St. Pete

Today we went to All Children's Hospital in St. Petersburg to meet with the team that will be doing Ryan's bone marrow transplant. The preliminary bone marrow match search came up with some candidates; five adult donors with three that are 10 for 10 matches and there were some cord blood matches that they are looking into as well. They have 'activated' the donors that are the best matches for him and will be double checking the H.L.A. (human leukocyte antigen) typing to be sure that we have a perfect match. Once we have a match they will call us to come in and start his conditioning treatment. Another great piece of news is that all of their treatment methods are exactly what we wanted. He will not need a splenectomy or have to undergo radiation instead he will be given a pretty intense combination of chemo drugs in the hospital for about a week before his transplant.  Once they have his immune system broken down the transplant itself is just a bag of stem cells from the donor's bone marrow, it looks like a bag of blood, which takes about an hour to infuse and should not be painful or difficult at all. They will most likely need to get blood transfusions as we progress to keep all of his blood counts where they need to be. Then we will wait to see if it takes, they hope to see signs of his red blood cell counts going up within 30 days. Once he shows improvement with signs of engraftment we will be able to stay at the Ronald McDonald House or another place close by for frequent clinic visits for about 100 days. The transplant coordinator gave us a tour of the hospital today including the floor Ryan will be on. The nurses loved him, so I took full advantage of it and asked if we can get one of the bigger rooms with  a view of the bay which seems like it will work out! This unit is the hematology / oncology floor where the kids that are getting chemotherapy treatments are, when we arrived on the floor we walked in as a little boy was getting released to go to the McHouse. It was amazing to see how excited he was and how happy his family was, soon that will be us!!! One step at a time this is becoming more and more manageable. Keep sharing our story and spreading the word, every single prayer counts.