O Brother!

One of the stranger things that has happened during our appointments, blood draws, etc.... is that several times receptionists have referred to my father and I as brothers? Yes, this does concern me to the extent that I hope it is a compliment for my dad, and not an indication of my appearance. We have even needed to straighten them out a couple times as to which one of us was due for a blood draw or appointment.........mixups galore thus far! At the moment these mixups have been simple to solve, but we are certainly hoping they figure this out before the transplant! I have also been telling them to make sure they dont draw marrow from my dads funny bone........that could lead to me constantly hamming it up, coming up with puns all the time, and general goofiness!

Okay on to some more details about our visits. My appointments thus far have included 3 blood draws, an EKG, chest X-ray, pulmonary function test, dental exam, panoramic head X-ray (revealed nothing upstairs :o).....), history and physical, meeting with financial rep, meeting with social worker, meeting with attending physician to discuss transplant, IV hookup for blood draw followed by bone marrow aspiration (ouch), and finally a pretty cool test to see how my heart is functioning (called a MUGA test)........baseline for how my heart functions. All of us were pretty exhausted after all that, and are very excited to have the weekend now!

My father has had many appointments as well including several blood draws and many of the same physical checks as I. My dad was able to watch my bone marrow aspiration which gave him some indication as to how things will go, although they will be drawing about a quart of bone marrow from him, and his recovery process will be several days. It has been wonderful having so much support with me during my boring appointments, and we got through it in fairly good spirits.

Next week will be more of the same with possible blood transfusions if my counts are low (expected). We will be meeting with nutritionists, and be taking several classes to prepare us for the care-giving process. I will be starting a few new medications to prepare my body for the transplant, and we hope to be meeting the doctor who is in charge for this particular type of transplant with this particular antibody regimen so that we will feel more comfortable that this is actually the type of transplant we really want to proceed with. We are starting to feel more comfortable with the idea, but want to be completely confident that we are on the right track.

Tyler