Eureka!

Somewhere deep in the bowels of UCH a scientist has been peering down a microscope at a slide full of some of the stem cells that have been so laboriously extracted from my unwilling bone marrow over the past few weeks. As we only managed to drag a million (per kilo) kicking and screaming into the petri dish it was important to find out if they were any cop. In other words will they do the job they're meant to on returning to the blasted wasteland that will be my body post the high dose chemo? Well the answer it would seem is a resounding YES. As with all these things there is a certain threshold that needs to be crossed before the green light can be given. In this instance it was the number of colonies that the stem cells formed in the dish that mattered as this indicates how well and how successfully they'll engraft and get to work producing all those lovely reds, whites and platelets. The target was 20 and my little beauties managed 38...nearly double. This makes up for the shortfall in supply.

So it's full steam ahead with the transplant now scheduled for Jan 6th and various tests of one kind or another between now and then. It's an odd feeling; I don't really want to celebrate as I've in effect just been given a ticket to hell, but it is good news nonetheless as we're back on track, and the goal of many years disease free is once again seemingly obtainable.