Prayers requested: More news from Kat in UK

News from The C Word Blog.

After a fantastic weekend, it was back to reality. I woke up exhausted on Monday morning with sore legs, a nasty cold and a general feeling of malaise. I really didn’t want to get out of bed, least of all to go to my hospital appointment for the check up and nebuliser appointment. My check up went ok today and my consultant wasn’t too worried about my cold. She basically said that half the country seems to have a cold so it was probably inevitable that I’d get it and that it would take an age to shake off. However, she was a bit more concerned with my actual immune system. Since my transplant, I’ve been having twice weekly injections at home.

These injections contain GCSF which helps my bone marrow produce neutrophils which are essential to fighting off nasty bugs and infections, and for some reason my bone marrow is producing it, but they’re not surviving very long which isn’t normal. Two weeks ago, my consultant suggested that I could have Graft versus host disease in my bone marrow where my new donor cells recognise my neutrophils as ‘foreign’ and kills them off. My consultant then decided that they would try another treatment to see if it would help my immune system settle in a bit better and booked me in to have a IV of immunogobulins. Immunogobulins appear naturally in our body but after chemotherapy/transplant, it can take the body some time to recover them, some people don’t and have to have immunogobulin infusions for the rest of their lives (I hope I don’t).

So last week, I had my first infusion. I was quite unhappy about this as it meant having to have a cannula in my arm and fluid pumped into me, I’d really hoped I would never have to have something like this again after my transplant, the only consolation is is that it’s not chemo, just an anti-body being pumped into me. On Monday, I had a blood test to see if the immunogobulins worked and the test showed my neutrophil count was for the first time on a Monday, above 1!

My consultant said that it’s too early to tell if the immunogobulins are responsible. On the basis of this, I have now been given more immunosuppressant tablets to take which will take longer to be weened off. I was really hoping that I’d be off them by now, it feels like progress has been good and now I seem to have taken a little step back. My consultant said not to be disheartened, I’m still doing very well but my new immune system still needs a bit of support to get it up and running.

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