Category: leukemia
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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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I’m happy to report….
2) At the visit with Dr. Loren two weeks ago, George was told he only had to do his magnesium infusion every other day, which was great! Yesterday, he was told he can stop all together! No more infusions! 3) After reducing the tacrolimus a bit, George’s chimerism numbers came up! Since then, he has…
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Day +80
I’ve just spent the last 30 minutes looking for dinner recipes on Pinterest that don’t contain lemon, cream, sugar or tomato sauce because all those things trigger the funky taste in George’s mouth. Do you know what it’s like to be a Greek and not be able to cook with lemon or tomatoes?? OY! And,…
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Day +71
George saw Jackie, the bone marrow transplant guru, on Tuesday, Sept. 13. She said everything was looking good, but really emphasized the importance of eating and getting the proper amount of calories and protein to aid in his recovery. She said in the next coming weeks, the need for proper nutrition will increase because he…
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Day +17 – HOME!
24 days after going into the hospital for his bone marrow transplant and 208 days after his first hospital admittance, George was discharged with new donor cells working hard to manufacture new blood cells! He was supposed to be released on day +16 because his counts were recovering so well! But, on Saturday he didn’t…
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Friday the 13th
For the last few days, concern has been increasing over the fact that George’s white blood cell count hasn’t started going back up after this last round of chemo. Dr Ghimire expressed his concern on the phone when he called earlier this week to discuss the results of the blood work George had on the…
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Bone Marrow Transplant Consult #2
Yesterday, we drove out to UPenn in Philadelphia to meet with Dr. Loren. We hadn’t seen her since March and we were hungry for information and for some kind of timeline for the transplant. Well, we did get a lot of information. Some of it good, and some of it rather daunting. GOOD NEWS: Dr.…
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The joy of normalcy
In a previous post, I wrote that George had finished up his round of chemo injections and we were happy that we didn’t have to drive the 50 minutes to Camden every day anymore. Then I remembered that he would have to have blood drawn regularly so, maybe we were kidding ourselves. Well, the good…
Diagnosis: Acute Myeloid Leukemia (AML). A Journey 