Looooong day, but I'm free to go!

Wow, what a long day. It started fabulously with a celebratory breakfast at a local restaurant called the Red Door...croissant French toast topped with caramelized bananas. YUM! My mom and I had seen this place featured on a local morning news show last time we were here, we were sitting in the clinic waiting room with our mouths watering watching them make this fabulous looking French toast on TV. Unfortunately it didn't work out for us to make there last time since they weren't open for breakfast on Saturday (they were doing a trial only on weekdays). So this time we made sure we could get there on a weekday. It was so worth it, even though it meant getting up pretty early.

Then we headed to the clinic for the labs and waited anxiously for the numbers that would determine my fate. The main thing was that I needed my white count to be 2.0 or higher, and I was 3.15! That and all my other numbers were good enough to qualify me for discharge. Woot! I just would need some platelets in order to get the central line removed. After this it was a lot of dashing around trying to coordinate fitting everything in by the end of the day. I met with Dr. B briefly and he suggested I should be a poster child for telling other patients that it's really not so bad! Ha! He was pleased with how fast I recovered and with minimal side effects. He also said that my light chain is now in the normal range which means ALL my myeloma markers are in normal ranges!! He stopped short of calling it a complete response (the myeloma version of remission), and I suspect this may be because he wants to see this maintained until my next re-staging. In the end I managed to get all my discharge instructions, get the platelet infusion, and have the line removed. Whew, hectic Friday for sure!

I met another young patient in the clinic who is from Manassas, VA and works in Maryland. He was also recently diagnosed and made his way to Arkanasas. I got called in to see the doctor right after we started chatting, but I gave him my card so hopefully he'll contact me. There really are people here from all over, just today we met Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky, California, Virginia, and Germany.

So now I get to head home and I'm very excited! I'll get a longer break this time to allow full recovery before the second transplant. Despite the fact that I'm being discharged, my body still needs time to recover from the stress of being poisoned before I can safely be poisoned again. They want me back in 4 weeks for the second transplant.

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