Wednesday night Update

Sorry to keep you daily readers in suspense.....

Trish, her Mom and I had a nice day relaxing at Aunt Mary's House yesterday. Trish went for a short walk -- that was probably too long for her, but the weather was great and she enjoyed it.

She also ate the biggest meal she's had since being released for GvH treatment last week (or during the three weeks she was an inpatient).

We had Angel hair with chick peas (garbanzo beans), Aunt Mary's home made chicken fingers, caprese salad (tomato and mozzarella), and Zucchini pie. For desert some fresh farm picked peaches and water melon.

Trish looked dark green yesterday and more her color today. The yellow has faded, but is still visible in her eyes.

It was a slow day in IPOP today. The labs seemed to never come back. From a hematology standpoint Trish's counts were good. Red cells look to be made from Trish's new marrow post chemo, platelets continue to drop so she ma ge some more before her new marrow creates the platelets she needs by its self. From a liver function standpoint, we had the biggest increase since they stopped coming down. That may not be as scary as it sounds, because we did get confirmation that zyvox will cause the white and neutrophil cells to come down and that it will cause liver function numbers to go up. The billirubin has held steady in all this. She is on zyvox only till Friday and we hope that once she is off the zyvox her liver count will resume its downward trend and we will start counting the days till we can come home.

In the truly good news department. We received confirmation that the bone marrow biopsy taken just before discharge last week was clean and Leukemia (or anything else bad) free. That's great news, but anticlimatic, because that's the result we would have expected, this early and given the level of GvH Trish had.

One more good news item -- Dr. Meade mentioned ECP (extracorporeal photopheresis ) as the next (3rd) GvHd treatment that Trish will get if the liver function counts don't drop far enough, fast enough. This treatment would last a least six months. Because of the length of treatment he asked us to check on facilities near our house. We found one in Miami (at a hospital we wouldn't recommend to our worse enemy) and at Moffet in Tampa and Shands in Gainesville (both 5-6 hours away by car). My Mom called today with good news. The new cancer center at Memorial West (less than a mile from our house) has an ECP machine. This is great news. We are still hopeful that Trish will not need this treatment, but if she does we can come home.

Matt (our son) is coming up tomorrow. There's a day off from school tomorrow, he'll fly up tomorrow and back home on Saturday (so he can make his lacrosse game). It will be good to see him. Andy won't be able to come up because of work and other commitments this weekend. I know Trish will enjoy the visit.

Enough for now. We are off from IPOP tomorrow so, don't expect anything new till late Friday, unless something breaks tomorrow.