5/12_Julies Birthday

We went in for the second round of stem cell collection today, and just got the call, looks like we’re done! They got 4.5 million on Tues., and 5.4 million today; so a total of 9.8 and they like to have about 10 million to do 2 transplants. So we’re good to go at the moment! I guess that’s as nice a birthday present as she can hope for, and she gave it to herself!  This is the autologous transfer again, where you harvest stem cells from yourself, then return them to the body after a dose of chemo called malofin (or something – not sure of spelling) which totally breaks down her immune system. The idea, is that these stem cells regenerate her immune system, and she can go into remission. So feel good about her birthday today, because it looks like she got what she needed; instead of a bottle of cheap perfume, she got 10,000,000 stem cells! Who else can say that! If all goes well, the transplant will start up on 6/3.

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5/10

I know a lot of people are wondering how the stem cell collection is going, but it hasn’t gone yet. White blood cell counts were down too far, so we start the process again tomorrow; looks like things are better today; we have to be down the for labs @ 7 tomorrow; we’ll keep you updated tomorrow.

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5/2/10_Back Home

Julie had her last round of chemo before the collection/transplant, but it was a pretty intensive dose of cytoxin; she was in the chair @ Froederdt for 11 hours Friday, and then we had to go back in the am for fluids before heading home. Went well, but as you can imagine, it took it’s toll on her; probably hasn’t really hit her till today / tomorrow. Then Tues, she starts the nupogen injections to stimulate the bone marrow to create stem cells, which are then pushed out into the blood stream. On 5/10, we possibly begin the stem cell collection process. Wish us luck on that! It’s critical that they get enough cells here to do the transplant on 6/3.

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