Day 16 – tranplant plus 8

Well so much for not receiving any whole blood while I’m here. This morning the team came in and said, today you are getting whole blood and platelets.

My hemoglobin hit 8.0, which is the point at which you are given blood when on chemotherapy, and my platelets went below 20 (14 actually) so I got both. It was the third platalet transfusion and first whole blood.

I’m sure I needed it – from yesterday afternoon through this morning I felt tired – in fact I was thinking they would tell me I needed blood.

My white count is still at zero.

But other then tiredness, I feel fine. The mouth pain is easily manageable. Puts you off eating, though. All I had today was a little pasta and a small cup of pudding.

Brigid was in this morning, after busing to Washington on Monday with Joe – the March for Life. 

And late in the afternoon Sue Carmody paid me a second visit.

This evening I spent over an hour with Joe online and on the phone, helping him with his math mid-term prep. I think he thinks It’s pretty cool to do this stuff by instant messaging. Of course I don’t know all the abbreviations, which slows things down at my end – I have to take time to figure out what he’s written me! We’ll see how effective this technique is, when he gets the test back.

Still need to put the pictures of some visitors onto the laptop so I can post them. “Well then, what are you doing all day, Tom?” Today I did a lot of napping, made some long calls to clients, and sent out quite a bit of email. I am getting lots of email from people, which I appreciate. Did virtually no reading, except stuff online, which tires the eyes out, since one thing I can’t do here is print anything.

So the wait continues for my white blood cell count to start rising, which should start around Thursday. They said the stay here would be three weeks, which is Sunday. I would have liked to get out earlier, but I may be right on schedule for Sunday discharge.