Tag: chimerism
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He’s Home!
After 9 nights in the hospital, George was finally released yesterday! The doctors ran exhaustive tests and cultures and everything came back negative (and they tested for A LOT). No pneumocystis pneumonia (whew!). That left them with the conclusion that George’s lung issues were caused by the chemotherapy drug Vidaza that he had been receiving…
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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…
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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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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…
Diagnosis: Acute Myeloid Leukemia (AML). A Journey 