A journey in life - musings of a doctor, husband, dad, grandad, brother, and friend

I am sorry that I have not posted in the 3-4 days (haven't had my usual computer resouces).  During this time, I've been in the hopital.  On Satuday, a dry cough was worse and I had a fever 102.7.  Turns out I had rhinovirus (a little more malicious in someone with no immune system) which led to a L lobe pneumococcal pneumonia.  Triple antibiotic therapy. O2 support.  Slowly better. As soon as yesterday, they were just about ready to cancel Erika's peripheral stem cell harvest because they thought I was too sick!  Then at the last moment, they recounted.   I would have felt VERY bad for Erika who had been self-injecting Neupogen for the 5 days prior (with all the side effects). Yesterday, as I mentioned, we moved forward although I am still sick and received the Total Body Irradiation.  7 minutes on one side and I was flipped to get the 7 minutes.  Strange, face felt like a sun-overexposure and last that night my mouth had membranes (much like biting on to a too hot piz

Thanks again to all who've helped through the GoFundMe site (and off line) - we are two-thirds of the way there!  Thanks for sharing my blog. Yesterday was my first day of chemotherapy.  It was rough... but not how you might believe it was.  The chemotherapy with Cytoxan and fluarabine, although taking about 5 hours was pretreated with Zofran IV.  No nausea or major side effects. This kind of therapy is 'myelo-conditioning' therapy.  [Myelo - meaning bone marrow].  With some chemotherapies, the treatment is myeloablative (that is they TOTALLY wipe out the bone marrow).  With 'myelo-conditioning' therapy, they don't totally wipe out the bone marrow but come close.  Of course, the total body irradiation I receive at T -1 (day before transplant) will further drop the white blood cell counts (along with the red cells and platelets). The challenge I have are the various injuries I have had in my lifetime (ejected from car, run off the road by teenagers on my b