And here's the story.
In July 2004, some nine months before I was diagnosed with CLL, my godfather Tom died and left me in his will what appeared to be a rather strange bequest, namely two silver marrow spoons. Once a rather more common sight on dinner tables than today, marrow spoons are used for extracting the marrow from the bone in meat dishes, the classic example being osso bucco. When Tom's wife sent them to me, she said she wasn't sure why he had chosen them for me, and although I daresay he wasn't sure himself at the time, they have now assumed a very evident significance.
Aside from the obvious bone marrow connotations, the silver is symbolic too. First, because silver is traditional for gifts from godparents to godchildren; indeed, some 54 years ago Tom gave me a silver christening mug to celebrate my arrival on the planet. Second, silver has long been known for its healing properties and is a powerful killer of microbes, both bacterial and viral. Since Hippocrates first commended it in the 4th century BC, it was widely used for the prevention of infection before antibiotics were discovered, and hospitals, including the Marsden, use it even now, especially for the treatment of burns. And third, Tom, a distinguished physicist at Cambridge University, studied, wrote and taught about the physics of liquid metals. Although I don't know whether that included silver, it would be nice to think so.
For more on the healing properties of silver, this is an excellent website:
http://www.uk-cs.co.uk/index.htm
The actual transplant procedure that I will undergo involves no scraping or probing with marrow spoons, I'm glad to say. However, it will now be clear how charged with Meaning and Mystery those spoons have become. They are very special to me. I keep them on my desk and think of Tom often when they wink at me. He and the spoons will be with me for the Transplant.
