Tag: bone marrow transplant
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Making progress!
Today marks one week since George was admitted to the hospital. He has had some tough days at the beginning where he was out of breath walking to the bathroom, coughing fits that brought him to tears and retching, and complete frustration that every day was no better than the last. But a couple of…
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Back on the 14th Floor
George spent his first night in the hospital sleeping on a gurney in a private room in the ED. There was no bed available in the hospital for him, but they were planning to admit him to the bone marrow transplant floor in the Pavilion as soon as a bed became available. On Wednesday, he…
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Back in the Hospital with Pneumonia
After more than a week of coughing without ceasing to the point of gagging and retching, George finally decided something needs to be done NOW. Of course, we had messaged his team at UPenn and they didn’t seem particularly concerned. Had they seen George’s extreme exhaustion, his inability to walk to the front door or…
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A Second Transplant It Is…
Yesterday was George’s birthday. The love of my life turned 59 years old. We celebrated by going to the Perelman Cancer Center at UPenn for George’s scheduled labs, infusion and then appointment with Dr. Loren. When George was getting his labs taken, the nurse said, “Hey, why don’t we just do your infusion now since you’re already back here?” George’s…
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Cycle One Complete
George has completed his first regimen of chemotherapy. For seven days, he drove to Philadelphia (about an hour’s drive) to get his infusion of Vidaza. Since I am working at H&R Block during this tax season, he had to go alone for the first time. But, he did great, as I knew he would. Now…
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“It’s Starting….”
George was sitting in his recliner on Monday evening when he got a notification that his lab results from earlier in the day were available on the UPenn portal. He gets blood drawn every Monday by the nurse from Penn Home infusion that comes to the house. The results showed that his white blood cell…
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BM biopsy results…
….were not what we were hoping for. In addition, the DLI did nothing to boost his chimerism numbers. He only has 2% donor cells in his bone marrow. Today is 223 post transplant, almost 7 months after transplant. We so thought George would be getting his first round of childhood vaccines last month, but that…
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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…
Diagnosis: Acute Myeloid Leukemia (AML). A Journey 