Sandi on Mother's Day

Despite being far from home and going through what she is going through, Sandi is doing okay. Earlier today she finished her final bag of chemotherapy that she will receive prior to the stem cell transplant. That is still scheduled tomorrow and is a multi hour long process. Not only does she have to have some injections of various things over a several hour time period late tonight and into the morning hours of tomorrow, she has to be extensively hooked up to cardiac monitoring equipment and then the dialysis type machine. Once everything is hooked up they way they want it and she is considered stable, she faces almost six hours of straight bed time while the machine pumps her modified stem cells into her under the watchful eyes of a nurse who will be in her room the entire period. This is an important  safety precaution as there are major risks with the procedure.

At this point tonight she has just started the second bag of a needed blood transfusion. She thinks this will be it and that the deal should finish an  hour or so after midnight her time. While the blood count numbers did drop as expected, they did not drop nearly as far as it was believed they would. Still, she has dipped low enough to cause the need for the transfusion.

Apparently her immune system has not gone down like it should have and there is some concern on this issue. The bottom line is her body is fighting very hard to handle the effects of six days of round the clock chemotherapy and is actively fighting them. This may result in a delay of a day or two while they have to adjust medications and take other steps to make the environment for the stem cell transplant as receptive as possible. Because of the schedule she has been on and the narrow window they have to work with to make a stem cell transplant, there is time for a one or two day delay if necessary though they would much prefer to do it now as fast as possible. We won't know if a change has to be made until late tomorrow morning after they have run blood work after midnight my time tonight and again early in the morning.

She is tired, but positive, and remains optimistic that the transplant is going to work. She has been able to crochet all week and apparently is now teaching some of the nurses and other visitors to her room how to crochet. Which proves yet again how she is always teaching no matter waht she is going through or her surroundings.