DOT +26

Friday night at 7 pm, I got a call from a PA at the bone marrow clinic. My first thoughts were not good because they never call. It was Peggy and she asked for me to sit down ( so I did). She told me that one study had come back and the results show a 98% donor cell population! The graft has set and is working! Wow, was that incredible news. She did not know much else and said we could find out more over the weekend.

My counts were good Friday so they let us have the day off Saturday, which was fun because Laura and I love to watch the Derby so we had great tv all day! Todays visit they were very pleased with the results but also said to be cautiously optimistic. We are still in the early stages and things change fast. But the fact that there is so much graft, is wonderful!

So now we continue our day to day routine. Today my hemoglobin was 6.5, the lowest it has been. I received two units of blood and a lot of magnesium. My WBC keeps going up and down, but that is to be expected in these early stages. I am still having fevers most nights, but they are very low and nothing has grown out of the cultures.

Right now my blood counts and graft versus host disease (gvhd) are the two areas of focus. Last transplant there never was much of a graft, so we did not worry about gvhd. Luckily, this time there is a graft so we need to be looking out for that a lot.

This news is simply amazing! To see this process really start to work is unbelievable. To be honest, I am not sure if it has hit me or not. Or more so, if I believe it or not. Maybe that is my mind protecting myself from another letdown. But the test showed the numbers and Dr. Buckley's friday night email giving us an "attaboy", means the world to us!