Author: Phillip Branch

Blood and platelets

Bad nights sleep as usual. I really must take the sleeping pills. Also a bit off due to some endone, that shit seems to give me a bit of nausea and I really felt stoned on it. Which is ok except for a bit of nausea later in the day :-)

My temperature spiked last night to 38.4. So I had some blood taken via a syringe to check for a bacterial infection – normally they use my PICC line. He had to have three goes in my left arm. I love it when they twist the needle around as they search for a vein. My left arm is always difficult for blood. Checkout the piccy below for the result.

Two bags of red blood today and some platelets. The platelets should stop my nose from dribbling blood.

Also, temperature down to 37.3. Much more comfortable.

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My IV tree of platelets and blood.

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Nicky

Well done Nicholas for getting your purple belt in karate.

In other news, I am feeling rather flat today. Hopefully my blood levels start rising soon.

And we begin again

After 5.5 years leukaemia free unfortunately my AML has returned. I will therefore recommence my blog to keep those interested in my progress informed. Will post some photos later.

In went back in hospital on 10/11 and had 5 days of chemo. Now my bloods have gone down and I need to stay in hospital until they go back up – I have no immune system.

Due to previous treatment and all the drugs afterwards my kidney function is down 25% so they have to monitor my treatment closely.

Will provide more updates.

2013!

Well I made it 2013.  Now my thyroid has decided to slow down a bit.  As a result I am on some tablets for my thyroid.  That means I am taking:

  • Cyclosporin for my GVHD.
  • Blood pressure tablets for high blood pressure caused by the above.
  • Statins for my high cholesterol, possibly caused by the cyclosporin – it was fine before the leukaemia.
  • Thyroxine for my thyroid problem.

 

Steady as she goes

I dropped the steroid (prednisolone) at the end of last year.  My liver continued to improve for a few months until it was almost normal.  Then it went back to its’ old ways.  Fortunately a slight increase in my cyclosporin dose to 100 mg managed to fix the problem.  My liver is now back to almost normal.

Aside from that nothing much has happened.

Getting better all the time

Well, things have steadily been getting better over the last three months.

First of all the dentist. My teeth are still ok, no surprises there as they have been ok all along. The new filling for my tooth was easy, no injection required as I am as hard as nails. Probably helped that all that was required was removal of the old filling and a slight amount of decay. The tooth had also managed to get a chip in it which was also fixed. A quick scrape by the student dentist and I was off home for some practice of various Latin drum beats before picking up the kids from school.

My world famous liver has improved to the point where we could drop the steroid dose to 2mg from 3mg. Fingers crossed that in 12 weeks I will be off the steroids.

From the bad news department our little puppy broke his leg and has had a plaster cast on his back leg for the last two weeks. That, and over $1000 of our money on fixing the little devils leg adds up to double bad news.

Dentist

My regular visit to the RAH dentist went OK although one filling is required. Amazingly it has been over 30 years since my last filling so the next visit in a few weeks will be an ‘interesting’ novelty.

My anniversary

By the way, it has been over two years since my stem cell transplant. The transplant was on the 14th of July, 2009.

Still alive

Well a couple of things have happened since the last update.

First off, I stopped the Famcyclovir according to my last post.  Unfortunately I then got shingles.  It started off as a vague pain in my back and progressively got worse over a few days until the pain was quite intense.  At this point we decided I should pop into hospital to see what was going on.  Initially there was not much of a rash but they admitted me as they suspected it was shingles.  The next day a rash had appeared in a band from the middle of my back to my belly button.  The pain was quite bad too and it was rather itchy.  The hospital dudes gave me some pain killers, morphine mainly.  This killed the pain.  They gave me IV Famcyclovir to possibly prevent it getting much worse.  After a couple of days they discharged me with a supply of morphine.  A day or two later I started to get bad nausea due to the morphine.  I quit the morphine, maybe the pain would not be as bad any more?  Luckily it was not.  However, the itching was shocking.  I also felt a bit off for  a week or so.  After two or three weeks the itching very slowly diminished although even now, many months later, it is still a little bit itchy.

After that episode the doctors put me back on oral famcyclovir.

The liver has been a little better, it even registered a normal reading at one point.  As the liver function seemed to have plateaued the doctor decided to drop the steroid level to 4 mg.  Six weeks later, this week in fact, and the liver was not worse so the steroid level was dropped to 3 mg.  Hopefully everything goes OK over the next six weeks.

I had another purchase too, 335 kw of supercharged V8:

One drug down, 3 more to go

My liver is slowly getting better although it was a bit up and down this last month.  The good news is the doctor has dropped one drug – famciclovir.  The other good news is that my blood tests are now every three weeks and doctor visits are now every 6 weeks – at least I can relax a bit, the blood test and doctor visit are a bit stressful.  The bad news is – still no booze for me!

Things have been improving at work too.  It has taken a while to get back into the ‘groove’ but I finally feel as though I am sort of back to normal at work.

Kurianda