Hello family and friends, thanks for being patient with me as I know I was planning on writing sooner. On March 1st, Eric and I celebrated my first birthday with my new immune system! This was two days after completing my one year check up at the Duke Adult Bone Marrow Transplant Clinic. My check up went awesome, they were very pleased with my blood reports and my bone marrow biopsy came back clean. Meaning there was no sign of any leukemia cells and my marrow is producing normal amounts of cells. I'm over 98% donor bone marrow which is perfect! Dr. Horwitz preformed the biopsy and it was almost painless, I didn't even have to take a sedative. Plus, when they drew my blood for labs they took 13 vials and I didn't puke or feel uneasy....13 is my lucky number after all!
The only thing the doctors didn't like in my labs was I have an iron overload in my blood. This is typical for transplant patients and it's not urgent but I need to work on getting my iron levels reduced. The only problem is the only way to do that is to start on a medication or donate two pints a blood per month until the iron amount goes down. One down side is that any blood I donate will have to be discarded as they can't use it in the blood bank. So, I talked to Eric about it and we are thinking of going the medication route. He made a good point that donating blood twice a month could put me at risk for infections and cause me some pain since I don't have the convenience of a pic line or Hickman port. According to Duke, high iron in the blood can predispose me to infections and can be hard on my liver, heart and kidneys. So I have to say I'm leaning toward medication even though I hate to be on more medicine than I need to, but I'm not too fond of giving blood. All in all it's not a big deal considering I'm alive, living cancer free and I have a new lease on life! :)
I'm so happy I can write this post and share my good news with all of you. You have all brought me so much hope, faith and peace and I will forever remember how loved and supported I am. So THANK YOU to everyone who has been with me through this journey! Through God, love and support from all my loved ones and friends, I have taken this challenge and come out a better person in the end. I'm so much happier and healthier than I've ever been and I'm not going to let that change! I think that's it for today, I will probably not write as often any more but I won't go dark. :) So stay tuned for random posts as I continue my journey through life. Much love from Travelers Rest!
