Week 21 – Saturday 27th January- Ups and Downs

Claire here again but after today’s Blog I may no longer be the favourite child!!

A few quick updates . The last 24 hours has been quite eventful.

Yesterday the Bone Marrow Transplant team decided to give me a shot of G-CSF which promotes growth of the stem cells. This is the same injection that Tony had to promote stem cell growth in the week leading up to the transplant and the doctors were hoping this would stimulate neutrophil production as they had been sitting at 0.1 for a few days.

In addition to this, the team decided to take me off all my intravenous drugs and TPN (food) as I am able to take drugs and food orally again. During the course of the day I had all my drugs in tablet form and managed to eat quite a bit after significant encouragement (harrassment?) from my darling wife.

Everything was going ok until I had a wave of severe lower back pain hit very suddenly around 4pm. The pain was so bad I got shaky and sweaty. To help with the pain I had a top up of pain killers and some hot packs. After a while I took a hot shower and then the pain relief kicked in and I could sleep.

However, then I had a sudden wave of nausea followed by my second vomit since diagnosis 5 months ago. Maybe it was from the hospital soup but more likely it was because I had gone from no oral drugs to the full suite in a single day.

This morning, after a good sleep thanks to a double dose of zopiclone, I vomited again after another round of oral tablets and breakfast. As a result I am back having the majority of my drugs intravenously.

The good news is that my neutrophils are at 1.0: TEN times the levels yesterday, so the G-CSF has worked its magic and my bone marrow has been running like the cryptocurrency markets (on a good day). The other good news is that the back pain was due to the neutrophil production and not something more sinister and it has disappeared today.

The not so great news is that my Hickman Line has suffered some damage due to five months of wear and tear. One of the two main lines has a small puncture and can no longer be used. As yet I am unsure whether the whole line will be removed and replaced with another Hickman or a Pik line or whether the damaged system can stay in place just blocked off.

Other than that I have spent most of the day sleeping and playing a few games with Jan and Claire as well as my usual hot laps and bike riding.

STOP PRESS The pain team have just dropped in to remove the pain patch which should mean I’ll be clearheaded and back writing my Blog tomorrow