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The Bombshell
In late December 2021, my husband George finally decided to go and see his doctor. For a couple of weeks at least, he had been finding himself short of breath after performing simple tasks and he had trouble walking around the track on base without getting seriously winded. He thought maybe he had a respiratory […]
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New Mutations and a Broken Chromosome
Well, this is not what I thought I would be writing about 208 days after George’s bone marrow transplant. We are supposed to be on the other side of this disease. But his engraftment has been struggling and when we saw Dr. Loren on January 26th, we got some surprising news. George’s early January appointment […]
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More Info on DLI…(whew)
I was snooping around the internet and checking with Dr. google and found an article that had the following information: After a stem cell transplant, a patient’s chimerism will be measured on a regular basis. It tells doctors how much of your bone marrow is from the donor and should be as near to 100% […]
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DLI Day
George went in for his DLI (donor leukocyte infusion) on Wednesday, December 14. We were under the impression that the purpose was to boost the percentage of George’s donor cells….to get the low counts back up with more donor cells. However, we were slowly realizing that wasn’t the case. Waiting in the aphaeresis unit, while […]
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A Window
George had a visit with Dr. Loren earlier this week. When we were taken from the waiting room back to the cavernous hall of offices, we were told to go to room 6. Well, we did that and we found the door shut and we could hear voices inside the office. George went back to […]
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Next Up: DLI
Donor lymphocyte infusion (or DLI) is the infusion (transfer) of a bone marrow transplant donor’s leukocytes into a recipient’s body. We got a call from Dr. Loren’s office telling George there was a date for the infusion of donor cells – Wednesday, December 14. This was great news! Rachel, the bone marrow transplant coordinator said the […]
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Still in Remission!
Yesterday, we got the news we had been waiting and hoping for – no signs of leukemia in the bone marrow! I received this text from George while I was out walking our dog, Chloe – So, what is that chromosomal type stuff results we were waiting for?? Got the results this morning! So much […]
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Bone Marrow Biopsy #6
Yesterday, George met with Dr Loren at 9:00 am. She asked if her intern could sit in and we said sure! We were hoping she would be able to explain what caused the drop in George’s chimerism numbers, but she really couldn’t. She said the donor cells may be weak. So, if he gets a […]
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Breathe….
George received a notification today from Dr. Loren’s office asking him to confirm his upcoming appointment on Monday, the 21st of November. Wait, what? His appointment is on the 23rd! So we logged into the MyPenn account and saw that his appointment had been changed to the 21st (thanks for the heads up, yo) and […]
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Phone Consult with the Doc
George’s doctor called this morning to discuss the drop in his chimerism numbers. She said she was very surprised to see it as well. She said the drop poses two concerns: Dr. Loren has already reached out to George’s bone marrow donor to ask for another collection of marrow cells, which she said takes at […]
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I’m sorry to report…
George got the results back from the chimerism test he had done last Wednesday. We expected to see his donor percentages go up since he had been tapering off his tacrolimus. So we were stunned to see that two of the three values they check had dropped and dropped significantly. His CD3 % actually went […]
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Diagnosis: Acute Myeloid Leukemia (AML). A Journey 