Can’t wait for the continuation of the treatment

I felt more like spending the energy that I had with the family than on updating this blog, which is why I didn’t write an update since Friday.
During the meeting with the neurologist this Friday we had an extensive look at the MRI scans. All lesions show a significant size reduction. They haven’t disappeared, but they also haven’t stayed the same or grew. These results mean that the treatment so far has been effective and things are progressing as planned. Still, there are more treatments to come, and the next one will be with Ara-C in the VUmc. Ara-C, also called cytarabine is a modern drug, it was first synthesized in 1959, well after the second world war. It is a great drug that will certainly cause immune system suppression and will most likely cause nausea, vomiting, and headache. I will stay in the hospital until my immune system starts to regrow (probably this will take around ten days), when this happens they stimulate this growth even more with a growth factor Filgrastim (Granulocyte-colony stimulating factor -G-CSF-), which will increase the number of hematopoietic stem cells in my blood. This stimulation will be done by injections for two days; these injections will likely cause nausea, fever and bone pain. After these two days, they will start collecting stem cells from my blood. I will be hooked up to a sort of dialysis machine that will extract these stem cells from my blood. This apheresis will take around 5 hours. Afterward, the stem cells are cooled in liquid nitrogen, and I can go home for a couple of weeks. Later these stem cells will be used to regrow my bone marrow after the final course of chemo therapy will destroy it.

You can imagine that I can’t wait for the call of the hematology department at the VU this week. They will call me one whole day in advance to inform me that they are expecting me the next day.