Wednesday, October 23, 2013

Finally, Some Positive News

This week they harvested my stem cells. They set a target for number of cells they need to collect and then you go in for harvesting until they hit that target.  This can take anywhere from one (unusual) to four days so they schedule for four and hope that you're done sooner. The collection is done through my new catheter with a machine/process very similar to dialysis.
My Fancy New, Surgically-Implanted Flare
My target was 4 million and I hit 5.1 on day one so only one day of harvesting for me. It seems that my blood counts (along with my cancer..boo) recover fairly quickly from chemo.

Thursday is my next PET scan which will tell us how the cancer has responded to this final dose of ICE chemo and will help dictate the course of radiation treatment which we'll discuss on Friday. Hopefully we can move right into radiation on Monday but we still don't know what the recommended treatment is going to be or for how long.  The radiation treatment will be overseen by yet another doctor at yet another location, Doylestown, which is convenient to...nothing.  Hopefully it will only be a few days of highly focused treatment but we'll have to wait to see what they say.

After radiation, it's on to the dreaded transplant portion of the show. Still looking like either the 4th or 11th of November to kick that off.

Also, I got some sweet new shoes...

6 comments:

  1. Heh, heh, heh. I saw your nipple!

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  2. Nice kicks! Pretty sure that's not the first time Tim.

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  4. When this process comes to its successful conclusion and you are back on your skates, I think Robert Downey Jr. should hire you as his body double. Iron Man has nothing on you dude.

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  5. the sambas are nice, but the gazelles are great

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  6. You always were a Gazelle guy. Oddly, these look and feel more like Gazelles, they just seem to have the Samba label on them.

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