Mini-Me is Half Way Home

Lex has turned a corner. Last Thurs Nov. 18 she had a biopsy. The reason for the biopsy was to learn why she was engrafting so slowly. Professor Slavin said there were a few reasons, the scariest and main one was the concern that she still had leukemia, another, was because of all the chemo and drugs her marrow was damaged so the graft couldn't thrive, and finally, she had several fevers requiring antibiotics and steriods which also will slow down engraftment. So a biopsy was performed. Waiting for results is hard, you try not to think about the outcome, you're afraid to hope, you feel as if you're holding your breath for hours, Lex got preliminary results that same afternoon and they looked good but we didn't relax until Sunday when the doctors came in with big smiles on their faces 'Alexis was solidly in remission' no leukemia! Now, this doesn't mean we're hopping on the next plane to Toronto, she is not cured.... yet, what it means is she now has a real chance of beating this disease. Getting to this point is another miracle, more than half the patients treated don't survive the 1st month because they are too sick and frail to tolerate the treatment, Lex had some pretty intense moments over the last 33 days but thankfully nothing the hospital couldn't control. The rest of the miracle is in something called 'chimerism' this test was done along with the biopsy, a chimerism test is extremely important because it tells us what percentage of her marrow is now donor, the more donor cells they see the better, well the second miracle is that she is now 100% donor, my stem cells and bone marrow have taken up residence in Lex's blood you might say I've moved in and I'm staying! With all this good news she has been discharged from the hospital, to become an outpatient with the clinic. The engrafting is still slow, hopefully in the next 2-3 weeks she will be stable enough to proceed with the next step, which is the make sure the leukemia doesn't ever come back. But in the meantime this new phase is very welcome, being an outpatient allows Lex to have some normalcy in her life something that has been missing these last 5 weeks. She needs to be extremely careful though, she must mask when around people, for fear of being exposed to germs, what she eats must be clean and cooked no Ahi Tuna for now....Sorry Lex! She cannot go in the sea or sit in the sun for fear of bacteria or skin rashes. But even with these restrictions being out of the hospital is great, and 'mini me' and I are planning to enjoy it.