What's Going On?

Since people have been asking, and since I know how busy my mom is, I thought some of you might like an update on what's been going on with Dad in the last few weeks.

Dad was supposed to be back in Seattle by now, according to what they told him when he left anyways. They told him that he would have two or three rounds of chemo, and then he'd travel back to Seattle for the donor transplant, but by the time he was done the three rounds they'd changed their plans.

As things stand right now, they'd like to do three more rounds of chemo and then another Autologous Stem Cell Infusion (or Autotransplant) in May, before he goes back to Seattle sometime around August. The autotransplant would be like the one he had last January where they gave him a stem cell transplant using his own stem cells. Of course, he is not especially enthusiastic about this, (an understatement I'm sure) since the last one was very hard on his body if you remember. And things like this always contain some element of risk.

The thing is, because he has high risk Multiple Myeloma, and because his last remission didn't last as long as the doctors (and we) would have liked, they feel that another autotransplant would give the donor transplant the best chance of success. Hopefully the autotransplant would give Dad a long enough remission for the donor stem cells to take hold and then keep the cancer in remission. (You may be wondering why they didn't just give him the donor transplant right after his last autotransplant? Why did they leave him waiting around for almost a whole year till they finally sent him out to Seattle? One reason was because they weren't expecting his cancer to come back so quickly, and the other reasons... Oh, let's not talk about those. I'll just get angry.)

So that's where things stand right now. As far as I know, Dad still hasn't decided for sure on another autotransplant, but he's already started on these latest rounds of chemo. Each round takes three weeks, so he'll be around here for a while yet. (Which, I have to confess, makes this selfish girl pretty happy. I really want Mom and Dad to meet my new baby before they have to leave again.)

Please pray that the right decisions are made and that when it finally is time to go back to Seattle my mom will have her new Canadian passport.
Here's a picture of Dad just for fun. It's Ben and Sam's favorite. Right at this moment Sammy is screaming "Ahhhhhhhh! Lookadat! Dat's Grampa! Grampa's on the horse! Ahhhhhhhhh! Dat's funny! Grampa's funny! He's riding dat horse!" (And so on...)