Birthday Week

Monday, Feb 8th, we packed up a "Birthday Picnic", complete with cake, that had been generously prepared and delivered to our house by friends, and celebrated Alison's 14th birthday in Sara's hospital room.

The Nurses on Unit 57 refer to the date of a patient's Stem Cell Transplant as their "New Birthday".
We will be marking Feb 10th on our calendars as "Sara's New Birthday". I suspect that I might have to bake a couple of birthday cakes around this time next year as neither Ali nor Sara are very good at sharing cake!

The transplant went well. The transplant nurses commented that the bag of
donor cells was large and the lab report indicated that the concentration of stem cells in the sample was high.

We are not given any information about the donor's country of residence but the nurses speculate that because the cells arrived late they likely travelled a long distance -

probably from somewhere in Europe.

The transplant took place a day later than originally planned but Ali decided that it was worth the wait since Sara's donor had supplied a big,"chubby" bag of cells rather

than a skinny, little, low concentration donation.

The donor stem cells were transfused into Sara's bloodstream and will circulate throughout her body eventually migrating to her bone marrow where they will take over the function of her old stem cells which were destroyed by the chemo and radiation. ( I'm probably not going to make any points by referring to her stem

cells as "old" - so substitute "original" in that last statement )

The next couple of weeks will be spent managing the side effects of the chemo, steroids and immunosuppressant medications and controlling infection until the new stem cells can establish themselves and start differentiating into the variety of blood cells that Sara will require to re-establish healthy circulatory and immune systems.

Her spirits are good and despite being heavily medicated she was up doing laps around the unit an hour after the transplant.

The Olympics may provide a bit of a distraction to help pass the time during Sara's recovery phase. We will watch to see if she has any sudden urges to cheer

for Sweden or Germany that might give us a hint as to where her new stem cells came from!