BMT: Day minus 14

I was rudely awaken early in the morning (only had 4 hours of sleep after going to bed at 2.30am) to prepare for surgery. Then I realised I wasn't going to get any food or drink (had to fast for at least 6 hours). Thankfully, the surgery and the bone marrow harvesting went well, although I was in pain for the rest of the day and refused any food or drink.

I woke up to find that Mr Hickman moved from my right side to my left side. I felt a bit sore and grumpy, but mostly exhausted. The only thing which made me laugh was seeing Mummy trip over the leg of the trolley. That sent her flying across the room ... I thought she was doing some acrobatics to try and cheer me up!

I had to be given a blood transfusion tonight because of bleeding from the four surgical sites and the 160ml of bone marrow harvested for back-up. That messed up my very normal-looking blood counts from yesterday. The lab technician thought there was a mistake with the results and wanted to do another test - he obviously hadn't been told about my operation today!

My protocol (treatment plan) has been revised and the conditioning regime is now 10 days long instead of 8. My conditioning regime is very new, in the sense this particular combination of drugs has only been used on a dozen or so BMT patients in the world.

As I'm recovering from a mild viral infection which I've had since last Thursday (cold or flu suspected), my transplant doctor has delayed the start of my conditioning regime to Thursday and the day of the transplant will become the 5th of September (day 0).

My transplant doctor also clarified that the match for my cord blood is 8/8; not 6/6. A match for cord blood is usually done out of six, while a match for bone marrow is done out of ten, so I am not sure what an 8/8 match for cord blood really means, but she keeps saying she has never seen such a good match!

I started on some new oral drugs today. One is pink and sweet while the other is yellow and bitter. I can take them at the same time, but I am not sure whether it is better to take the bitter medicine first and then have the sweet one to take the taste away or take the sweet one first so that I can't taste the bitter one so much. I will be taking them twice a day for the next 100 days! I will also start my weekly IVIG (which will give me passive immunity) tomorrow morning.

Uncle Andrew and Aunty Serene, thank you very much for so many gifts and books. I like doodling on the board with the magnets and reading those books you got. You obviously know my taste for books. They distracted me from the pain for a while today.

Aunty Shuhui from the Children's Cancer Foundation surprised me with a ball blast-up toy today as well. I was a bit too tired after surgery to do much blasting - but hopefully will do tomorrow.

Thank you for all your positive messages of support. I will definitely need them.