Saturday, December 22, 2012

BMT is Not Just a Subway Sandwich!

Trying to find catchy titles to encourage readership of your blog has always been one of the things that attracted me to keeping a blog.  Now that I'm trying to post and tweet and write my blog I find I've run out of cool and funny things to say - go figure!

I just wanted to give a quick recap of what I've got planned and take a brief moment from Promoting Global Hair Loss (@PromotingGHL or #PGHL).  On 28 January I go in for my bone marrow transplant (BMT).  The procedure, as I understand it, and in lay persons terms is relatively simple.  I go in on Monday and get Melphalan.  This is probably the most powerful chemo I've gotten to date and I'm expecting the worst.  In a general sense, Melphalan is like a pesticide introduced into your body that only has a 12 hour shelf life.  After 12 hours it's used up and no longer has any harm on the body.  However, during that first 12 hours it's basically killing everything it's exposed to.  So basically all red, white, purple cells that are exposed to the Melph are now dying.  But it takes a few days for them to completely die.  At the end of those few days I have absolutely no immunity - as I've been saying,  a sneeze in Jersey could be the death of me!  On Tuesday my old cells get pulled out of the freezer, put into a microwave and get put back into my body.  Since these cells weren't exposed to the Melph there's no worry but they need to grow.  So while one set of cells are dying off, the other set is just starting off.  I believe it's about day 5 (with Tuesday being day 0) that I'm at my worst and by day 10 I should be coming back to about normal.  By day 15 I should be out of the hospital and heading back home.

Once home I'll need to be in regular contact w/ the hospital and I've not yet sorted what needs to be done to determine when I can actually get back to work.  For now, I need to buy some Glutosolve and ProBiotics which I'm supposed to take approximately 14 days in advance of the BMT.  I go into the hospital on 9 January to go through a series of tests and meetings (nutritionist, etc.) so I'll have more details then.

That's it for now.  More later - till then keep Promoting Global Hair Loss - find a friend to have a party and shave their head to raise money for the MMRF!

thanks...Bill

4 comments:

Sandy said...
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Sandy said...
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Sandy said...

I was trying to post and it posted twice, so I tried to remove one and it removed both... sorry about that... what I was going to say is be sure you have plenty of popsicles for the Melphalan day so help prevent sores in your mouth. And I will have you high on my Prayer List for a successful outcome.

rugbyhubby said...

Sandy - though the posts may not have "posted" I did get an email for each! Many thanks and ill have more details on the blog as I go through everyting! Right now I'm focused on raising money to shave off my hair and beard! ; )