Several people have commented that this second transplant seems less involved than the first one, and yes, that 's true because this time the stem cells were already collected and could be used immediately. The problem we had last fall was that they had so much trouble collecting Jimmy's stem cells, and had to get special approval for a drug still not yet approved by the FDA to make that possible. Until we harvested enough stem cells, we couldn't do a transplant.
This time, with the frozen stem cells ready for us, all we had to do was to start Jimmy on a preparatory regimen on Sunday, check into the hospital Wednesday in time for them to drop the big chemo bomb on him, and reintroduce the stem cells on Friday. Now we're waiting for the cells to engraft.
The high dose chemotherapy Jimmy got acts like a delayed reaction time bomb, and the worst of it won't start for a few more days, with it bottoming out between Day 4 and Day 10. Today is just Day 1, so things are going to get worse before they get better.
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