Here is what I know about the meeting at CHOP today. Blake will now be put on a waiting list. The time it takes to get to the top of the list varies. They estimate around 2 months. When he goes they will give him two different chemo treatments the first week. Then he will have several days off. The second week they will give him 10% of his T-cells back. Then a day or so later they will give him 30% of his T-cells. The remainder they will store. Every patient varies in how they react to the T-cells. The fewer leukemia cells you have in your body, the milder the reaction. Everyone does go through a reaction. This means the treatment is working. Blake will be an out-patient until he runs a fever. At that point he would become an in-patient. The T-cells actually attack cells with a protein 19 attached which is what Blakes leukemia cells have. I guess some leukemia cells have protein 21. There is another clinical trial that is set to fight that situation. They said sometimes the T-cells go away for some reason. If that happens they would use some of the remaining T-cells they did not previously use. They have no long term data. Therefore, they do not promise a cure. Well take what we can get. Garry and I met another family who was going through the same procedure with their 13 year old son. Their son was on his first visit there so he still had the tube in his neck for the T-cell extraction. Garry said it was funny because the two boys acted the same. They do not look at strangers or strangers (Blake sometimes will not talk to people he knows). Blake will often not respond to someone who asks him a question and this boy was the same way. Garry said everyone they met in Philly was so very nice. The man who ran the train did not charge them to ride after discovering that Blake was there for treatment at CHOP. After getting off the train, a woman they had never met offered to walk them to within a block of their hotel so they would not get lost. As Nikki, my sister-in-law said It is the city of brotherly love. Please continue to pray for Blake and his medical team. My aunt Debbie could use your prayers too in her fight against leukemia.
Posted on: Sat, 09 Aug 2014 20:30:02 +0000