Today was a day of planning, preparing, and spending time with family. (It was also the day to have a delicious vanilla milkshake.)

It was the final day for the foreseeable future that wouldn’t revolve around my health and the transplant. In reality, I’ve had precious few of those days over the last few years anyway. Living with MDS and anemia means managing your energy and health more or less daily; it’s just about to get a lot more intense and unpleasant for a while on the way to a better place.

Yesterday, when we relocated, it was the 19th of July. In many ways I find this fitting and a good omen. The number 19 has grown meaningful to me over my life. In the beginning, it was just a fun number that Stephen King used with mystical meaning in his epic fantasy series The Dark Tower, which also spilled over into most of his other works, particularly those tangentially connected to the series. The Dark Tower is my favorite series of all time, and certainly my favorite of Stephen King’s stories.

But slowly, over the years, it began taking on more and more meaning to me personally. In 2006, my then girlfriend (now wife) and I bonded, in part, over The Dark Tower series, and went on to record music under the band name Stage 19; many of my works of fiction have been deliberately published on 19ths; I’ve used the number frequently in usernames and even had it stamped into the front of a leather money clip. (Yes, I’m both nerdy enough to use a money clip and to have a nerdy reference stamped on it.)

So all in all, the fact that the transplant’s delay just happened to change our moving day to the 19th feels like a good sign—after all, it was the 19th of June, 1999, when Stephen King was struck and nearly killed by a van, and though his recovery was long and difficult—as mine is sure to be—he’s still with us nearly thirty years later. He worked through the pain and hardship of his tragedy with his writing. I hope that I can do the same.

And, in just over two months time, as I’m approaching the end of the first phase of my recovery, King will be releasing his first novel set in Mid-World (the universe of The Dark Tower) in fifteen years. (I bet you thought I was going to say “nineteen years” there!)

I can’t wait to be well enough to read it!