Maintenance

I'm hooked up and receiving my maintenance treatment of Rituxan.. We met with the Nurse Practioner and Dr. Tarantolo this morning. Dr. T gave us some more thoughts on how the CLL would behave with the anti-rejection meds from a transplant.

He believes that one of the drugs I'll get will suppress the CLL. I believe he was talking about Ropamune. He agreed there are risks associated with the transplant, but he thought those were of a low probability. He's going to call Dr. Tim Call at the Mayo Clinic, a doctor who specializes in CLL, to see if he has access to any data on CLL patients getting kidney transplants.

The benadryl is kicking in. It's all a part of the pre-med cocktail I get before the Rituxan begins to flow. I'm plenty relaxed now, making spelling errors to beat the band! My typing is about a step or two behind my thoughts.

Ethel is taking care of me this morning. She just brought over some wipes that they use to remove adhesive marks left on the skin. She wiped off my left arm and then left me a wipe to use on my right arm.

While waiting for Dr. Tarantolo this morning, I was thinking about our appointments before treatment and all the kidney issues. He used to ask me what concerts I would be going to, and we would talk about those.  Since dialysis began, we really haven't done much in the way of traveling or taking in any concerts.  It may not be fair to blame all of this inactivity on dialysis, there's no question that it changes things.

We may be stopping treatments soon too. Since the treatments aren't doing anything positive for my kidneys, and that was the main reason Dr. T started me on treatments, he may just go back to monitoring my situation. That would be great!

Monday's PET scan was clean as a whistle, so that's more good news! Now, all we need is the phone call from Holly at UNMC. Let's get moving on the transplant!