It’s been a good few days since I last posted and I’m pleased to confirm I am now back at home again. I stopped taking antibiotics on Friday night and had no sign of a fever on Saturday or Sunday, so managed to check out of the hospital Sunday afternoon.

My bloods have been a lot better this week too and my platelets have gone up from 19, which is bad, to 170 which is low normal. It’s also the most it’s been since the beginning not last year. Likewise my neutrophils were 0 for three days and then 0.1 for three more but now they are back to 2.5, showing my immune system is working again. It also meant that the fever didn’t try and come on again when the antibiotics wore off. Finally I have hb of 6.3 so hopefully won’t need a transfusion for a week or so.

So all good news really on that front.

Otherwise I am now 11 stone, (2 and a half stone off usual weight) so am eating an extra meal a day again now I am out of hospital. Also my next appointment is with Doctor Hodson next Tuesday, so I am likely to have another bout of chemo next week, giving me a week off at home. Huzzah. We did agree it was going to be a lighter dose this time.

In terms of an underlying infection, we never did work out if there was one. It’s likely that because I was so low on resource in the bone marrow that this was always going to be a rough treatment, with penias (very low levels) of blood counts across the board before we started. Hopefully if some of these recover to more normal levels treatment two won’t be as rough…. I would prefer not to have three weeks in hospital every round of chemo. (And it was pretty rough at times). This is likely to have left me very low and the fever was just a result of the Bendamustine opposed to any real infection. Still it led to three weeks in hospital, so something to take seriously.

An additional problem I have (because I need more… ;)) on the horizon is my ferritin level (iron). It’s currently more than ten times what it should be. This is down to the 31 bags of blood I’ve had from other people. At some point we will have to do something about this level. I’m not sure what yet, but I’ll keep you posted when I find out. I’m just concentrating on the chemo right now and even that I’m taking a week off of worrying about.

So if someone could just organise a good week of weather for this week that would be great.

Finally it was just lovely to come back home and see my kids after nearly three weeks. They had been close, as there is a nice park near the hospital (pictures below), but no kids were allowed to visit so madelyn and mum and dad would often take them to the park whilst Jo came up.

Avery was very pleased to see me and jumped all over me. He’d been doing jigsaws all day so he could show me them and hang out. He also thanked me for coming home, which was very cute. Grace was a little more serious, but then she was playing Pokemon, so that makes sense. She did check I wasn’t going to disappear again after one night of being home, so she was clearly pleased to see me too.