GvH

Whatuuuuup?!?!

Listening to My Chemical Romance's album, The Black Parade. It's always enough to pump me up. Though, in all honesty, I doubt the pumped-uppedness will last very long. "Why" you ask? Because I'm on a kick-ass anti-itch medication. It's like super benedryl and it stops me from itching, as the name implies. But it also knocks me on my butt faster than a banana peel.

Which brings me to a thought; banana peels, like tyrannosaurusen, are not all bad. Though I complain about my itchy GvH, it's important to remember that my old cells were.. you know.. cancer. So if the new ones want to bitch out the old ones every once in a while, Dr. Grant tells me it's a Martha Stewart level good thing. So, werd.

I went to my appointment on Wednesday with Kym, and my increased liver function is a pretty good indication that my itchy rash is GvH and not something else. This means we don't need a biopsy! That's good news here. I'm going onto another stretch of steroids, which means that I am now at risk for thrush, a goo that grows in my throat. Before, the almond shaped pill protected me from thrush, but now that I am no longer taking that, I need to drink a bad tasting goo that protects me from the bad goo.

By the way, if any of this makes no sense, it's because I'm listening to this album at a rockin' level and not proofreading.

So, drinking goo, preventing goo.... where was I?

Right! They also increased my tacrolimus. But, now that I'm on steroids, the infectious disease folk might want me to go back on the almond shaped pill to protect me from the fungal nodules on my organs... so I wouldn't have to drink the bad tasting goo. But! If we do that, then they need to lower my tacrolimus pill intake, as the increase in almond-pill will naturally increase my tac-level. But we might not do that.

Lots going on with that.

Basically, here's the dill:

I'm still doing quite well, and GvH alone doesn't have much meaning in the infection-related side of the transplant, so even though I am getting GvH 6 months out (which is not uncommon), it's not really something that affects when I will be cleared to leave Boston and go back to work.

That's an entirely new conversation right there, so I'll leave you with this to chew on for a bit and write another post soon:

Gum.

Yeah. Go chew some gum. It'll be good for your jaw muscles.