You can see in the photos above the difference in our sleeping facilities in the hospital and our sleeping facilities here. I am very thankful for the hospital but I am so glad to get out after 38 days being in there.
I learned quite a bit about the future plans from Dr. Van Rhee today. He told me that my bone marrow biopsy I had in early June showed 80% myeloma involvement in my bone marrow. The one I had last week showed only 5% involvement. The four days of chemo made that much difference but it is short lived because the myeloma will come back as strong as it was before if further treatment does not proceed.
One week from tomorrow, on Wednesday next week, he plans to start a stem cell transplant. I will receive a 45-minute infusion of melphalan and 18 hours after that, I will start to receive my own stem cells back in order to rebuild my bone marrow that the melphalan has wiped out. I will receive the five million stem cells, that I have stored from 2013, over a period of several days. There is risk involved since I have a low number of stem cells stored and he said the quality of the ones stored are probably low quality. He predicts a very slow recovery time as for as me producing platelets and also I will never be able to produce platelets like I once could. That will restrict what treatments they can use to control the myeloma since most treatments cause lower platelet production. He said I would have very low white cell count for about 2 weeks after the melphalan infusion and I would have to be very careful not to contact infection. He thinks the recovery will take around eight weeks. It looks like we're going to be here for a while. As I find out more, I will post more information on the blog about it.
I really appreciate all your notes, comments and emails. You all make this whole thing a lot easier.