Skip to main content

Transplant Update

By

Matt's been approved.  We think.  Maybe.  Sorta.  There is a reason that "insurance" and "easy" are never mentioned in the same sentence.  As many of you know, we've been anxiously awaiting insurance approval to transfer Matt's care to University of Chicago.  We were told last week that it had been approved.  Hooray!  Oh but wait.  After reading the fine print Matt realized the approval actually read "transplant consultation."  Well, crap! So after a little further investigating and a lot of phone calls to various doctors / secretaries / coordinators / whoever else answered the calls, Matt found out that once the consultation went through, transplant would be approved as well.  So all in all, good news! It just took a lot of "wait...what?"s to go through in order to figure it all out.  So let the balloons fly, Matt's moving to U of C!

Matt got a call from U of C several days ago and they scheduled him for a full battery of tests, a bone marrow biopsy, and blood work on December 15th.  If all looks good they will harvest his stem cells shortly after the beginning of the new year and then he will be admitted in to the hospital for transplant around January 14th.  So there you have it, a plan.  Finally.

I realized that it has been almost a month since my our last post but then I realized that nothing eventful (cancer related) has happened, which I view as a good thing.  We've just been entertaining a crawling 9 month old and a very active 3 year old, while trying to maintain a somewhat decent amount of sanity.  Some days that's questionable.

As always, thank you all for your continued love and support!

All our love,
Matt & Mandy

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Beginning

By
It's Probably Just a Virus "It's only a virus," is what we kept thinking and hearing over the past few weeks.  By this time, Matt hadn't been feeling very well for 2.5 weeks.  He had suffered from fatigue, sleepiness, and some nausea.  He hadn't drank coffee in over 2 weeks and eating ice cream was out of the question.  After 2 weeks of this "virus" Matt decided to make an appointment with his primary care doctor on Tuesday, August 11th.  They decided to draw some blood and take a urine sample and scheduled a follow up appointment two days later.  When he went in for the follow up appointment they informed him that his kidneys were essentially failing and were only functioning at 10-12%.  They immediately directed him to a nephrologist who scheduled a kidney biopsy for the following Monday. Fast forward a day and his symptoms of fatigue and sleepiness worsened to the point that a 2 hour nap was absolutely mandatory yet he still couldn't ga...
5 comments
Read more

Boring. It's Very, Very Boring.

By
 The title sums up the past two days.  Boring.  But I will be the first to say, with a hospital stay - boring is great.  Matt and I headed down to the hospital yesterday morning nice and early so he could get checked in by 7:00am.  They drew some labs and sent him down to surgery to place his central line. While this process was not complex, it took for-ev-er.  By 11:30 or so he was finally headed back up to the floor where he'd begin his first chemo infusion.  However, we soon discovered that he'd be getting 2 hours of pre-hydration and 2 hours post-hydration.  So the hour long chemo was really 5 with all the extra stuff.  But in Matt's words "I'm not going anywhere."  The rest of the day continued to be uneventful.  Matt got into his room where he will spend the next 7-10 days and his dad was able to visit in the afternoon. After a good nights sleep by all, I headed back down this morning and enjoyed a cup of coffee and a few laps...
Post a Comment
Read more

The New Plan

By
We have a plan.  Thank goodness. Matt and I went down to U of C today and, after waiting for far too long, met with Dr. J.  He informed us that Matt's light chains have not gone down as much as they would have liked and because of that, they don't believe transplant is the best option.  The main reason for this is that the drug they give Matt to wipe his immune system is something called Malphalan, and it's in the same category as the Cytoxin he just received.  Meaning there's a high possibility that it wouldn't work as well as they need it to prior to transplant.  I also learned today that both of those drugs are in the same class as VDPACE, which is the infusion Matt received before our initial plan of a donor transplant in 2021.   Which, of course, didn't work then either.  So I think it's safe to say, that category of drugs is essentially useless to Matt.  So, we pivot. The new course of action is to do a carT called ciltacel.  This ...
Post a Comment
Read more