Big Day Today

Okay, folks – it’s time to send big, positive, healing energy. It’s Bone Marrow Biopsy Day.

What is a biopsy? Well, today is the day they will put Kristina under and take a sample from her bone marrow. The purpose is quite simple: to find out if, and how well, the bone marrow transplant worked. It will take a few days, maybe a week, to get all the official results, but there are three basic outcomes:

Best: If there are no “blasts,” that means she’s cured – although the cancer could come back, and on top of that, future forms of cancer are a little more likely due to all the chemo she got. Basically, under this scenario, she continues to recover from all the treatments and keeps an eye out for GVH.

Semi-bad outcome: a few blasts would mean she’s in clinical remission and will still need ongoing maintenance from drugs or chemo.

The worst outcome is a lot of blasts, perhaps even signs that she’s gone all the way to full-blown leukemia, which would require another transplant in the next couple of months.

For updates, like I said, it may be a few days. Also, I will be out of town and away from the Internet until Friday morning. There’s a chance Kristina will log on herself and post something, but she’s trying to figure out how to take things easier.

Speaking of which, she sounds like she’s slowly getting to feel a little better. She had two great caregivers over the weekend, and that went well. She is still a little shaky, gets tired easily, and is being told to take it easier, so she’ll work on that. Her weight and temperature are stable, and her appetite is slowly coming back.

The bummer at this point is that the steroids she is on have altered her blood in such a way as to necessitate insulin shots. She’s quite frustrated by this development, but there is a good chance it’s a temporary situation that will pass when the steroids she’s taking (and the GVH they are fighting) pass.

She continues to tell me that she has run out of words to thank everyone. I encouraged her to log on here directly sometime and post a letter of thanks to all of you.

Meanwhile, there probably won’t be any news here for a few days, so please say a prayer and/or send some energy for the biopsy today.