Long Tuesday....

Today ended up being a very long day with very few results....We thought they were going to take Trish down first thing this morning for the procedure to drain some fluids, but they ended up not taking her until around noon.

The first attempt at the procedure was not successful. So they took a CT Scan and tried again. The second attempt also did not produce the results they were looking for. It is apparently hard to reach the area that they are trying to reach through normal body orifices.

So tomorrow, Trish will head to the main hospital for the procedure, using some more real expensive equipment to guide the drain line. The difference this time is that they will cut her open and go through the skin to reach the area in question.

I guess I must have missed something the other day -- but they will keep the "drain" attached to Trish for a few days and remove it once they get the results they need. This looks to further delay our moving on with the transplant and put Trish at risk of relapsing before it is cleaned up -- which would really suck...

Trish is resting comfortably tonight. Tired from the ordeal and the twice sedated day. She should sleep well tonight. Before starting to sleep she ate some of Aunt Mary's Zucchinni pie. She had been NPO all day, so it was the first food she had and she will be NPO starting at midnight, so I hope she gets the procedure fairly early in the day.

The goal would be to clean up this fluid and infection stuff and move on to the bone marrow biopsy and transplant. I don't know anything for sure, but if I were to guess the absolute earliest Trish would get biopsied is next week sometime. The other thing I don't know is how long we will have to wait for Trish to recover from all these procedures and antibiotics before we could safely move to transplant. If they chemo'ed her up for transplant with this infection active, I am sure that it would be bad news.

So, the one thing Trish and I are getting used to is waiting. Being patient at all turns. Hoping that tomorrow's news is better than today's. Trish is so amazing taking things as they come, but she is also starting to show some signs of wear and frailty from the process. The thing about AML is that there is no standard of care. It is all a guessing game on what the best course of action to take will be and each patient reacts differently to the attempts to cure him or her. The allogeneic transplant that comes with its own serious risks, is the best cure.

In our case, would it have been better to get HiDac first? It sure seems that way now, but the reality is the CloSi may have opened her up to the remission powers of the HiDac -- we will never know. I just hope that the remission, I think she is in, can last long enough to take us all the way....