Saturday, April 26, 2014

In Nashville

Thank you all so much for your love, prayers and support. We are so sad to be writing to the blog again, but I guess that's life.

Wanda was officially served a shit sandwich this morning.

Doctors have confirmed from the bone marrow biopsy that she has AML (acute myeloid leukemia). They were very quick to say that the prognosis is not the prognosis for a relapse from a transplant, which would be pretty darn bad news. Instead, because she is 3.5 years out, the prognosis is the same as for a new leukemia patient. Which they think is good.  As soon as she stabilizes here, they would begin aggressive chemo to get the AML in to remission and then begin the stem cell transplant party again.  In the next few days they will determine whether the leukemia originated in the remnants of her blood or from her donor blood. This does not change anything except whether or not we need a new donor. If the AML leukemia originated in her blood, they will use the same donor. If it originated in his blood, then we will be on the hunt for a new donor.

This news was hard to receive. The pressure in mom's brain has made that even harder. She understood (mostly) all that her dr presented us, but she was not able to articulate questions or reactions.

Which leads me to the hurdles she has between now and chemo. Unfortunately, those hurdles feel very significant right now.

They have not been able to 100% address the issue of her bleeding. The coagulant is working but not perfectly. This means that they will not be able to perform surgery to relieve pressure in her brain even if they wanted to. It seems like there is a lot of blood in her brain, and what we are praying for right now is that we do not have a situation soon where the neurologists need to perform surgery and the hematologists don't want to.

So we have two prayer requests today. First, that her bleeding in the head has stopped so that we aren't faced with the potential of having to decide whether or not to risk potentially necessary brain surgery at a time when we are unsure that we can control bleeding.

And second, that she is not losing heart. It is hard to know, and that terrifies me. She has (short) periods of alertness followed by extreme tiredness and general non-responsiveness. In the alert periods she can often muster a smile. We all know she is a fighter, but I can't help but worry.

Case will be joining us here in Nashville in the morning. We tried to make mom choose which of us (me, Kit or Dad) should go with her to get the most recent CT scan, and she said Case.

Lots of love-




4 comments:

  1. Praying the days ahead are filled with healing and strength. All my love to Wanda and the entire Taintor family.

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  2. Prayers, prayers, and more prayers

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  3. God is the great physician of healing and peace draw closer to Him. Prayers, Prayers, Prayers.

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  4. Many, many people are praying for Wanda and for you - Callie, Kit, Case and, of course, for Pat. If there is anything that I can do to help, please ask.

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