John had a big milestone this week. 2/18 was his 4 month anniversary for the bone marrow transplant. As predicted, he is feeling a whole lot better now than he was then.
Some recent complications include dropping blood and platelet counts, dropping electrolytes, rising CMV counts and wild swings in the blood sugar readings. We're having a long day today - photopheresis in the morning followed by magnesium, hydration, cydofovir, platelet and rbc infusions. The increased CMV has resulted in extra cydofovir treatments as well as infusions of cytogam (IVIG) every other day. Looks like that will be the norm for now. Trying to level out the blood sugar is a crazy experiment of dosages and meds; right now John is on 3 diabetes meds and varying schedules of how much to take. They have ranged from 64 this morning to a high of over 500 a couple of weeks ago; we obviously still have some work to do to get better at this. We do our best to minimize swings with diet but since this diabetes is steroid induced, not diet induced, diet isn't a very effective way to control the sugar. Still, we do what we can until the steroids can be reduced some more. That's not going to happen very quickly because steroids help keep the gvhd controlled.
The upside is that John's skin is remarkably clear; the most recent form of gvhd to be vigilant about is gvhd of the gut. Hopefully, that is an experience we can avoid.
John's medical team was at a bone marrow transplant conference last week. They were excited to report that Jefferson's protocol using 2 steps and double donors for half matches has significantly better results for patients than the other protocols out there for half matches. This is great news!
Finally, we had another event to celebrate this week; Michael (one of our donors) and Meredith celebrated their second wedding anniversary :)
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