Another restful night; finished with chemo until Friday

Well, we are still on schedule to celebrate Denise's "second" birthday tomorrow. She feels good and is eating and sleeping well. Found out yesterday the transplant is a little more than a tranfusion of a unit of blood, as we had originally thought. It is more like a transfusion of four units of blood, which means it will probably take around 4 hours to get it all in.

As of now, we expect this to start around noon or so, but that is a guess since we don't know where the donor's marrow is actually coming from.

Still no side effects from chemo to this point, but they may kick later in the week/weekend. Hopefully the drugs they give to alleviate will do their thing and any side effects will be minimal.

Some of you may ask why is Denise getting chemo AFTER the transplant. The reason is because it decreases the chances or minimizes the severity of Graft Versus Host Disease (GVHD). GVHD is when the donors Donor's white blood cells think Denise's cells are foreign and start attacking her own cells. You can read all about it here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graft-versus-host_disease

but rest assured these people at Johns Hopkins know what they are doing and we have all the confidence in the world in them. If you ever have to be in the hospital, this is the place to be.

Factoid: Johns Hopkins was a Baltimore banker, merchant and B&O Railroad magnate who left an estate of 7 million dollars when he died in 1873. In his will, he asked that his fortune be used to found 2 institutions that would carry his name: The Johns Hopkins Hospital and The Johns Hopkins University. At the time, it was the largest philanthropic request in the history of the United States.