We found out yesterday that a friend of Amy’s passed away last week from complications of leukemia/lymphoma. From everything Amy says, this was an incredibly good-hearted and compassionate person. So we’ve got the grief over losing a good person, as well as all of the fear this stirs up for our own situation.

Not much has really changed since last month. Amy finished up another round of chemo on Monday, so she’s pretty wiped out. There are some cumulative effects, so the exhaustion and stuff gets a little harder each time, but she’s getting through it.

The next step is another round of scans to see if she’s in remission and decide whether we can move on to the bone marrow transplant. We had a consult with the bone marrow transplant director in Detroit a week or two back. There are still a fair number of unknowns — not only the scan results, but whether her bone marrow is healthy enough for an autologous transplant. That’s where they use the patient’s own stem cells rather than getting a donor, which is what we’re hoping for. (Faster recovery, no rejection issues.) But her younger brother will be getting tested to see if he’s a match, just in case.

We meet with the oncologist again tomorrow. Hopefully we’ll get things scheduled soon, because all this waiting and uncertainty sucks.

I’ve been continuing to work to get the house ready. Chemo suppresses the immune system, and bone marrow transplant does the same, so there’s a lot of worry about potential infections and such. We’ve got people ripping out the gross carpet in the basement today, replacing it with vinyl laminate that should be a lot more sanitary. I’ve done a lot of dusting and cleaning and decluttering. It’s never going to be hospital-level sanitary, but we’re making progress.

I think we’re all feeling a bit burnt out by everything, but we’re getting through.

We have a slightly more concrete plan for the coming weeks, with the understanding that plans can change from day to day based on test results, scheduling issues, the whims of the insurance companies, and more.

Amy’s currently going through her third round of R-EPOCH chemotherapy (her fifth or sixth total round of chemo, depending on how you count them.) The goal is to do one more round the first full week in May, then do another CT scan. If she looks cancer-free at that time, we’ll move on to the bone marrow transplant step.

I got choked up the first time the phrase “cancer-free” came up. There’s so much hope and fear wrapped up in those two words, and in the results of that scan a month or so from now. We know she’s responded well to treatment so far, but there’s so much unknown…

We got to spend some good family time together for my birthday weekend, which was nice. I ate way too much, which was also nice 🙂

I’d like to believe the end is in sight, and we’re starting to move toward the next steps of her recovery and rebuilding our new normal. The whole family is pretty damn tired of cancer and chemo and all the rest. This crap gets old pretty quick.

We learned something exciting this week, though. Amy’s been using an infusion pump that delivers her chemo cocktail over the course of 3-4 days. But the tubing has sprung a leak at least three different times, all in the same spot. It looks like the chemotherapy meds are actually eating through the air filter in the line. These are the chemicals they’re pumping into my wife’s body…

Well, if they eat through filters, hopefully they’ll gobble up cancer cells even better.