Day 12

Wednesday, April 30

Good news the past couple of days... the new cells have begun engrafting! 

Monday (Day 10) was by far one of Gail's worst days in the hospital. She awoke at about 3am feeling poor. Within about 30 minutes she began to experience difficulty breathing, tightness in her chest and her lungs started filling with fluid. /the nurses responded quickly and notified the night on-call doctors who quickly gave her Lasix to flush the fluids out of her body. After all the tests were performed....chest X-ray, EKG, blood enzymes etc.the doctor said that it appears she had what is called a "cytokine storm". Not really sure how to define that in the blog (it's one of those things you can google), but basically with the white cells starting to engraft, it created some type of dangerous "storm" in her body. Monday she continued feeling run down and sleepy.


Yesterday, Gail's white cell count did indeed move up and she felt really great all day.Today the white cell count jumped even more, but unfortunately the feeling great part did not continue. But she continues to make really good progress.

If everything continues to proceed as it is, she will likely be discharged this coming Monday! They have even hinted at the possibility that she could even be released as early as Friday (her original discharge date was the 16th). But as has been the case all along, this is a day-to-day process and not one where you can get too far ahead of yourself. Something is always changing!

Now that they have moved the discharge date to early next week, Jerry has had to take a couple of classes on how to take care of her central veinous catheter. His test is tomorrow... and hopefully he will know what he is doing!