Numerical Progression
I might get to go home for an overnight on Saturday.
This is how the numbers have looked over the last few days:
- White Cells: 1.0 -> 1.5 -> 2.3
- Neutrophils: 0.7 -> 1.2 -> 1.7
Platelets are still sluggish, today at 8 (they want it to be higher than 10 minimum, with past 20 being better). We’ve been reassured by the doctors that this isn’t a side-effect of the leukemia itself. It’s also not because of HLA antibodies in my system. So instead this can happen because they’re a more picky cell about where it’s willing to go. It’s also been suggested that the growth stimulating hormone shots—which are helping boost the white cells and neutrophils—could be making the generation (or count) of platelets get slowed down a bit.
I’ve got one bag of platelets just finishing this afternoon, and another will come tomorrow morning (Saturday). As long as my bloods haven’t had any odd change, I’ll be able to visit home for a day! I’ll stay overnight and the come back Sunday afternoon after lunch—when I’ll get another bag of platelets.
I gave myself a growth hormone shot today, but they’re going to deliberately skip one tomorrow. Then they’ll look at how things are again on Sunday.
To be honest, I’d been hoping things were good enough for me to go home today for a couple of days. (I’m still eying actually being discharged, but hold that off at a distance.) It took a little while for my emotions to accept how I’d been looking forward to leaving today—more than I realized or was willing to admit, even to myself. It’s not always easy to focus on all of this just one day at a time. I understand why; it just asks for an awful lot of effort sometimes.
Uninterrupted sleep
With my cell counts mostly being polite enough to go up, this had an interesting positive side-effect: they didn’t need me to have my obs (pulse, blood pressure, etc) checked at 2am. I got to sleep through the night! I found I was yawning later in the morning—apparently uninterrupted sleep also qualifies as a break in a normal pattern if your body’s not used to such luxury. 🙂
