Day minus 7, or a long day got longer...
today is -7! Wow, I can barely get my head around that- I'm sure Margie's needing to process it too.
Spoke with her a little while ago so I thought I'd recap what turned out to be quite a day yesterday- as you may recall, her last day of radiation, which sounds like something subdued and calm and was anything but.
Here's how she described it:
Had to be at the hutch at 7:15am for the usual lab work and then found out at the last minute that she did indeed have
a bone marrow biopsy sheduled for 8am- but then after the lab numbers were in, her platelets were down to 9 k and they
have to be at least 10 to do a bone marrow biopsy.
Soooo, off to another bed to get 2 hours of platelets and then reschedule the biopsy for noon.
The biopsy went fine, sedated and awake about 45 minutes later. After that, off the the university hospital for her final
radiation.
Finally done and home at around 5:30. She hadn't realized it, but she hadn't eaten since the night before (in preparation of biopsy) so, this morning, when she was there for her daily blood draw, she was getting dizzy and had to get about 500 cc's of fluid just to get her back to hydrated.
So, as usual everyday still to get her blood drawn, check numbers, get blood product as needed.
Wednesday is the weekly meeting with her doctors. 2 to 3 days before day zero, she'll have several rounds of chemo to once again bring her numbers down/wipe out any possibility of blasts, and then full body radiation on the day of transplant-
Holy smokes.
off to the studio to work this all out on canvas...
Love, Kathleen
Hey kathleen, Mom says great recap.We were just contemplating about your canvas work and we want to see what this artistry will look like, could you have any reproductions done, I should blog but i'm too lazy, Had a good appointment for cathy and all my health is rare and ready to go for this transplant, Had a good visit with margie and bob bob is like cracking up every few minutes about what they have been through isn't laughter great! They send their love to everyone we will have a big day on Friday i start my shots to give life to our sweet Margie, She deserves it. yeah!!!!
ReplyDeletehi, all:
ReplyDeletewow. well, when this is all done, you'll really know the inside-out of leukemia/bone marrow transplants and everything else that a year of "let's beat the you know what out of this" can mean. from the outside looking in, it's amazing what medicine can do know. there's really truth to how smart these people in the medical profession are.
so i bet there's some butterflies in your stomach, right? only one more week. just like at NASA, the countdown has begun.
i'm actually home today. haven't been home on a weekday in a long time. it's a lovely feeling. i've had a busy year so far. there's been lots of celebrating. my brother-in-law turned 60 so rich and i went to boston to celebrate his birthday. big family reunion. rich is from boston originally and still has most of his family there. gosh, was it ever fun. toured all the historical sites such as the Freedom Trail. got to meet members of the family i'd only heard about. it was a total blast. only thing is it was HOT! oh, and HUMID! when you live in san fran, you lose your ability to cope with heat. anything over around 70 and i wilt.
then my sister turned 60 last month. we went on our first ever cruise. i've wanted to go on a cruise for years but rich wouldn't hear of it. he gets motion sick just looking at pictures of ships in magazines so he would have none of it. luckily for me, my sister told him that she wanted us to go with them for her birthday, and he couldn't refuse. so off to alaska we went! i got almost no sleep onboard because there was too much fun to be had to bother with sleeping. we cruised the inside passage for a week and then took a land tour of denali national park for another week. just amazing. i'd love to go back again and see the arora borealis. the only thing we missed was seeing the bears. one day we took a nine-hour bus ride into denali. saw every creature in the park...except the king, the grizzly. oh, well.
then flew back to reality and WORK.
andy came home from college june 15. guess what, he's 21!!! of course, still acts 15 on a good day, but there's still hope. he's spending next semester studying in lyon. i see a trip to france in my future. (any excuse, you know.)
anyway, just wanted to say hi. i'm watching the countdown. very excited for you. weird to think of being excited about someone having a transplant, but the fact is this is so important that it really is exciting.
please forgive typos, etc. you know i'm afraid of the web. i'm just typing as fast as i can and praying that i don't mess this up, as usual.
will write later.
xo,
deborah