In Other News, Cancer Still Sucks

We found out yesterday that a friend of Amy’s passed away last week from complications of leukemia/lymphoma. From everything Amy says, this was an incredibly good-hearted and compassionate person. So we’ve got the grief over losing a good person, as well as all of the fear this stirs up for our own situation.

Not much has really changed since last month. Amy finished up another round of chemo on Monday, so she’s pretty wiped out. There are some cumulative effects, so the exhaustion and stuff gets a little harder each time, but she’s getting through it.

The next step is another round of scans to see if she’s in remission and decide whether we can move on to the bone marrow transplant. We had a consult with the bone marrow transplant director in Detroit a week or two back. There are still a fair number of unknowns — not only the scan results, but whether her bone marrow is healthy enough for an autologous transplant. That’s where they use the patient’s own stem cells rather than getting a donor, which is what we’re hoping for. (Faster recovery, no rejection issues.) But her younger brother will be getting tested to see if he’s a match, just in case.

We meet with the oncologist again tomorrow. Hopefully we’ll get things scheduled soon, because all this waiting and uncertainty sucks.

I’ve been continuing to work to get the house ready. Chemo suppresses the immune system, and bone marrow transplant does the same, so there’s a lot of worry about potential infections and such. We’ve got people ripping out the gross carpet in the basement today, replacing it with vinyl laminate that should be a lot more sanitary. I’ve done a lot of dusting and cleaning and decluttering. It’s never going to be hospital-level sanitary, but we’re making progress.

I think we’re all feeling a bit burnt out by everything, but we’re getting through.