The Thomas family

The Thomas family
From left to right, Tania, Dave, me and Corina

Saturday 22 October 2011

Life goes on

OK, this is the longest time ever since I updated my blog.  If there is anyone out there who still looks in on me, I apologise for abandoning you for so long.

With regards to my CML, all has been pretty quiet.  I had an appointment last Monday and my counts are looking fine.  They took 14 vials of blood so that some could be sent off to test for residual disease.  I had 0.007% last time and they are looking for an improvement on that!  I should hear in a week or so.

I have been back at work for 7 weeks now, gradually working up towards my new "full" time of 3 days.  I have got up to 3 six hour days, although my last one, Thursday, turned out to be closer to 8 hours!  It's all very well in principal to say I should stick to 6 hours but a lot more difficult in practice.  I do find it surprisingly tiring and am very relieved when Friday comes around but I think I am coping well.

I have had three viruses since returning, the first I must have picked up the second I arrived as it hit me on the Thursday evening.  The second one took about a week to go and  I did end up popping along to the hospital to check it was nothing serious.  The third lasted one night so hardly counts.  I have to expect this as I am building my immune system up from scratch all over again. Other than that I have been fine.

Michelle news:  the last time I posted, Michelle had just had her bone marrow transplant.  I went to see her the following week and the poor thing had such bad ulceration of her mouth and throat that she was being fed via a tube.  This is normal for the type of transplant she had but not at all pleasant to have to go through.  Her new cells grafted very quickly though and she was out of hospital in record time, after only 3 1/2 weeks compared with my 5!  I have not seen her since she got out as she has been terribly tired and had a few issues with her medication.  And the last I heard she was back in hospital with Epstein Barr Virus, more commonly known as glandular fever.  Again, this is common for transplant patients but you'd rather not have it.  I keep praying for her and looking forward to when I can go to see her.

That's it for now.  I'll try to remember to post when I hear the results of my test, fingers crossed for even more zeros!