Tales From City of Hope #4: The Smell of Victory in the Morning

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Chemotherapy is over and tomorrow is Tag Null: that is, Day Zero, when they pump my own frozen stem cells back into me. The entire process takes about 20 minutes, but I’ll be in the hospital practically the entire day getting liters and liters of IV fluids. This is partly to keep me hydrated and partly just because they want to keep me under observation for a while.

But here’s the interesting thing. The stem cells are kept in a preservative solution to keep them fresh, and apparently this will give me a strong body odor of some kind. But what? One nurse said I would smell like bad garlic for a day. That sounds bad. But a different nurse said I would smell like creamed corn. That seems more tolerable. Yet a third suggested it differed by nationality, and a white boy like me might smell like iodine.

But which is it? To me, of course, I will smell fresh as a new-plucked daisy. It’s only other people who have to put up with my olfactory weirdness. In any case, I plan to ask everyone who comes into my room what I smell like. Spoiled tuna? A lovely cheese casserole? Bacon and eggs? Who knows?

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WE'LL BE BLUNT.

We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

You're here for reporting like that, not fundraising, but one cannot exist without the other, and it's vitally important that we hit our intimidating $390,000 number in online donations by June 30.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. It's going to be a nail-biter, and we really need to see donations from this specific ask coming in strong if we're going to get there.

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