Day +120 - Unexpected drop in blood counts

Apologies for not posting for such a long time. Everything has been going great (until today) and I've just been working on the condo and generally keeping busy. The reason I haven't posted is not because things have been sucky, the main reason is that there hasn't really been much to report.

Until today, when we got some surprising news. We went in for a routine clinic appointment with Dr. Goldberg, my primary oncologist, and he became pretty worried after seeing my latest blood counts. All my counts seem to have tanked in the last week. My white blood cell count is down to 0.096, which is almost non-existent, and my platelets are at 38. It's like deja vu from last year. It was 4:30, so he called some of the docs on the SCCA transplant team, then did a bone marrow biopsy on me a few minutes later. He gets pretty worked up over these things, so naturally, we get pretty worked up too. The docs at the SCCA have always said to expect the blood counts to yo-yo, and so far they've stayed pretty stable, so although we haven't seen this before, it might not be totally unexpected. I'm optimistic that the graft is still going well since we did get very positive results on everything just a few short weeks ago. I finished the steroid taper last week, so we're wondering if the lack of steroids is somehow causing the problem. The bone marrow biopsy will give us a definitive result since it will tell us whether the cancer cells have returned or not.

My skin GVHD has also returned in the last few days since I'm no longer on the steroids, so now I've got a pretty nasty rash on my arms and legs. To be on the safe side we started me up on a pretty high dose of steroids tonight to see if we can get it back under control. Phooey on today. Cross your fingers that this is just a speed bump and not something bigger :(.