Moving Forward -- A Quick Update

As has already been touched on in the last couple of posts, this last week has been hard on Amy. She's still in a significant amount of pain from her marrow working hard to produce cells, as well as from her fungal infection -- which the doctors believe may be both inside and outside her lungs. The fungal infection is presenting as a type of pneumonia and is making it difficult for her to breathe and is painful. She's also had to be on oxygen these last few days to help with her oxygen levels in the blood and the aforementioned breathing.

Earlier this week she had a few days when she was very confused about where she was. The doctors have changed around her medicine a little bit to help combat that and she is, thankfully, back to her normal self once again -- aware of her surroundings and what is going on. As a precaution they did an MRI on her head (which was clear) and decided to go ahead with the spinal tap to rule out neurological involvement of her disease. They did the spinal tap this morning after giving her both platelet and plasma transfusions, as well as some vitamin K to help with blood clotting. As a further precaution they went ahead and gave her a dose of chemo (methotrexate) into her spinal fluids while they were tapped in so as to not have to do another spinal tap on her in the future. We should have some preliminary results from the spinal tap tomorrow with final results by Monday.

Though we don't have an exact time frame yet, we are moving full steam ahead into the second transplant. The doctor met with Amy & I yesterday to let us know that they were committed to the transplant as long as we were committed to it. Aside from the risks already present with the transplant, her infection increases her risks severely. So we ask that you would pray that the antibiotics she's getting for it will help to contain it before we get to that point. She is currently getting caspofungin, meropenum, vancomycin, and amphotericin B -- a drug she had last year that she did not do well with, though she has not had any of the serious side effects this time that she had last time around (praise the Lord).

Amy & I are always grateful and appreciative of your thoughts and prayers, and of your comments. Thank you all for caring so much for our hardships and well-being. We continue to hold out hope that Amy will be healed and beat this disease, but know that whichever way this ends up that God has gone before us.

We're also thinking of and praying for those of our friends dealing with their own battles with cancer or other serious ailments.