Day +14 - At home!

Here's a picture of me all packed up with my backpack, just before leaving the hospital. Even though the weather was crappy, it was still nice to be outside. My only issue with being in the outside world is that my eyes look so evil! I can see people looking at me funny, and every time I catch a glimpse of myself in a mirror it looks so spooky. They're starting to fade a little, so now they really look blood-red. It's very weird.

Once we got the orders to be discharged, we had to wait around a while to meet with the discharge nurse who let us know what to expect for tomorrow, since I have a full day of appointments at the SCCA, we had to get all our supplies and equipment to take home with us, like sterile pads, gloves and the portable IV pump, and then we had to wait for the pharmacy to fill all the prescriptions. This all took several hours, so by the time we left the hospital it was about 5:30 pm. It was kind of weird to leave, since I had lived in that little room for 22 days. Some of the nurses stopped by to say good-bye and to hope that they don't see me again :), and Erika asked for my blog, which was cool. But it feels so nice to be at home again.

Here's a picture of my prescriptions that I've been taking at the hospital and that I'll need to continue at home. This is only about a 2-week supply, if you can believe that.

This is why it took the pharmacy so long to fill my prescriptions

Here's why we're a bit excited about the engraftment. In the last graphs I posted from a few days ago, you could just start to see an upward trend of white blood cells, neutrophils, and platelets. Well, take a look at the graphs below! The green area is the normal range, and the purple bar is when I underwent the conditioning chemo just before the transplant. We still expect these to bounce around a bit, and in fact, my hematocrit has dropped from 33 to 31, but things are still looking great. The doctors continue to be impressed at how fast the engraftment happened.







So far I'm adjusting well at home, and Johanna and my mom were here this evening keeping things clean and cooking soup for the next few days for me to eat. I'm still rinsing my mouth with the special mouth rinse every few hours, and will be looking for a mile-long route around the neighborhood to keep up my energy.

Happy to be home!