Diagnosis: Acute Myeloid Leukemia (AML). A Journey

Saturday, July 2nd had finally arrived. We drove to The Pavilion at UPenn, which is a brand new part of the Abrams Cancer Center, having just opened in November 2021. George was admitted to the Bone Marrow Transplant Unit on the 14th floor.

His room is a nice size and has sweeping views over the UPenn campus, with views over to Philadelphia as well.

George’s room has a lot of really cool and innovative features, most of which are found on his big screen tv that hangs at the foot of his bed. First, it’s just awesome that his screen is so huge! So, watching movies and programs will be nice while he’s in there. But the big screen serves other purposes as well. First, there is a lot of information in the upper right hand corner of the screen, as you can see in the photo below.

Then, there’s the feature that George can control the temperature in his room and more from the tv remote. When he presses “display” the menu appears on his screen:

Also, whenever someone steps into his room, a little avatar appears along with their name and title to let you know who’s in the room. When they leave, the avatar goes away:

George can also choose to listen to music if he wants.

Anyway – day 1 – once George was settled in his room, someone came and whisked him away for a chest x-ray. It didn’t take long, like it did at Cooper Hospital. Maybe 20 minutes! A little later, a tech came in with a portable EKG machine and hooked it up to George. That didn’t take long either.

Since George was admitted after dinner orders had already been taken, he was offered a frozen Stouffer’s dinner and he chose a lasagna, which he said was pretty good! That was about it for the first day.