The sun is shining bright in Chapel Hill today, and if it weren't 35 degrees, I would be outside enjoying it. I was discharged from the hospital this morning, 14 days after the transplant. The decision to discharge was based on the absolute neutrophil count and me being able to go off antibiotics without a fever. The graph below shows my neutrophil counts since early January.
Due to the induction drugs, Daratumamab and Revlimid, that I was still taking up until a few weeks before the stem cell collection, my ANC has hovered near the lower bounds of normal. For the stem cell collection, I had to stop the induction drugs in early Jan, and then give myself some shots to induce stem cell growth. You can cell how the shots jacked up the ANC as well. I entered the hospital with a fairly high ANC on Feb 5, when I took a large dosage of Melphalan that effectively nuked my my bone marrow, and you can see the eventual flatlining of my neutrophils. For the past week I took more of the shots that stimulated growth in my bone marrow, and my ANC went from 0.5 to 2 to 5. This is a big jump in the ANC, but I think I was also a few days delayed in going up relative to the average patient so maybe it balances out.
My platelets and hemoglobin (HGB) graphs are below. During induction therapy, my platelets and hgb were mostly normal. Low HGB means I'm anemic, and low platelets means my blood won't clot properly. I had to use a sponge to brush my teeth for the past week or so because my platelets were below 50. I was excited to learn that my counts last night showed them to be 51, which means I can brush my teeth with a normal brush again! Both platelets and HGB should continue to improve over the next couple of weeks. I think I posted about the big spike in my HGB a few days ago. Clearly that was an outlier. I'm more anemic now than I've been throughout this process.
I hope you enjoyed the show and tell. I'm happy to be out of the hospital, but I'm still pretty tired, and the shots I've been taking give me a pretty bad headache in the evenings. I'm still having GI issues, and while I still have my hair, I'm shedding hair pretty heavily in certain areas. I'm not sure how much I'll ultimately lose, but I think I'll probably manage to keep my eyebrows and hopefully my beard. :)
Comments
Post a Comment