Day 2

Good morning and welcome to day 2. Yesterday was a busy day for me. I had to pick the boys up from camp and had a lot of work related things to accomplish. The boys had a great time at camp and enjoyed a short visit with Mom late last night after getting their friend Eli to the airport.

Today Trish's Sister, Mom and our niece Kristie come into town. If I can wake the boys up we will meetthem for lunch in Baltimore.

Trish was kept fairly sedated overnight last night to help control her nausea. She is worried that her speech is slurred and that it might not be a by product of the sedation. I am pretty sure it is a by product of the sedation. While I was talking to her on the phone this morning, she slipped and fell, but didn't hurt or hit anything. In fact her nurse checked her out while I was on the phone and she was ok.

Her blood work from last night revealed an infection in her central line. They debated removing the line and placing a new one or treating with antibiotics. They settled on antibiotics and will start those today.

Today is a day of rest for Trish and tomorrow she will be given more chemo (Cytoxan) -- she'll get that tomorrow and Saturday.

I keep mentioning that I will tell you about the process and keep not having the time to write about it. I'll take a few minutes now to try and explain.

So, on Tuesday, Trish received an infusion of bone marrow/stem cells from a fully matched unrelated donor. Friday and Saturday she will receive more chemo (Cytoxan) designed to control and limit graft versus host disease. Graft versus host disease is the effect of the new marrow and Trish's own cells fighting each other. You want some of this (mildly) to fight the leukemia (graft vs. disease), but full blown GvH can be fatal.

What we want to happen now is engraftment. You probably know about grafting trees, you take two cut plants and tie them together and take good care of them and hope that they grow together and become one -- sorry Marianna, I am sure you could have explained that better.

The concept is similar with a bone marrow transplant. You take marrow and sttem cells from a donor, transfuse into the patient and hope that they setup shop and begin to grow and work in the new host. Stem cells are pretty smart. While they are transfused into the blood stream, they make their way fairly quickly to their natural home -- inside the bones. Where they set up shop and start making more new stem cells, which grow up to hopefully be new healhy white cells, red cells, platlets and all other wonderful cells in our blood. So we will once again at some point, about 30 days out, start watching very closely her blood counts (see the counts link in the left column). Engraftment will be confirmed and we will watch the counts. Trish will have a bone marrow biopsy sometime around Day 30 to confirm all is going according to plan.