A call for bone marrow donors

Here's a confession: I can rarely make it through an episode of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition without tearing up. Occasionally I'll make it nearly to the end, but the part where the family with the renovated house thanks all the hundreds of community members who made it happen always gets me.

I didn't make it nearly that far during the Lizzie Bell episode. That one had me bawling like a baby from, oh about minute 22 throughout the rest of the hour. That one I had something of a personal stake in.

Lizzie lives in Arizona, and we've never met, but we're related. We're second cousins, or second cousins once removed or something like that. Bottom line, my mom and her dad come from the same family.

Lizzie's got a condition called Diamond Blackfan Anemia that over the years has had in and out of the hospital and needing regular blood transfusions. Having spent some time in hospitals myself, I felt a kinship with her. But where I was generally laser-focused on myself during my illness, hers has spurred her to focus on others. For years now she's been organizing blood drives and collecting toys to hand out to other hospitalized kids (Lizzie's Loot).

That's what got her and the family on Extreme Makeover, so that I could have a good cry.

Lizzie's about to turn 18, and she needs a bone marrow transplant. Thus far, she's had no luck finding a matching donor. Her mom is Latino, which complicates things because all ethnic minorities are underrepresented on the U.S. bone marrow registry.

We need more people on that registry. More people of all races. So if you haven't yet registered your DNA, please consider doing so. All you have to do is swab your inner cheek and then put that little piece of cotton in the mail. Science does the rest, I guess. Biology's never been my strong suit.

Digging deep for some Twins positives

One of the attractions of going home for Eater weekend this year (along with somewhat significant stuff like seeing family and friends and celebrating the resurrection of Jesus), was being able to watch the Twins' opening series against Baltimore.

Those who shared that experience with me know that the joy of it was slightly tempered by the fact that the Twins played absolutely awful baseball. I'm not a fair-weather fan. Anyone who went to high school with me can probably tell you I was loyal to the team even then when one could count on it finding the bottom of the standings as surely as a catfish finding the bottom of a river. But this is the first time in a long time that I'm just not particularly optimistic about the season. It seems like the franchise is moving in the wrong direction by subtracting Thome, Kubel and Cuddyer without adding a whole lot.

Still, I feel like I gotta try and find some positives from opening weekend — not so much for myself but for my grandma, who will watch most of these 162 games no matter how bad they are (unless my brother hijacks her TV for cable news purposes):

-- Justin Morneau is back (and swinging well): Morneau went 4-for-10 with two doubles over the weekend, taking fat pitches and quality pitches and driving them hard. Morneau's concussion was arguably the most frustrating injury an athlete can suffer. The symptoms can linger indefinitely (just ask Sidney Crosby), even though you look perfectly fine and feel pretty good doing most everyday activities. There's no timeline for recovery and no surgery, physical therapy or herbal voodoo (that I know of) that can help. I've had one concussion in my life and I don't even think it was all that severe, but it still scared the bejeebers out of me, as it temporarily wiped out my short-term memory almost completely. The takeaway? Head injuries are nothing to mess with. It's great to see Morneau back, even just DH-ing, and if he can hit anywhere near his MVP numbers, it would go a long way to off-setting the loss of Kubel and Thome's lefty power.

-- The new additions are doing their thing: Rather than making a splash in the off-season, the Twins made their usual modest ripple. But the returns are good so far. Josh Willingham went 3-for-9 with a homer, a double and three RBI at the plate, provided an unlikely defensive boost when he threw a runner out at home, and appeared in one of the more entertaining Twins commercials in recent memory (The Big Herbowksi). If he continues to hit like that, he'll go a long way to replacing Cuddy's right-handed bat (though I don't think he'll ever throw out runners like Cuddy). The other main addition, Jamey Carroll, hasn't hit a thing. But he was brought in primarily to shore up shortstop and he's done that thus far, with a slew of defensive gems and no notable mistakes. Very important, considering last year's SS experiment, Nishioka, appeared to lose his fielding and hitting ability on the flight over from Japan (kids, take note: that's why you always pack your skill set in your carry-on bag and don't risk checking it).

-- A pretty good outing from a No. 6 starter: Anthony Swarzak was supposed to begin the season in the bullpen, but got a surprise start due to a bout of food poisoning for Liam Hendriks (which gave me a bout of morbid curiosity, wondering if he got it from any place I once ate in Baltimore). Swarzak responded by going five strong innings with a solo homer his only blemish (he probably should have been given the ball for the sixth, which was when the bullpen more or less blew it). Guys like Swarzak and Brian Duensing have had some good stretches as starters in the past and having that kind of depth can only help when the usual bit of elbow soreness, shoulder issues or uncontrollable vomiting rear their ugly heads.

Unfortunately, the back-loading of the rotation that pushed out guys like Swarzak and Duensing also accentuates one of the Twins' greatest weaknesses: the lack of a legitimate (or even close enough to be passable) top-of-the-rotation ace. In short, what they have is about 7 or 8 guys who would make good No. 4 or 5 starters. Carl Pavano might be a No. 3, and he can eat innings, but he's not an ace.

In my humble opinion, this has been the organization's biggest failing of late. The Twins haven't had an ace since Francisco Liriano blew out his elbow. I held out for a Tommy John miracle for a couple years, but it doesn't look like Liriano's gonna get one. He has to rely on his head as much as his arm now, and that's never a good equation for a head case.

An ace would push all the other pitchers back in the rotation, into much more natural spots. But as far as I can tell, there's only three ways to get one: draft one, pay through the nose in free agency or trade a boatload of prospects to get one mid-season from a team that's fallen out of contention.

The Twins haven't been able to draft one, they've shown no inclination to spend that kind of free-agent money (nor should they, necessarily — it's a huge risk) and they seem to no longer have the prospect haul to even propose a trade that a team with an ace wouldn't just chuckle at and move on. That being the case, the Twins may end up being that team that falls out of contention at mid-season. For Grandma's sake, I hope I'm wrong.

The Ballad of Baxter

Baxter has cancer, but he doesn’t want anyone to feel sorry for him.

The word from home on my dog come from two fronts: A disappointing pathology report and heartening dispatches from Mom.

The pathology report, performed on the tennis-ball sized tumor vets removed from Bax’s liver last weekend confirmed that it was malignant. It’s apparently a relatively slow-moving form of cancer, so it’s hard to tell how long it will hold off.

By the looks of things, it should be a little while, at least. Mom reports that Bax is doing surprisingly well, able to get out and walk and, most importantly, keep food down (his repeated vomiting, likely because the tumor was pushing on his stomach, was what landed him at the vet in the first place).

Word is, he’s now back to fighting with Mom’s dog, George, over possession of rawhide treats and the fam is even having trouble keeping Bax from trying to jump up on the furniture (it’s for his own good – no jumping allowed because he still has about 12 staples cinching together his surgical wound).

During his followup visit yesterday, the vets were reportedly also surprised at how quickly he’s recovering – once they were able to get him to come out from under their table and stop shaking (he clearly hasn’t forgotten what the put him through last time).

So it seems the surgery has at least prolonged his life.

It’s hard to know how much time he would have left even without the cancer. When we got him from the Humane Society in 2005, he was listed as three years old. But the first time we took him to the vet, we were told, “Oh no, this dog is much older than that. So we think he’s somewhere between 9 and 12 now.

Which is not young for a 20-pound dog, but we got a little spoiled because our last dog, Shaggy, made it to 17.

To understand my attachment to Baxter, you need to know a little bit of my history with Shaggy. She and I grew up together, essentially. We picked her up at the shelter on my fifth birthday, shortly after we moved to a new house with a nice big yard next to the Sauk River.

I lived in that house until I left for college and she was always there waiting for me when I came in, madly wagging her tail. After angst-filled days of junior high and high school, I’d come in, drop my backpack on the floor and just sit there on the stairs with her and let her remind me that, in the words of Stuart Smalley, “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough and dog-gone-it, people like me.”

At the end of my senior year of college, I landed in the hospital, my circulatory system torn apart by meningitis. While I was there, Shaggy, her sight and hearing almost completely stolen by age, developed pneumonia. I never got to say goodbye.

A year later I was still recovering, at home in Minnesota and confined to a wheelchair while I rehabbed what was left of my legs. Mom and I decided it was time to get another dog.

So we went back to the Humane Society and, as I wheeled past one cage after another filled with frenzied, barking dogs, I came upon a furry, white-and-brown mutt sitting calmly in a corner, unfazed by the chaos.

“That’s the one I want,” I immediately thought.

His name was “Bear,” but I renamed him “Baxter” after Ron Burgundy’s dog. I needed a little comic relief.

As soon as we got home, I used my arms to push myself out of the wheelchair and onto the living room couch. Baxter looked up at me for just a second, then jumped into my lap. From then on, we were best buds.

He was really the perfect dog for that time and situation. He wasn’t much for running, so he didn’t mind at all that I couldn’t run, or even walk. The one bit of physical activity he did occasionally enjoy was retrieving one of his cloth toys so we could play tug-of-war. And that was actually quite good physical therapy for me. It helped me strengthen the grip of the right thumb that was going to have to get me through most every manual task for the rest of my days.

Most of the time all Bax wanted was to sit next to someone and be petted. And he didn’t mind if it was me with my torn up hands. He didn’t care about the scars or the missing fingers and he taught me not to care about them as much either.

God gave me a great gift when he set that dog in my path.

So it was tough leaving Bax when I went east for grad school, and I had been hoping to bring him here to Topeka with me, after the busy legislative session.

But now I’m sure it’s best for him to stay home with Mom, Dad, Grandma and Dan. His greatest joy has always been being around people and at home there’s almost always people around.

He’s done so much for me, he deserves that love and attention for as long as he has left. As long as he has that, he'll be happy, cancer or no cancer.