My neutrophils have risen from 1.3 yesterday to 4.0 today thanks to my sister's five star stem cells. It is only twelve days since my transplant so this has been incredibly quick. The booklet we had been given said fourteen to forty two days!
It is absolutely wonderful to be home but the first thing I did was to have a two hour sleep. Just the process of coming home was exhausting.
I'm much more fragile than after the first two cycles of chemotherapy. Everything requires a very big effort. Hopefully this will pass quickly. In the meantime I will try and get as much uninterrupted sleep as possible, no nurses coming in to change my IVI or do my observations - hurrah!
Please, no phone calls between one thirty and four in the afternoon or after about eight thirty in the evening.
Although I'm home there will be twice weekly visits to the Haematology Day Case unit for blood tests, review by the doctors, see the transplant coordinator and the trial coordinator. I'll probably need some blood products from time to time. My haemoglobin is still roundabout half to two thirds what it should be. This will take months to come back to normal, quite possibly a year or so. They tell me I won't feel back to my usual self for about a year but that sometimes this can take a couple of years. There will also be physiotherapy visits for a few weeks as soon as I feel up to it.
After a month I'll have a repeat bone marrow aspirate to see exactly what is going on. I am now a "chimera" which means I'm made up of cells from two different beings. More correctly I'm probably a partial chimera. It is quite likely that my bone marrow hasn't fully converted to my sister's yet in which case I will need a different type of cell from her. They have already taken these when they originally harvested her stem cells back in June. I'm glad someone's thinking ahead!
Finally, please consider supporting Alexi and Lucy in Newcastle who are going to do The Great North Run in September in aid of "Leukaemia and Lymphoma Research". As they say on their Justgiving site neither of them are keen runners so this is a big thing for them to do. The link is......
Alexi & Lucy's JustGiving Page
Many thanks for all your support in the last few months. It continues to make a big difference. I'm not out of the woods yet but but am making good progress. More anon.
* Rolling Stones "Aftermath" track 6
2 comments:
Link actually is https://www.justgiving.com/Alexi-LucyThornhill/?utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=fundraisingpage&utm_content=Alexi-LucyThornhill&utm_campaign=pfp-share
woop woop xxxx
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