Gozo

On my last full day in Malta, I headed out early to try to catch the ferry over to the island just to the north which goes by the name Gozo. Even smaller than the main island, it's less than a half-hour ride from the tiny port at Cirwekka on Malta to its counterpart Mgarr on Gozo. Since I had a plane to catch early the next morning, I wanted to be sure I wasn't going to get stuck on Gozo after the last ferry had run back to Cirwekka, so I lost no time in catching a bus up across the hills that separate the peninsula where Qawra lies from the northern tip of the island.

The bus arrived just a few minutes ahead of the next ferry, so I had little time to wait, and pretty soon they let the passengers on and started loaded up the car compartment. It's been a few months now since I've been on a boat, but all boats have something of a similar feel - the smell of engine grease and cleaning fluid and salt water corroding steel - and it all felt very familiar.

The day was hot and a little foggy, leaving an air of mugginess over the channel. We passed the tiny island of Comino on the right and docked a few minutes later at Mgarr. Shortly before we landed a woman came up to me and struck up a conversation. She said she assumed from hearing me talk that I was American, though I'm not sure how she knew that since, well, I would have had to be having a conversation with myself since I didn't know anyone else on the boat. She was from South Africa, in Malta on vacation, and asked if I would want to travel together for the day. She seemed quite nice and I hated to say no, but I had a particular destination in mind and didn't think that dragging a stranger on one of my 10-mile forced marches would really seem all that charming to her. We chatted for a few minutes then went separate ways, though I caught up to her again in line for the bus up to the main city of Victoria. The unlicensed taxi drivers are persistent to the point of being a little scary, and one of them had got his claws into her and wasn't letting her say no, she'd rather take the bus. She was a little timid and I finally got between her and this guy and told him to cut it out. He ignored me but walked away anyhow, and she & I hopped on the bus.

From Victoria I had planned to go to the north side of the island. The buses only run once an hour in that direction, and by the map I figured it couldn't be too much farther than an hour's walk, so I started following street signs down the winding way toward the north coast. This did indeed take about an hour, and I was glad to have the shade of an overcast day. Once I was out of the city it was quite a pleasant walk, although on a rural highway with no sidewalk or even shoulder. I dodged traffic most of the way there, and eventually watched as the hourly bus buzzed by me. By that time I was getting pretty close to the coast anyhow, although walks always seem long when you're not quite sure how far you've got to go.

I got to Marsalforn and hung out on the beach for a while, got some ice cream, walked around town, and thought about getting some lunch when I realized it was pushing two o'clock. With the bus trip back to Victoria and then over the hill to Mgarr, it seemed like I was pushing the end of daylight with the time I had left to get back, so I went over to the bus stop to wait for the next ride, as I was not excited to do the same trek I had just completed, only uphill in the reverse direction.

While I was waiting, two different British couples sat down and I chatted with them for a time. Apparently, because it's pricey to fly to Malta but very cheap to stay, most people would consider a five-day vacation like mine to be almost a waste of time. Both couples were there for weeks, though both were heading back soon. One of the couples was staying in Qawra, and the woman said I looked familiar, and might we be staying at the same place? This wasn't the case (the place they were staying had been named "Fawlty Towers" - by the locals, at that - for it's second-rate services), and we eventually figured out that she'd seen me walking along the highway and that's where she had seen me before.

Back in Victoria I had another wait, so I went to grab a bottle of water and a snack from a local shop, then sat on the bus munching on candy and trying to prop up my blood sugar until I got could get back across the channel and get some real food. Once again the ferry was just coming in when I got back to Mgarr, so I didn't have much time to look around the picturesque harbor with its traditionally painted fishing boats, all primary colors with the ancient symbol of the eye of Osiris painted on each side of the bow. Then across the channel, and a long wait before the bus to Qawra managed to acquire a slightly less-than-sober driver who had been sitting at a snack stall drinking some kind of beverage - hopefully not too terribly alcoholic a beverage - before he got behind the wheel and took a good forty people on a hair-raising and bumpy ride back across the hills to Qawra.

Back there I got dinner at the same place as last night, then took one long walk around the peninsula. The weather is starting to cool - the wind swinging from hot, arid Africa in the south has shifted around the compass and is now coming from the north, bringing the spring chill of Europe in the melting season with it. If I wanted to be chilly I could just go back to London and get that, so again I picked the perfect time: warm during my stay, cooling down just as I get ready to leave.

I caught a cab early the next morning and was back at Gatwick by noon. I grabbed my pack from baggage claim, threw on a cart, and ran to catch the first train back to the city. I had a return ticket already, so I hopped down the stairs and arrived just as a train was rolling up the tracks. At just about the moment that the door closed, I reached down to grab something out of my pack and realize, to my utter horror, that it was nowhere to be found. I knew I had it on the luggage cart, I had shoved the luggage cart off to the side when I reached the stairs into the train station, and, by all appearances, I had left the pack on the cart. Unfortunately I was on the express train to the city, so it was a good twenty minutes before the first stop. At East Croydon I ran up across bridge to another track and caught another train just pulling into the station. Back to Gatwick.

This entire trip took a good hour, by which time I was quite sure that Gatwick security would certainly have called the bomb squad, sealed off the terminal, and destroyed the pack inside a bomb-proof container. My phone was out of minutes, so there was no calling ahead to see. I hit up about three offices - lost & found, security, and then another lost & found before I made my way back to the floor where I had left it. A friendly security officer took the description, scratched his head, then disappeared into a back office for 10 minutes. He came out with a piece of the luggage tag, which had my name printed out on it. I produced a passport with a matching name (fortunately, I always carry passport, wallet, and keys on me so I'm less likely to lose them anywhere), and he rolled out the pack...on the same cart I had left it on, he joked.

I headed back to the train station, yet again, and caught the first one into the city, yet again. Only this time my ticket had already been punched, so I had to get the story straight in my head to try to convince the conductor that no, I wasn’t trying to cop a free fare, I really had paid for a ticket and had just been waylaid by the fiasco with the lost luggage. Fortunately, no one was checking tickets on this empty train, and I made it to Kings Cross, and then home, with no further incident.

Silent City

Feeling more adventurous with a good 24 hours since the last sign of food poisoning had passed, I hopped a bus once again to the center of the island, the twin cities of Rabat and Mdina. Mdina apparently means "walled city," and it is the inner section, the old fortress from which the many revolving empires established dominion over the island. It is called the silent city because the paved streets are too narrow to accommodate cars, and the white noise of Rabat's traffic is dampened by the thick old fortified walls. And it is quiet, at least off the few main streets where groups of tourists by the dozen gawk at ancient sites while a tour guide speaks in any number of languages that tourists come in. I thought about hanging back behind one of these crowds to hear some of the stories, but I didn't find any in English and I didn't think I'd get much out of listening in on French or German.

The walls of Mdina are made from stone cut straight from the island - a place old and intact enough to remember times when human-built edifices melded almost seemlessly to the landscape, made out of the same brick and mortar as the rocky island itself. It possesses a Mediterranean aesthetic that, if you just saw pictures, you might mistake for postcards of anything from the Greek islands to Algeria to Italy. This is the territory where Africa and the Middle East and Europe come together, around a sea that gave birth to some of the earliest far-flung sailors on the planet, skirted by the lands where civilization first rose up.

Outside the walls I crossed into the new city, Rabat, where the streets are only slightly less narrow and harrowing than the old town. I walked toward the cluster of churches and catacombs and other monuments hidden in the jumble of streets, and stopped into the church of Saint Paul, where a gated basement chamber marks the cave where Saint Paul gave a legendary sermon in his brief stopover on Malta. Nearby are two sets of catacombs, though I didn't go into either one. A few years ago I visited the catacombs under Paris and decided that unless there was some pressing reason to do so, I didn't really need to climb down into the crust of the planet to see tightly claustrophobic chambers full of dead human bones again. The crypt of Saint Agatha is rumored to be covered with centuries-old frescoes which were nevertheless painted years several dozen decades after Agatha herself hid out in the catacombs away from a rich nobleman who eventually found her and expedited her path to sainthood, so to speak.

But I was getting hungry, so I headed back toward Mdina where I'd seen a couple of cafes. Somehow, just a block from the main square where I had exited the bus a couple hours earlier, I managed to turn right when I should've turned left, and spent the next hour wondering how exactly one can get lost in a tiny city on a small island - especially when said city perches on top a hill from which one can see, well, most the rest of the country. But lost I was, and in the noon heat I realized that I probably should take a little care not to get caught out away from known territory with no sunscreen, no snacks, and not enough water to keep myself hydrated after the recent adventure in food poisoning that I was still recovering from. I finally went back to exactly where I'd started from, and noticed that the entrance gate to Mdina was no less than about a hundred yards in the opposite direction.

I went back into the old city and checked out a couple of cafes, but by then the lunch hour had arrived and the shaded little terrace restaurant I had my eye on was so crowded that it appeared that there wasn't enough wait staff to even seat people. So I found a quieter place and eventually got some food and enough energy to walk back to the bus station and make my way back to Qawra, where I promptly took a nap. As the sun started to set I went for a long walk around the peninsula, and got dinner on the far side at a place that probably had the best fresh pasta I've had in years, despite the sign outside that said "Extremely Casual Dining!" I guess that's their selling point. I went back to the hotel and - not being able to find any episodes of Law & Order, even in Italian - worked a little more on my thesis and then collapsed into bed.

A day of rest

Last night I was falling asleep to a dubbed episode of Law & Order in Italian (didn't matter that I couldn't understand - I've seen just about every one of the several hundred episode half a dozen times, so the dialogue wasn't important) when I started to feel like something wasn't quite right. I got a screaming headache that came on suddenly, so I popped a couple of ibuprofen and tried to sleep through the rest of it.

Nope.

Within a half an hour, I was in the throes of food poisoning. Not the kind of food poisoning that grabs on and hangs in your gut for days, but the kind that hits you like a trainwreck and is gone before you've quite realized what it was.

So this morning I ditched most of the day's plans and instead slept til noon. I had to get up to eat before breakfast closed - and hungry I was, being that my stomach was entirely empty after the previous night's adventure. I woke up again when a maid knocked on the door to change the linens, but otherwise I was out cold.

I had planned to get up early and attend Palm Sunday services at the cathedral down the street, but I slept through that too. Catholicism has an interesting history in Malta, and I was curious to see its modern incarnation. Legend and history agree that Saint Paul was shipwrecked here on his way to stand trial in Rome, where he was eventually condemned to death. The more controversial story goes on to say that he performed a few miracles, preached a few speeches, and in the short time he spent on the island, converted the Maltese into one of the earliest Christian peoples on the planet, and they are to this day righteously devout. But, still suffering from stomach upset, I slept straight through the morning, which gives you some idea of how much less devout I am about the whole affair.

I went down to the beach-side tourist strip to hunt down some lunch - something that wouldn't cause any more upset, and wasn't too big. I had a hard time finding anything besides calorie-overloaded sit-down meals, though I did manage to locate some bottled water. I don't think it was the water that made me sick (if it had been, I think it would have hung on far longer), but I also didn't think that running a load of chlorinated water through my gut had helped at all with the ensuing intra-intestinal mayhem of last night. I finally found a sandwich, headed back to the Sunflower hotel, and established myself a small territory on the roof-top deck next to a multi-lobed swimming pool in the shape of a clover.

I spent the rest of the afternoon lounging in the sun and plowing through the initial notes and sketchy paragraphs of what is to become my masters thesis. I had hemmed and hawed for a considerable time last fall between going abroad to do some exotic research and staying around London to do a literature review, and between all the other things going on (among them med school, applying to residency this summer, and having a sick niece back home), I decided that this was not the time to be locking myself into a summer in some remote place that didn't at least have phone or internet connection from which I could keep on top of all those other goings on. So I came up with a topic that has just enough twists and turns to make for an interesting and worthy thesis project, which goes something like this:

Tuberculosis is very common (something like a third of the world's population carries it, even if not all are sick from it) but because it strikes poor people hardest, new innovations in treatment have stalled out over the last thirty years, and most of the drugs, lab tests, and vaccines are older than I am. The BCG vaccine pre-dates the era of flight, and though it's got a very spotty track record, it's the only tuberculosis vaccine on the market. But in the last couple of years, a drug called moxifloxacin (a close relative of ciprofloxacin) came on the scene that has a potential to change all that. Clinical trials seem to indicate that replacing this drug for one of the four drugs that TB patients must take for six months lowers the time to cure to about half that - around three months. Because of the enormous financial burden to patients and the health system alike from having to treat the disease for six months, cutting the time in half would probably greatly improve cure rates and lessen the chance of people dropping out of the treatment before cure, which inevitably leads to antibiotic resistant TB bacteria.

Sounds great. But there's a catch: this drug is very expensive (about $10 a pill), and TB mainly affects the poorest people and the poorest nations in the world. At the same time, the drug is used for many other diseases, and at least a few of those who have received it probably have tuberculosis too, and that means that the bacteria is probably gaining resistance to the drug as we speak.

So. Some people want moxifloxacin to be limited to only TB patients to slow the development of bacterial resistance to the drug. Some people argue that if you limit the drug's use for other things in wealthy nations, the profit margin on the drug will drop and companies will stop letting their products be registered for diseases of poverty like TB, malaria and HIV (this problem already popped up once with another potential TB drug called sparfloxacin - it looked great against TB in the test tube, but the patent-holding company yanked support for clinical trials out of fear that profits would plummet if it were labeled a tuberculosis drug). My project is to sort out the economic, clinical, and ethical implications of these opposing camps and to evaluate how different policies would play out. That means in addition to reviewing the clinical side (eg, who can use the drug and who can't - for example, it's not good for pregnant women), I am also delving into the world of patent law, international trade agreements, how the free market fails to provide for treatment when patients cannot pay, ethical concepts like efficiency and equity, and global health care policy.

After going at that for a few hours, I went out to get dinner and found a quiet place just up the street from the main square at the center of all the tourist action. Something involving techno music and a large crowd of teenagers to twenty-somethings was happening down the block, and I got a little taste of what Qawra probably looks like in the high season. Way too many people, way too much of a meat-market vibe, and I'm way too old for all that. I prefer the low season, peace and quiet and all that. I took a long walk in the cool night, around the perimeter of the peninsula, and turned in earlier than last night, and much more comfortably too.

Ancient and modern, temples and cities

I hauled myself out of bed, feeling like it was much earlier than it actually was. Between Ohio, the change to daylight savings, and another hour lost between London time and Malta, somehow mid-morning has begun to feel like hours before daybreak. But I had a long list of places I wanted to see in the few days that I am in Malta, so I grabbed breakfast at the hotel and headed out, equipped with Lonely Planet guide and a bus map.

My first destination was the south coast of the island, far opposite from the northeast corner where I'm staying. I caught a bus back into Valetta, then a second bus back out toward the far coast. The buses aren't entirely comfortable - most of them predate the Kennedy assassination, and probably haven't got new shocks since the first Bush administration - but they are a fine way to see the scenery go by. And though Northern European tourists fill the seats on certain routes on the circuit with their sensible shoes and cruise-wear get-ups, the bus system is actually designed for local mass transit and is thus a pretty cheap way to get around.

I wasn't entirely sure where to get off the bus (the stops are sometimes marked, and sometimes seem to be determined by the driver's whim), but I figured all the other tourists on this rural bus line were headed for the same place, so I could just follow them when the whole crowd hopped off. And I was right. The bus stopped at a nondescript crossroad, and I followed a couple dozen camera-laden toward the signs marked Mnajdra and Hagar Qim.

The dual ruins of Mnajdra and Hagar Qim make up an ancient temple complex, one of the oldest stone buildings still standing on earth. They far predate the Egyptian pyramids and were built not long before Stonehenge. They sit on an arid slope above the Mediterranean blue, long buried but now re-excavated and partly re-built in the modern interpretation of what they might have originally looked like. Not unlike Stonehenge, their orientation captures certain dawn light on the two solstices - or so say the guide books.

Between the two temples, a stone-paved path rolled out down the hillside. Several less ancient remnants - a fortification tower built only several hundred years ago, and a monument to twentieth-century Maltese governor - so I hiked cross-country to see those too. From there, the tiny island of Fifla peaked up out of the sea; like most small marine islands, it's home to thousands of seabirds who've staked out claim on the breeding grounds - and was once (though no longer) a target of shooting practice for the British military during their tenure on Malta.

With it's location in the middle of the sea, not much farther from Africa than it is from Europe, Malta has been occupied by just about every European empire worth it's salt - the Phoenicians, the Carthaginians, the Romans, Byzantines from the east, Arabs from the south, Normans on their way to conquering Sicily, Castilians, the French, the Spanish, the Turks, the French again under Napolean (who was born not far away on Corsica), and finally the British. When Britain let Malta go a few decades back, it marked the first time that the Maltese people ruled Malta in written history.

In between all that, a few centuries back, the island was gifted to the Knights of Saint John, an order founded during the crusades to alternately wage war on various infidels and provide medical help along the crusade routes to Christians battling the same enemy. They still exist as a peculiar political entity, a nation without a homeland, being recognized as sovereign and existing outside Italian law within its enclaves in Rome.

Or so I paraphrase from the eminent scholarly work known as the Lonely Planet guide book.

In any case, the Maltese language reminds me very much of Catalan, that linguistic oddity you find in the north of Spain, backed right up against the neighboring (and totally unrelated) Basque language. Only, with Catalan I always felt I could possibly understand it if I listened just that much harder, as it derives from every language that was in sailing distance from Barcelona: Spanish, Italian, French, even German and the like. But Malti, while similarly derived from the boundaries of its historical trade, is far more deeply rooted in the Semitic ethnic stew - Arabic, Hebrew, languages where I can't pick out more than a word or two, or even guess the pronunciation from the script. Some believe that Malti is the closest living language to what the Phoenicians spoke all those millennia ago.

I took a long lunch at a restaurant on the crest of the hill above the ruins. It didn't have a view of the ocean, but of the landscape of the island's interior. Most of the land is terraced in row upon row of rough stone walls that might have been put up yesterday or might have been put up a thousand years ago and you couldn't tell the difference. With row on row of stone, it almost appears as if the entire land is made of stone, unless you look down on it from above to see the patches of green between.

After lunch I caught the bus back again, via the coast where aquamarine waters overlie white Mediterranean sand and remnant arches of eroding limestone still hang precariously from what was once cliffs. Back in Valetta, I thought I'd see the some of the city before going back north to Qawra. But the city was hot and dusty, and though there are many sights to see, I didn't spend long there. The tap water in Malta is quite drinkable but so heavily chlorinated that it's less of a taste and more of a texture; I hadn't been drinking much, and with the heat I'm not accustomed to after winter in London, I probably should have been more careful.

Back at the hotel, I took a nap and went out again for dinner. I got Italian food down on the tourist strip by the beach, then walked the length of the short peninsula that houses the towns of Qawra and Bugibba. Night had turned the air from warm to chilly, a nice break from the day. I went back to the hotel, read a little, and turned in.

Malta

I have most of the month off, and with the weather in London gloomy enough to drive a native Californian mad, I decided it was time to blow out of town for a bit. I chose Malta because it is, in no particular order, cheap, warm, rife with beaches, English-speaking, and just about as far south as you can get and still be in Europe. Or, as someone told me, it's a place where they speak English and eat Italian. That sounded great to me, so I booked a flight and hotel, and off I went.

I left out of Gatwick on Malta Air, which has a quite a reputation. Online reviews complain about sudden cancellation of scheduled in-flight meals, getting bumped out of prime seats for the bratty children of Maltese officials, and having to brush the last person's crumbs off the seats. "Non-linear" is the way one person described their corporate approach to aircraft maintenance.

But it turned out fine - it was a very smooth flight, food was served (better than the bag of peanuts you'd get on a bargain flight in the US these days), and I happened to get a window seat on the east-facing side of the plane. It was overcast over the English Channel and as far as France, but then the Alps peaked up out of the clouds, and soon we were over the Mediterranean. Italy slid by off the tip of the wing, then the islands of Corsica, Sardinia, then Sicily. Malta is so small you can't see it before you're on top of it and dropping quickly onto the runway.

This season, the Maltese landscape is green and the air is warm. I knew the cab ride out to the area where I was staying would set me back about $35, so I decided if I could swing it, I'd take a bus. I picked up a map and bus schedule at the tourist office, hit up the ATM for some Maltese cash (a recent addition to the EU, they haven't switched from the lira to the euro just yet), then broke a ten-lira bill by buying another bus map. I found the bus outside, asked if it went into the center of Valetta (the main city on the island), and hopped on.

I had thought about renting a car so I could see more the island, but the first bus ride into town put that thought firmly six feet under, where it belonged. Driving behavior in Malta is eerily similar to Tijuana (or like the hairy ride I once took out of the ferry terminal Guaymas, although to be fair, I think Megan was driving that time) but with one difference. Malta is an ex-British territory. They drive on the left side of the road.

The bus left the airport and headed out on dusty, pothole-ridden roads toward Valetta. About a third of the way there, the driver stopped, a buddy of his hopped on for a chat, and then the driver proceeded to make a three-point turn while involved in a rapid conversation with the other guy, never once looking back to check if anyone else was driving through the intersection. Then he turned off the engine, and there we sat for about five minutes before I finally asked where exactly we would eventually be going, and when. The driver reassured me we'd eventually get to Valetta, so I sat back and waited until the he decided to get moving again.

Eventually I made it to the center of Valetta. Almost all bus routes on the island lead to the same terminal, and I was able to figure out which number route would take me to Qawra. Some three hours after I left the airport, and after a scenic tour that covered about half the island, I got off at the end of the line. From there I took a couple of turns up and down side alleys before I found signs noting actual street names that I could pick out on the map. The hotel I had booked at was a quick five or ten minutes' walk from there.

The neighborhood was kind of weedy, literally. It had that look that I've seen all over Mexico, where someone has set out cinder blocks as if to build something, then left them there until they are growing a healthy thatch of the local flora. I knew this area was the super-touristy part of the island, and at the rate I was paying per night at the hotel (less than $30), I figured I'd probably be staying at some divey place off the beach. Turns out, the hotel was just about as far from divey as you can get. In fact, dressed in jeans and a t-shirt, showing up dusty and sweaty from the bus ride and with a pack on my back, I felt severely under-dressed for the occasion of checking into a hotel. They gave me a room on the floor just about the lobby, with a clear view of the weedy parking lot - the bargain room, I assume. But the room was large, with a deck, and an actual bed - quite a luxury after my months sleeping on a hybrid futon-couch in my cramped studio in London. In deference to Malta's very limited water supply and ever-diminishing resources, the hotel was built to minimize its water and electricity consumption. Every room had a little device to stick the key into to turn on the electricity; when you leave with the key, the electricity goes off and stays off until the key is replaced.

I had bought lunch back at Gatwick, not knowing if there would be food on the flight, so I ate those leftovers for dinner then cleaned up a little and went out to see the town. Not a couple of blocks from the hotel, in the gathering dusk, I heard a muffled voice amplified over a loudspeaker that sounded like chanting. I followed it and found a thick procession of silent, darkly clad worshippers walking slowly up the street, followed at the rear by a white van with a stereo speaker on the roof, from which a woman's voice repeated the prayer in a language I could not understand. I slipped quietly into the somber column of people, followed them to the cathedral at the crest of the hill, where the head of the procession was just carrying an icon and a moving altar of candles into the open waiting doors of the church. I watched from the sidelines for a few moments, then split off back into the night. I took a stroll along the waterfront, watched the edge of the waveless Mediterranean lap gently against the island shore, then headed back to the hotel and turned in for the night. From my room I could hear a far off rendition of an off-key Barry Manilow tune, and I fell asleep to the vague hope that this was a drunken karaoke moment and not a professional trying to live off the tips from that performance.

Ohio

A couple days after the term ended, with a month's vacation ahead of me, I hopped yet another trans-Atlantic flight back to the States. My mother flew out from California, and we met up at my brother's house in Cincinnati to visit for a few days and celebrate a few birthdays (hey little brother, the next one will be thirty!). We took the kids and all to the zoo, ate birthday cake, and generally had a fabulous time. I don't usually fly across the ocean for birthday parties, so you might be wondering why I went all the way to Cincinnati for such a quick visit.

Everyone who is family already knows this, but anyone outside the family probably has not heard. In January, my brother's little girl, Carly, was diagnosed with leukemia. She is six years old. Specifically, she's got Philadelphia-positive B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia. Because hers is something of a rare type of cancer, it's a little harder to cure than the usual childhood leukemia. She is now in remission after several rounds of chemotherapy, but her kind of cancer does not stay in remission without drastic treatment. So in May she will be getting a bone marrow transplant. She will be in the hospital for anywhere from a couple of months to a year recovering and rebuilding her immune system. She's got a tough time ahead of her, but so far she has weathered the hospital stays and the chemotherapy and losing all her hair before she even finishes kindergarten with courage and grace and wisdom you'd never expect from someone so young.

So if you're a praying type of person, prayers for this little girl are welcome. If you're a good thoughts/good vibes type, feel free to send good thoughts and good vibes her way. If you're a check-writing type, the Cincinnati Children's Hospital is a wonderful institution that has given Carly and the whole family the best of compassionate and competent care during this difficult time. And if you're the type that can give a little more of yourself, please consider signing up for the bone marrow donor registry. All it takes is a simple blood test to type your marrow and the commitment to donate if ever a person in need matches your type. With no matches in the immediate family, Carly would be in dire straights without the amazing generosity of the anonymous people who signed up for the registry not knowing if they would ever be called to help a stranger in need. Many people on the marrow registry never get called to donate, but there might be someone out there who matches your type, right now, facing a very short future without a marrow donor. You might just save a life.