Thursday, April 5, 2012

Day -6

Day -6 was pretty much the same as day -7.  The only difference was the main drug they gave me.  Instead of the Rituxan, I was taking the rabbit ATG.  So now instead of having my B cells ablated I now have my T cell ablated too.  Two letters down, only twenty four left.  Well, not quite.  Tomorrow I will start the chemo regime for real and that is there to destroy all the white blood cells.

So today was very similar to yesterday.  Apart for the main difference that I mentioned above, I had only two smaller difference.  First, instead of just having 250mgs of solumedrol, I had 1000mgs.  That is an insane amount of steroids to have floating around your system.  Oh well I guess I will have to give up my dream of a call up to open the batting for the Australian cricket team as I'm sure that will raise a red flag with any international doping agency around the world.  Just so you know,  the human body naturally produces 7-10mgs of steroids per day,  So I'm only 100 times above normal right now.

The second change is that the Rituxan was run over two hours, the ATG has been run over ten hours so currently, as I started at 2pm I am still having it infused.  For any doctors that read this I'm having a hard time figuring out how the drug is derived and its actual mechanism of action.  Maybe I'm stupid, maybe (and I hope) it's complicated, so if someone could explain it to me in layman's terms, I'd appreciate it.  My cousin is an anaesthesiologist and I have a friend who is a chemist (you know who you are) so I'm sure someone can explain it to me.

Well day -5 should be interesting.  I'll let you all know how it goes.  Until then, stay well:)

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