Cord Blood is in House.

We had the meeting with the doctors today. The Hospital got the Cord Blood today from a storage facility on the east coast. Now that the Hospital has the Blood we are good to start conditioning. On Sunday He starts with Campath a drug used to wipe out his own bone marrow so there is room for the new cells to take over. As Lisa posted earlier in a previous posting our Bone Marrow donor from Europe fell through and for whatever reason will not be donating the marrow. This at first seemed like a big stumbling block but come to find out it might just be a blessing in disguise.

They were able to match him with a cord blood donation. The down side is that Cord blood takes longer to graft into bone marrow and takes longer to start producing white blood cells. The good side is: Cord Blood contains stem cells from an infant, the bone marrow it will produce becomes a brand new immune system with usually causes less severe Graft Versus Host Disease. When a person gets a bone marrow transplant they are basically getting a new immune system, when you get that from actual bone marrow from an adult donor you are getting their immune system, unfortunately rarely does the new immune system like the new body and thus attacks the body thinking it is foreign and harmful.

GVHD can range from a slight rash similar to an allergic reaction, to life threatening complications and lasts in some cases more than 5 years. Recent studies have shown that cord blood transplants have less severe GVHD because the infant immune system learns to tolerate the new environment more like a new born acquiring an immune system, rather than teaching an old dog new tricks (or an old immune system a new body). I explain it as simply as I can, trust me this is easy reading compared to what the doctors have given us.

So enough with the medical stuff. Henry has been gaining much needed weight and strength. He sits with no problem, he is close to crawling and ends up going backwards. Today he just learned how to use his legs to propel his walker, backwards of course, buy hey its still mobility! He can support his own weight on his legs for about a minute. This is very exciting for us. He still has compression fractures in his spine but his back looks less stressed than a few months ago.

Elizabeth is just as crazy as ever. I feel the weight of the parental curse, you know the one, "I hope one day you have kids just like you". Well Mom and Dad, it worked, now how do you feel? Your probably laughing and enjoying every minute of it.

Well this is my 2nd night with Elizabeth and tomorrow I switch with Lisa and I get Henry at the Hospital. Our life is now organized into 4 days. Day 1&2: I'm at the hospital with Henry, Day 3&4 I spend with Elizabeth, then back to Day 1 again. I rarely know the actual day of the week or the date.

I have been playing around with my 457 retirement account when I'm bored. I started playing the market a bit buying and selling stocks. It almost becomes addicting, some say it is a form of gambling, I guess it could be, but after a few sells and different buys, my account has 30% more than it had 2 weeks ago, compared with if I had kept everything the same it would have only been up 4%. But then it is the stock market, by Monday I will be down 30% again right? Unfortunately it is all just numbers, I can't touch the money till I'm retired anyways. As long as it beats inflation that is all that matters.

Well I have been going on and on about nothing of importance so I'll add some pictures of Henry and call it a night.