0.2!

Today is brutally hot, demonstrating that Minnesota can almost hold its own with Kentucky for summer unpleasantness (although far less often, and less severely, to be fair). It's another good day to lie low, which suits our lack of options.

For whatever reason the transplant ward (aka Station 9-4) is really busy this week, so when we came in this morning no rooms (or half-rooms) were available. After a few minutes we were shown to the window side of one of the rooms, with another post-transplant patient nearer the door. The nature of these rooms does not allow for privacy in any real sense, and since she was there first all her visitors and conversations were totally audible to us.

I only mention this because it is a small and rare (for us) insight into an alternative trajectory of post-transplant recovery--she had lost her hair, was having severe diarrhea, was being screened for a wide range of gram-negative and -positive bacteria, and generally feeling miserable. However, her cells were engrafting, and she was ahead of me in terms of bone marrow recovery.

For me, today is +10, so I am waiting for hair loss. Not much to report on that front, yet. The nutritionist did not apparently need to see me today because I have been eating too well (I was looking forward to reporting the gyro and fries I'd had for lunch yesterday). No new symptoms to report to the nurse or PA, so we had an extended discussion of Liz's and my competing hypotheses about why my right leg has resumed hurting: Liz says that the diagnostic workup (involving electrial stimulation via fine needles stuck into nerves) may have had a therapeutic effect for a few days, while my hypothesis is that the immune system had gone quiet (hence no inflammation) but is now coming back. My hypothesis serves double duty as wishful thinking, of course, while Liz's suggests that people should stick my legs full of holes at some future point. In fairness, the one time I tried acupuncture it was completely painless and involved no electricity.

The blood numbers had started to come in when we got back home, and the red cells and platelets have not changed (except for the addition of bag of platelets I got yesterday). I might need red cells by tomorrow, depending. But there was good news after all: white cells went from 0.1  billion per liter (lowest possible reading) to 0.2 billion per liter, the first meaningful uptick. Given that the unknown minimum count is probably well below 0.1 (the docs say 0, but we won't ever really know), 0.2 means they have probably doubled several times already between the nadir and now.

So tomorrow I'm expecting to see more white cells (they need to keep doubling a few more times before they get to anything close to "normal" ~ 3.5 billion/liter), and hoping the platelets and red cells will join the party soon.