Getting Ready

Hi everyone, this is our way to let you know about our trip to Baltimore. I think this should be more entertaining and readable than my grade school diary, but then again, who knows. We are not going on vacation, but rather, Blake is getting a course of chemotherapy that will hopefully deliver a knock-out punch to his MS. His crazy and obsessed wife, which would be me, wanted to find something better than the 16-30% improvement that the current standard of care meds offer. I am now a supplement-MS-emerging treatment massive collection of statistics- anything for my awesome husband. If you get me talking about it at a party, you will likely find yourself in a deep comatose state. Here's a link to the Hopkins newsletter article that described the treatment in a pretty easy to read way. It's also from where I blatently plagerized the title of this blog.

http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/hmn/W08/feature1.cfm

Unfortunately, his MS has not been well behaved, but fortunately, it is therefore more likely to respond to this therapy. So far, half of the patients without taking medications afterwards have a sustained remission. Now, patients are taking Copaxone afterwards, which can act like a vaccine against MS, at least in mice and monkeys. In those patients, ALL are in a sustained remission at the 2 year mark.

He'll be getting 4 days of cyclophosphamide, a chemo drug, and it'll kill all (or at least 99.9999%) the immune cells that have been made during his life so far. It'll leave his stem cells intact, and they will reconstitute his immune system from scratch.

So this is where I fit in- I'll be cleaning like crazy, (which btw, is against my innate nature), giving meds and making whatever food sounds palatable. I will even give foot rubs, but this is a special occasion. We'll have the help of many people, of course, including our families who are coming to help out, and our local area friends, Adrienne and James, who got us our sweet diggs and are loaning their car. THANKS GUYS!

So, this week, I will be anticipating any childproofing needs (outlet plugs, thick padding, etc.) and getting packed. We'll get in on Monday, and will start the procedure on Wednesday. I'll keep this updated, so that you too can feel sympathy for nausea and vomiting, but also feel jealous of his sweet medications.