Ready, steady, go!

OK, so we've been today to see the big Prof and the news is that despite my hb levels having gone up slightly, that he would still recommend treatment. :-( (Don't think you can do proper sad faces on here!)

So, it looks like after a long deserved break, drinking G&T, we will back to an MRI, a bone marrow biopsy and probably the start of the road of chemo.

I probably ought to clarify what it all looks like for those of you who don't know. If it goes as planned, it will start with low dose chemo (CTD) in August/September. This will last for about 3 months, after which they will harvest some of my stem cells. None of this sounds like it will be too intrusive in the grand scheme of things, and I think I should be able to carry on life as normal (or pretty much so, bar the jekyll and hyde personality I might take on....oooh lucky Nick!!! He thinks I have that already!!)

Once we get through that, they freeze the stem cells until I am ready for a transplant... the Prof suggests sort of New year time for that one and then I get high dose chemo for 4 hours (and yes, this will lead to hair loss etc etc) before having my stem cells reinjected to me. It sounds like I'll then be in hospital for 2-3 weeks sort of in isolation, before they send me home to recouperate. And that will hopefully only take a couple of weeks but could take up to 3 months.

Funnily enough I feel pretty ok about it all. I have found the last week really hard since I saw my levels go up again, as I think I find the not knowing really hard....control freak that I am. At least now, I know what is going to happen, in what timescales, and what we need to watch out for. All good in a warped sort of way.

So now we need to plan as more than anything in the world, I want to keep things as normal as possible for the kiddies. I am so scared for poor Sam especially as he will be starting school as all this kicks off and the last thing I want is for him to have a tough time with it. But hopefully we can make it seem normal.

I'm also thinking about returning to work....strange I know but there is method to my madness and I am being very upfront with them. I currently work on a sort of contract basis where I only get paid for what I work so I get no sick pay etc. If I can go back to work, it would mean that I would be protected and if I was really ill, I could take the time off with no financial pressures. I don't know if they'll really go for it (not many companies would!) but if they do, they'd know that they'd get me back at the end of it for longer hours than I'm currently working. While the timing isn't great and I could do with not having to work longer for another 6 -9 months, it would be fantastic if we had that stability.

So much to think about and perhaps now isn't the time for me to waffle on (hmmm, have had a couple of G&T's already!)......catch up soon