Saturday, December 16, 2006

Fungus among us

Yesterday was a rather disapointind day at Hopkins. As you may or may not know I have been going up daily (7:30 AM) to see if my stem cells have mobilized. Unfortunately my stem cells have not mobilzed off of the ICE chemoherapy. It is odd but I have learned that I am not the normal cancer patient when it comes to the odd's game.

My nurse practioner thinks it is my fungus that is holding up the show. My doctor disagres and thinks I am just simply not mobilizing - possibly becuase I have had too much chemotherapy to date. They have put me on oral medication to try to clear up the fungus. In the meantime they will have another conference about my case on Tuesday and come up with a game plan. It will either include removing the cells directly from my bone marrow in the OR or postponing the transplant until the fungus clears up. The second option would mean I would go on some new chemotherapy while I wait to get rid of this thing.

I vote for moving forward and my doctor is leaning towards this as well. A fungal infection is very serious when my immune system hits rock bottom but they hope it's not systemic and won't be that big of a deal for me. However if this infection gets out of hand it can be bad even a small percent of people die from fungal infections post transplant.

So we wait and see if the fungus clears up and I will possibly go in this week to harvest or the following week. The silver lining in all of this is that I might be home for Christmas. We just told the kids I would be in the hospital for the holidays so we are waiting until my doctors are 110% that I will be home. I hate jerking them around.

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