Peter’s Hospital Diary

Yes, it really is 7 weeks yesterday since the transplant took place! I suppose the real difference is that the trees in the garden are startiing to bud, the bird life is more noticeable and the evenings are much lighter!

Another check-up yesterday and the general agreement seems to be that I am making good progress. I didn’t wait for all the blood test results, but my haemoglobin is continuing to rise (now at 10) and the basic blood chemistry seems to be heading in the right direction.

The main item of note is the stopping of the Cyclosporin; it was low dose anyway, but it is thought that this might provoke a little GvHd (a “good thing”) to encourage the Graft V Lymphoma Effect (a “very good thing”)

The next milestones will be the PET scan on Tuesday, to see how much of the underlying lymphoma remains, and the chimerism rests, when the ratio of donor DNA to my blood DNA will be measured. This shows how the donor immune system is doing in taking over from my own. I think I said in a previous post that this is being done slightly earlier than normal, because I went into the procedure with somewhat more active disease than was desirable, so I’ll await the outcome of those tests with interest (and anxiously!)

I saw Mark and Jean yesterday – you may remember that they were fellow patients having similar procedures – and I’m delighted that both were looking well, and also seem to be making good progress!

Work on transferring the blog to my server continues. I have a working set up at www.boraston.net/blog but there are some compatability problems between the two versions of the underlying database that stores the posts so I can’t import the old data – and upgrading my version of the database (MySQL for those that are interested) is not quite as straightforward (these things never are!) as I thought. Perhaps by the end of the weekend…

Tags: GvHd