I had a meeting today with a couple of members of the Bone Marrow Transplant team that will be looking after me. The purpose of the meeting was to go over any concerns I may have and to sign the consent forms.
There were a few pieces of new information that I had not previously heard.
One was that the period taken for my blood counts to recover is a lot faster than with standard chemotherapy. They believe it could be as short as 10-14 days rather than the 21 days it usually takes. This of course could be affected by the slightly reduced size of the stem cell harvest though.
The other bit of news is about one of the chemo drugs Melphalan, which is known to cause severe Stomatitis (mouth sores etc). This is something that I am very prone to anyway, so I'm rather concerned about it. Apparently in severe cases patients are unable to swallow food and are fed via a tube.
I developed severe stomatitis when I had radiation therapy and was unable to eat properly for several weeks, loosing 10kg in the process. So as you can imagine I'm a bit worried. Certainly last time I would describe as being the most horrible painful experience of my life.
The doctor said that sucking on iceblocks while the chemo drug is administered is supposed to help. I thought this most unlikely until I did some research on the internet today and found several medical studies have confirmed this. They called it "oral cryotherapy". Other websites called it for what it was.. "sucking on ice-pops".
I know the fridge in the kitchen on ward 1 is full of iceblocks so I'll be sucking a constant stream of them starting thirty minutes before treatment until thirty minutes after. It's either that or be on morphine and a nasal feeding tube for two weeks in a worst case scenario.
No word on the CT scan results yet. I'm looking forward to seeing those as I believe they will show reduced tumour activity in my chest and lungs as my breathing is still in excellent condition and no sign of a cough.
Next post will be on Thursday from my bed in ward 1. Probably with the first of the high-dose chemo being pumped into the PICC line newly inserted in my arm.
Till then I'll try not to chew my fingernails too much!
..Ron
1 comment:
do you ever check out our blog? I have a link on there to my brothernlaw blog in S Africa who is going through the same thing at the same time as you! Only without all the medical terms and info.
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