MCL and Me

Happy Twixmas to all my readers. Twixmas of course being the official name for that weird twilight period between Christmas and New Year. I had a very nice Christmas at home with Mom and Dad and observed all the usual Stanford family traditions . This year I was also able to go see my Brother and his family in the morning of Christmas day as they were all healthy this time. As far as medical stuff is going, things are ticking along nicely. I've not had any occurrence of GVHD and the 2.5mg of prednisolone steroid every other day is not causing any major problems as far as my energy levels. The only thing I have noticed is a bit of a bout of nausea, tiredness and general yukiness about 2 hours after I have had my morning pills. It passes after about 15 minutes so I just have to sit quietly and wait it out for the most part. I'll mention it to the doc when I go next Wednesday ( 6th Jan ) but I suspect my ciclosporin levels might be just a bit high and causing this reaction af...

As you can see I've put the Christmas Decorations up on the blog..... It's been another tough week this week and I've been in to the office everyday except Wednesday. This has been a special occasion as we have had some visitors from our outsourcers from India to do a Knowledge Transfer for oracle that has required me to be present in the office to assist them. I've coped but I've been in bed by about 20:30 most night and asleep by 21:00 Wednesday I went to the transplant clinic and saw one of the registrars. My B12 and other tests have come back and they are all fine which is good news on the one hand but means the cause of my low haemoglobin remains a bit of a mystery. However the level was up to 11.3 this week so as it is going in the right direction the doc was happy to just keep it under observation, ( known in medical world as MICO, masterly inactivity and cat-like observation ). We decided to keep me on the same level of prednisolone of 2.5mg every other day ...

Sorry for the delay in updating but I do have a good excuse as you will see... Last Wednesday I had a clinic appointment and it was pretty routine. I saw one of the registrars who reviewed my results but annoyingly my B12 test from last time was not on the system so we had to repeat it which meant being stabbed a second time. My prednisolone (a.k.a pred) is now down to 2.5mg every other day and so far I've not noticed any ill effects from that so that is encouraging. I might actually get off the damn things this time. Then there is the issue of getting me off the other two steroids I have to support me getting off the pred but one step at a time. My haemoglobin remains lowish but stable at 10.3 and until we get the B12 result and a couple of other tests back we won't know exactly the reason for that, however I am pleased to say that although it is low I haven't so far felt the effects of fatigue at even light exertion that I sometimes get. I'm back in the clinic in two ...