Week 11 – Thursday – more tests!

Now that I am in the process of being handed over to the Bone Marrow Transplant Team  (BMT) –  the main goal is getting a myriad of tests done.

The results of these tests will dictate the type of pre-transplant chemotherapy I receive.

Rather than take you through each one I will provide the list below and comment on a few:

The Bone Marrow Biopsy is the third one I have had to check that the Leukaemia is in remission (results still to come).

The consult with Ramona who is the Infectious Disease Specialist was to review the lung infection.  Ramona was pleased with progress but found a conflict with the Ambisome and my kidney function which had started to suffer.  She has reduced the Ambisome dose to just 3 times a week – probably a great thing for my health care fund as we found out each bag of lovely yellow liquid costs more than a $1000!

My lung function tests involved blowing into a pipe under instruction – not so different to the bagpipes so I was reasonably comfortable with this one!

The bone density test involves another scanning machine.

The Gated Heart Pool scan involves adding a radioactive isotope (Technetium 99M) to my blood and under an  ECG taking scans of the capacity of the heart to pump blood.  The half life of the radioactive material is 6 hours.

We ended the day by heading off to a talk at the “School of Life” by Lawrence Levy – the guy that took Steve Job’s PIXAR company and turned it from a $50m a loss into a $6B company and then left to set up a modern day Buddhist school.  His talk was engaging and I am looking forward to reading his book.

The Beanie Auction will start soon – please register your interest ASAP so you don’t miss out.

Thanks to Darren Wallace for moving from blood donations to fortnightly plasma donations – you are keeping people like me alive!