. This has been moved up to this Friday while she’s still in the hospital. Once these are harvested, they take 20ish days to be engineered, but more importantly it opens up further chemo options that have a great success rate in shrinking this kind of cancer. That type of treatment can’t be given prior to T-Cell harvesting as it could damage the T-Cells and put the subsequent therapy at risk. The doctor will make the call on Friday if we move in that direction, and if so we’re likely looking at extending the stay until at least Monday. So we’re essentially just left to wait (and play some games!) which can be tough, but luckily we have plans, and backup plans, and that sort of flexibility is encouraging.