bone marrow | cherish each moment, even the ones that suck.

One thing I think it’s real important to keep in mind is that there’s a whole lot of random in daily test results sometimes. Today, I feel like a hematological rock star, because one of the nurses told me yesterday, “You’re a rock star for getting a high enough white count to be given tomorrow off of coming in” to the outpatient unit. But that’s definitely not the whole story of the past couple weeks.

Although my counts have been going up like crazy for the past three or four days, before that there were three or four days when my main clinician (whom I’ll call Nurse Practitioner Brusque Yet Friendly) seemed clearly disappointed that my white counts were stuck in the 700s.

And before that, there was the exciting first day when the nurse told me there were signs of marrow activity (a white count of .25), and my assignment was to be .40 the next day, but instead I dropped to .19.

Jesus helped me keep these reversals mostly in perspective (at least, to the extent of not brooding on them when I was supposed to be falling asleep), but it’s always a temptation to dwell on things.

Anyway, for today, yay! My white counts and ‘phils are technically in the normal range. But they’ll probably fluctuate some more (starting now that they’ve discontinued the ‘phil-boosting shots and put me on a routine antibiotic that will suppress my counts a little). And that’s ok.

I’m happy to report that, at day 26 post-transplant, my white counts have really shot up–they were 2.73 yesterday, with the ‘phils 2.10! My platelets have started going up too, and reached 41 yesterday (a little over a quarter of the normal level). The red blood cells are the last to go into production after a transplant, and haven’t started going up yet–I got a transfusion of them yesterday to carry me over (after a couple days of being pretty wilted), and feel much better today. I will need to wear a mask outdoors and be very careful about infection for at least six months, as apparently the T cells (an important kind of white blood cell) take that long to come back, but it’s great to have way more immune system now than I did a couple weeks ago, and to know that there is very active marrow–hopefully my donor’s–doing its thing hidden away in my bones.

Speaking of which, this Friday they’ll take some blood to test how much of my blood is being made by my my donor’s marrow–the goal is for her marrow to be at least 95% of what’s in there, with no more than 5% from leftover marrow of my own. (This will facilitate the whole point of the transplant, which is to replace my old immune system with a new one that will, Lord willing, recognize and destroy the malignant cells I got diagnosed with last fall).

I asked all my friends and family to pray for “not-I 95” (except for my donor, whom I asked to pray for I-95). It will take a week for the test results to come back, so looks like it might be time for another test result wait hymn sing.

cherish each moment, even the ones that suck.

thoughts about surviving cancer. also, other things.

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Goal: Not-I 95!