I'm still here. I would have posted Superbowl Sunday since my energy level revived late Sunday afternoon, but, well, it was Superbowl Sunday! It was an interesting day, and not always in a good way. We went to MDACC at 10, got back at 4, after they gave me my usual liter of saline with a magnesium chaser. I was actually looking forward to taking in the last of the interminable pre-game nonsense, as one of my goals while in the hospital was to get out in time to watch the Superbowl back at the apartment. We'd been home about half an hour when the fire alarm for our building went off. We all dutifully evacuated the building. My wife and I went to sit by the pool, where we could still faintly hear the alarm. It seemed to take the HFD quite a while to get here. When they did, it was determined, as far as we could tell, that some yo-yo had been grilling on his back porch (against the rules) and had set it off. We got to go back in about half an hour before kickoff. We watched the game, had some game food, watched Springsteen, and then in the final minutes of the game, I had a migraine. I've had maybe 20 of them in my life, starting when I was a senior at UT. They're ocular migraines, causing fairly spectacular, jagged, psychedelic light shows and some temporary blind spots. They usually pass in an hour or so. I decided to see if the darvon they gave me at MDACC would have any effect on it. It did! About ten minutes after taking it, it shut right down. The only thing I've ever found that had the same effect is Tylenol 3 (with codeine). But I'm not allowed any Tylenol or aspirin or any other drug that masks a fever right now. So the game ended, the migraine was gone, and I could have posted then, except that I was on darvon, which makes me pretty loopy. Then Sunday night I had a bad night's sleep. Don't know why. Could have been the migraine after-effect or the darvon, but the end result was I was out of it yesterday. This morning I feel pretty great, though. Yesterday we met with Dr. Hosing (my stem cell transplant doc) and Dr. Duvic (my dermatolgist and my original doc here). They both pronounced me to be doing well. Hosing said it will be 1 to 3 weeks before she expects my new immune system to start attacking my disease. (We thought, just based on visual evidence, that it already was, but what do we know?). And Duvic took a biopsy of a spot on my arm because she thought it might be MF. I was surprised that she was surprised that I might have an MF spot. Especially if they think my new immune system is not on the MF-attacking job yet. Again, what do I know? Anyway, neither doc thought anything seemed to be amiss.
Okay, times up. We're off to MDACC.