Erika's Treatment Update -- Week 38

Hi!

Well I've had my share of Stanford these past two days. Yesterday I went in for my 11th chemo. My counts were good (no elevated liver numbers), my cultures were negative, and no mystery rigors/fevers so my doctor gave me the okay to proceed with chemo. I had my treatment around 5pm and slept through the entire rest of the afternoon, evening, and night. No fevers or nausea so far (knock on wood) this time around...yuppee! I also got the okay to go skiing this weekend :)

My skin biopsy results were a different story. The results showed some type of unspecific dermatitis, which basically means there's something there, but they don't know what it is. We do know it's not lymphoma, which of course is good news. There were more spots all over my lower legs and arms so it was decided that I see an infectious disease specialist and dermatologist today. The infectious disease specialist had no idea what it could be, she asked if I had all my vaccinations when I was a small child and that was about it (wanted to eliminate measles/mumps as an option). The dermatologist was just as clueless and said she hadn't seen anything like it. Both haven't eliminated the possibility of it being GVHD (graft vs host disease), however that is very unlikely due to the pattern of it. For now I'm just supposed to keep an eye on it and if it gets any worse I'm supposed to go back. Thankfully it doesn't itch or bother me, however pretty soon I will start to look like a relative of a leopard if it doesn't clear up! They removed the stitches from my biopsy site also which was nice, it was starting to look like I was growing a bunch of long, unattractive hairs on my calf...yuck!

So that was my excitement of the last two days. Right now I'm not scheduled to go back until the 21st for my full body CT and then on the 23rd for the results as well as treatment.