It's 11:30am, and mom still hasn't started on her next round of thymoglobulin. If anyone thought that getting injected with rabbit syrum would make you as happy as a rabbit, I'm sorry to say it's not the case. Although mom woke up rather hoppy, she's not feeling so great now. We walked 8 laps of this section of the hospital this morning -- 25 laps is a mile -- and she was in good spirits. We then had breakfast, which mom actually ate a fair amount of. She's been feeling pretty nauseous most of the morning, though - not a good feeling.
You may be asking what this thymoglobulin is and why it's given as a 'anti-rejection' drug. Well, I found a pretty good description of the drug online. I'm not a doctor, and the doctors out there can correct me, but it looks like thymoglobulin wipes out most all of the T-cells in your body. Remember the T-cells? I talked about them in an earlier post when I was talking about Gengraf. The T-cells are the maestro of the immune system, so without them, you basically don't have a response to infection. While Gengraf dampens the immune response, thymoglobulin wipes it out. So, by tomorrow, mom will have little to no T-cells (due to thymo), little to no white blood cells (due to chemo), and the T-cells that are still around will be dampened (due to Gengraf). That means that when she receives her new cells tomorrow, her body won't put up much of a fight.
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