At least we have news......

But unfortunately, it is not good.

Dr. Griffiths called a few minutes ago. Trish's Wednesday aspirate showed 15% blasts, which means she is not in remission.

Tomorrow we will go into the clinic and get labs drawn and blood products if necessary.

Trish is expected to be readmitted Friday night or Saturday. She will begin a round of high-dose ARA-C over a planned 5 day admission. She will than be in IPOP for a 25-28 day recovery period - we will likely be required to stay in the Rockwell House for part of this time and if she is doing well near the end of that recovery period they will consider letting us be at Aunt Mary's and if she is doing really well maybe a short period at home.

When the recovery period is over, she will be tested again (bone marrow biopsy) to see if they have placed her in remission, so that a bone marrow transplant can be scheduled.

She likely will have to go through all or some of the testing we just did again. The only thing good about this new news is that we won't sit around waiting for a phone call tomorrow. Other than that it pretty much sucks.

With a 15% blast level it is likely that even the Hopkins doctors may not have moved forward with the transplant without some more therapy, so maybe the insurance company did us a favor by requesting another test.

By the way, Trish has been feeling great today post all of her punctures yesterday. We were able to go to cousin Tony's Lacrosse game and out to dinner with Aunt Mary and John, but we both wished it was one of our boys' Lacrosse games. That sucked too.

We need to remain hopeful and praying for good results. The next month could be very rough.