Day 43

It's Saturday evening and things are going okay. My counts are up. They switched my anti-CMV medicine from an oral medicine to an IV medicine. The oral medicine was Valcyte and was suppressing my white count. So now I'm on Foscarnet which is stronger and more effective, but is harder to administer since it can be done only through an IV. I'm on home health care 5 days a week now. Home health care just means that they have the meds delivered to me at the hotel and I hook up the IV's myself. Remember I have a central veinous catheter in my chest so I just hook up to that - sort of like going to the gas station.

I got the results back from the scans. Dr. Hosing, my transplant doctor, said she thought I was doing fine. I read the reports and was happy enough with the CT scan report, but the PET scan report didn't seem so positive. But Hosing said she put more stock in the CT scan. Plus those scans were done at days 33 and 34, so the new cells only had a couple of weeks to begin to work against the disease. Day zero is the day I got the stem cells. It took a little over a week for the donor cells to engraft; then it took another week for my blood counts to come up. So, out of the those first 33 days, 16 or so were spent just beginning to "ramp up." They will re-stage again on Day 90 or a little earlier. That will be more informative.

In the meantime, we are on GvHD watch. Typically they expect GvHD to appear between Day 40 and Day 80. They are maintaining my anti-rejection drug level at the low end of the target range. They are doing this to allow the new cells to attack more readily. I want the new cells to defeat the disease. But by keeping the anti-rejection drug at low levels we are taking more of a chance of getting GvHD. So, it's sort of a cat and mouse game.

I'm watching the Las Vegas Bowl football game tonight. BYU is playing UCLA. The BYU quarterback is named Max Hall. It's pretty cool to hear your name over and over on national TV. I hope I play well tonight. LOL