Tony is a bottom-dweller! (Day +5)

Just kidding. But his numbers are getting down there and in particular, his neutrophils are so low the lab cannot even count them! What does this mean?? Its good. It means we are progressing according to plan. It means, now the stem cells have a chance to take root.

There are many goals in this process. Many of them are obvious. This one may not be as we are getting a lot of questions about it. The doctors need Tony's numbers to be bottom-dwellers because the stem cells, that are 5 days old in Tony, need an empty space to take root in. The transplant nurse explained it like this: Imagine the cancer Tony has as weeds in a beautiful garden. The weeds were choking out the good growth – flowers and veggies. The chemo is the weed killer. Unfortunately, it does not just kill the weeds, it kills the flowers and the veggies too. The stem cells are the seeds for a new, fertile, healthy garden. Right now, at day +5, we are waiting to let those “seeds” germinate and begin to sprout. This is gonna take about 5-8 days, maybe more.

So, Tony is a bottom-dweller, but he needs to be and, SOON, he will be a brand new garden. :)

BTW- he is good. I am just writing the blog because I am excited to try to explain it to you all!

Day +4

Hello all, just wanted to let you all know that I am doing well and have been feeling pretty good the last few days. We have not posted anything on the Blog as there really has not been much happening. At this point everything is a waiting game. For now we are waiting for my immune system to be completely removed. The indicator for that will be when my white blood cells get to zero (currently we are at 0.5), which should be tomorrow. After that we wait for the new t-cells to “engraft” and start producing their own white cells (and stuff). This is not an exact science and we can not be sure when this engraftment will begin, nor what might happen when it does. There is a whole myriad of issues that can come up once the process begins but I am not going to speculate (even think about ) that for now. What we have to do now is NOT GET SICK. As you can imagine with no immune system I am susceptible to the smallest/simplest infection and the worse part is that I have nothing to fight it off with if I did get something. So we are doing our very best to keep everything as neat and clean as possible and just slowly work through the next days. This process could take less that 2 weeks or more than a month, we just don’t know. For now I need to keep working on my energy, without new cells growing I have nothing to burn/use.