Layout Share - Bone Marrow Transplant

I've talked a lot about my nephew's journey through leukemia and the subsequent bone marrow transplant in 2013, that it all had to be repeated in 2015 when leukemia came back. I share these stories because I want to process the trauma, but also because I want to share my experiences with documenting the reality of what happened.

I think telling difficult stories in scrapbooking, if it's something that contributes to healing and growing from those difficulties, can be a good thing. It is for me; I know it's not necessarily for everybody.

But I'll admit, even after 6 years, even after my nephew beat the shit out of leukemia twice and is now living a happy, healthy life, telling these stories is really hard. So much emotion comes back, and I think it's the process of facing those lingering, complicated feelings that does the healing.

In this post, I'm sharing two pages about the bone marrow transplant my nephew had in 2013, hoping it may help someone else tackle difficult stories and start to recover a little in the telling.

1. Transplant 2013

For me, blue is a soothing color, so I chose this light blue background and used minimal embellishment, as I wanted a simple, subdued tone to compliment the subject matter.

Butterflies represent transformation to me, and as I would call bone marrow transplant an ultimate transformation, that lovely butterfly sticker is perfectly placed.

I was also able to incorporate a photo, taken of the window of my nephew's room, and some memorabilia from his hospital stay. The title incorporates both Thickers (the year) and letter stickers from Pinkfresh Studios. (I'm using a lot of Pinkfresh these days.)

2. One Week Later

My vision for this page was better than the actual result, but I'm going to refrain from redoing it.

I love the background paper, also from Pinkfresh Studios, and I definitely wanted minimal embellishment again, some epoxy stickers from Cocoa Daisy, a couple of puffy corner stickers to bring out the yellow in the patterned paper, a die cut from Elle's Studio, and a couple enamel dots here and there. Letter stickers from Thickers and Pinkfresh create the title, and I drew a single line border in an effort to "contain" the contents of the page a little bit.

I think it mostly works, and it definitely tells another story of 2013.