Day 37

Praise the Lord!

We finally received results today from the biopsy and the cyto-genetics showed 46% of the pattern from the first cord donor and 54% pattern from the second cord donor. There were no cells from her past donor, or her original cells. The pharm-D reviewed the results with us (he was the only doctor from her team that we saw today), and he said that this test was actually done with peripheral blood rather than cells from her bone marrow. I thought this was kind of odd since most of the blood in her body now is from either her old donor or her. Blood cells in your body stick around for about 85 days. They have two ways to do this test, one is from the bone marrow biopsy and the second is from peripheral blood. When they use peripheral blood they sort out certain types of cells (I think it was Type-36). These are young cells. They then compare the DNA of them to that of the donor along with Kristen's original blood to make the determination of which cells are present. The idea being that the young cells recently came from your bone marrow and you can see what it is manufacturing. Needless to say, this was great news, they will repeat the test again at day 60. They also did some advanced tests on her bone marrow biopsy looking for Leukemia along with any gene mutations that she was originally diagnosed with, and those all came back clear as well.

I remember the transplant doctors explaining the double-cord transplant process. They indicated that both cords will start out making cells, and then over time one will become dominant and over time the other one will go away. They said that can take months, or in some cases years to happen, we'll wait and see.

In addition, Kristen's platelets didn't drop much from yesterday, only from 30 to 27, so hopefully her counts will start to trend up and she can quit receiving transfusions in the near future.

Jill and Steven are on there way down today for the weekend to celebrate her birthday and Steven and I will head back on Monday.

Please continue to pray:
1) Continued improvements in her blood counts and that Kristen continues to take in adequate fluids to keep her kidney and liver healthy
2) Ultimate healing
3) Safe travels over the coming days