This is Judy again. Today Jaime had her transplant. What a cool experience! The nurse told her today to think of this as her birthday. After day zero you start counting from one forward.

Here is how this works: between day one and day five the numbers will continue to drop and approximately on or about day five the immune system will be totally at zero. From that point on, her counts should go up little by little. If things go well, she will start getting her numbers back around day ten then hopefully by day 14 to 21 she will have a normal enough count to be able to leave the hospital and go back to the Pete Gross House. Unfortunately, these next three weeks are the most dangerous time during this whole process (much to my surprise, I thought we had the hardest part behind us, but that is not so). Jaime will have no immune system and she will be very venerable to infection. She will also really have the side effects kick in from the chemotherapy. Mouth sores, hair loss and a lot of nausea. After all that Jaime has been through, it seems that this extra part doesn't seem very fair. Well, we have decided that Jaime will just pull herself up by the boot straps and get ready for the fight. We didn't come this far to let chemo side effects keep us from the final goal! If there is anyone who can do this, it is Jaime , (I really do sound like her mother, don't I?).

Today was pretty interesting. We took some pictures of the transplant process and I need to wait until Jaime feels better to help me down load the pictures from the camera on to this site. Blogging is one thing, but I am not smart enough to give you a report with pictures. The stem cells that were transplanted back into Jaime were in two little bags. It is very much like a blood transfusion, but these cells are stem cells, so they have no color. We somehow thought they would look like blood and be bright red, but that is not the case and the cells are very very small and selected. It only took about twenty minutes to complete the procedure. One interesting thing that happened is that Jaime was born at 12:52 and the transfusion took place at exactly 12:52. Don took a picture of the clock. Seems a little Twlight Zoneish to me.

Jaime slept about three hours after her transplant. She is getting ready for the next phase of this trial.

I will keep you posted as to what is going on and how Jaime is doing. Have a good week, say some prayers and take care.