Saturday, February 17, 2007

New Life Celebration on Day -47

Everyone in the family is getting ready for the Christening of Brenda and Jonathon's daughter Grace in Ireland tomorrow just as we have heard the news that my brother Kevin and Nora are expecting. So this weekend is a great celebration of new life in the Mulligan family. Unfortunately because of chemo 3 the Edinburgh branch of the family will not be present in person but perhaps we can have some fun with our video conference technology and join in a bit from here. Anyway congratulations to all concerned for tomorrow new life and new hope all in one week is a real blessing.

I have dropped into the calender speak of the transplant patient, from here on in all the treatments and recovery is described in days before, or days after, the actual injection of the stem cells back into my body. This is planned for April the 4th so today is day -47, BEAM will start on day -8 and we will know if the stem cells have taken residence in my bone marrow and are producing the right cells by day +14. My concentration once chemo 3 is over is to do nothing to "stop the clock", this can include a major infection, specially of my Hickman line, or too slow a recovery of my blood counts after chemo 3. Lee is already warning me she is going to up the discipline on the sterilisation and avoidance of infection.

As to chemo 3 this is a bit deeper than the last time as expected, not in any major bad way, just big waves of fatigue and a lot of sleeping, loss of concentration, hard to stay sitting up for too long that kind of thing. However all of this is no big deal to cope with I just go with the flow and sleep when I need to, some of my sleeping may be caused by trying to wade through Fisk as he moves from the soviet invasion of Afghanistan to the fall of the shah of Iran (yawn! ). Off to sleep now pretty happy and content.

Celebration of new life and celebration of a better chance for an old one, not a bad day.

Cheers

Gerry

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