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Day +135: update & correspondence with my donor

The days have been passing quickly without a lot of material to create this next post.  With my return to work, acceptance of my new reality of fluctuating blood counts, and an anonymous correspondence with my donor, it feels like a good time to send out this update.

After being home from Houston for a little less than 3 weeks, getting caught up on doctor appointments and generally feeling well, on March 10th I returned to work. I am excited to again challenge myself, interact with my co-workers and catch up on all things technology.  As everyone continues to work remotely, the transition back has gone well and I am now working full time out of my home office.

I've transitioned my regularly monitoring to the Stem Cell team at UCHealth in Denver. I'm fortunate to have such an expert team to guide me through this next phase of my recovery while collaborating with the transplant team at MD Anderson.  My counts have been fluctuating quite a bit over the past 4 weeks and I've been treated accordingly.  This is my new normal as it will still take quite a while for my counts to stabilize.  My next "Big" progress check will be during a return visit to MD Anderson on April 26-27.  This corresponds to the 6 month post-transplant milestone with the hope of getting sign-off that the brain tumor did not return, the leukemia has not returned and begin to ween off some of the medications.  

The most exciting part of this update is the recent correspondence with my donor.  The donor bank (https://bethematch.org/) has a policy to not allowed direct correspondence until the 1 year post-transplant point.  So, the communication was from me, to MD Anderson, to BeTheMatch, to the donor and back.  While a slow back and forth, it is really exciting to have made this first interaction.  I'm attaching that interaction to this post if interested in the details.  He sure sounds like an amazing person with an amazing wife that helped him through the process.

Getting what are hopefully our final snowstorms here in Denver and looking forward to springtime,

Gary




 

Comments

  1. CindyMarch 23, 2021 at 11:18 AM

    What a great exchange with your donor Gary! Glad things are positively progressing.

    ReplyDelete
  2. UnknownApril 26, 2021 at 10:10 AM

    awesome +

    ReplyDelete

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